dren of nature. Every natural phenomenon
excited their wonder, admiration or veneration. The poet is struck
with wonder that "the rough red cow gives soft white milk." The appearance
or the setting of the sun sends a thrill into the minds of the Vedic
sage and with wonder-gazing eyes he exclaims:

"Undropped beneath, not fastened firm, how comes it
That downward turned he falls not downward?
The guide of his ascending path,--who saw it?"

[Footnote Ref 1] R.V. IV. 13. 5.

The sages wonder how "the sparkling waters of all rivers flow
into one ocean without ever filling it." The minds of the Vedic

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[Footnote 1: _The Rigveda_, by Kaegi, p. 35.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_, p. 38.]

18

people as we find in the hymns were highly impressionable and
fresh. At this stage the time was not ripe enough for them to
accord a consistent and well-defined existence to the multitude
of gods nor to universalize them in a monotheistic creed. They
hypostatized unconsciously any force of nature that overawed
them or filled them with gratefulness and joy by its beneficent or
aesthetic character, and adored it. The deity which moved the devotion
or admiration of their mind was the most supreme for the
time. This peculiar trait of the Vedic hymns Max Muller has called
Henotheism or Kathenotheism: "a belief in single gods, each in turn
standing out as the highest. And since the gods are thought of
as specially ruling in their own spheres, the singers, in their special
concerns and desires, call most of all on that god to whom they
ascribe the most power in the matter,--to whose department if I
may say so, their wish belongs. This god alone is present to the mind
of the suppliant; with him for the time being is associated everything
that can be said of a divine being;--he is the highest, the only
god, before whom all others disappear, there being in this, however,
no offence or depreciation of any other god [Footnote ref 1]." "Against
this theory it has been urged," as Macdonell rightly says in his _Vedic
Mythology_ [Footnote ref 2], "that Vedic deities are not represented as
'independent of all the rest,' since no religion brings its gods into
more frequent and varied juxtaposition and combination, and that even
the mightiest gods of the Veda are made dependent on others. Thus
Varu@na and Surya are subordinate to Indra (I. 101), Varu@na and
the As'vins submit to