The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

52 The Secret of the Veda
use Vedic symbols, Agni and Vayu, not Indra, were the original
artificers of human language. Mind has emerged out of vital
and sensational activities; intellect in man has built itself upon a
basis of sense-associations and sense-reactions. By a similar process
the intellectual use of language has developed by a natural
law out of the sensational and emotional. Words, which were
originally vital ejections full of a vague sense-potentiality, have
evolved into fixed symbols of precise intellectual significances.
In consequence, the word originally was not fixed to any
precise idea. It had a general character or quality (gun. a), which
was capable of a great number of applications and therefore of
a great number of possible significances. And this gun. a and its
results it shared with many kindred sounds. At first, therefore,
word-clans, word-families started life on the communal system
with a common stock of possible and realised significances and
a common right to all of them; their individuality lay rather in
shades of expression of the same ideas than in any exclusive right
to the expression of a single idea. The early history of language
was a development from this communal life of words to a system
of individual property in one or more intellectual significances.
The principle of partition was at first fluid, then increased in
rigidity, until word-families and finally single words were able
to start life on their own account. The last stage of the entirely
natural growth of language comes when the life of the word
is entirely subjected to the life of the idea which it represents.
For in the first state of language the word is as living or even
a more living force than its idea; sound determines sense. In
its last state the positions have been reversed; the idea becomes
all-important, the sound secondary.
Another feature of the early history of language is that it
expresses at first a remarkably small stock of ideas and these are
the most general notions possible and generally the most concrete,
such as light, motion, touch, substance, extension, force,
speed, etc. Afterwards there is a gradual increase in variety of
idea and precision of idea. The progression is from the general
to the particular, from the vague to the precise, from the physical
to the mental, from the concrete to the abstract, from the