Vedic and Philological Studies

A Fragment

[.....] - Word(s) lost through damage to the manuscript (at the beginning of a piece, sometimes indicates that a page or pages of the manuscript have been lost).

[.....] of the truth of the Veda.

It is a fact that modern thought—which is not necessarily the last word of human knowledge—has rejected the idea of a revealedWord or an infallible Scripture; but modern thought has rejected many things which a more modern thought is beginning to reaffirm. A Bengali writer of repute has even gone so far as to challenge Dayananda’s sincerity in the very basis and primary idea of all his teachings, apparently with the naive idea that what was to him and the generality of men unbelievable, could not possibly be anything else to a man of undoubted intellectual power. As if it were not precisely by challenging the received ideas of men, the ideas which are mechanically accepted because they are prevalent and have the stamp of a general currency that great and original minds open the door to new truths or restore truths that have been perverted or forgotten. And if the existence of God is once admitted, it surely needs no intellectual insincerity to believe that God can reveal the Truth to man and reveal it in a word of Truth and not in a word that is half truth and half falsehood. The denial rests on the idea that though God exists, He does not interfere in the evolution but allows man to develop the knowledge of the truth for himself and that the word expressing it must, being human speech or writing, be in its very nature fallible. This denial is the concession or rather the surrender which Religion in the present day has made to Science.

But let us leave aside the religious question and look only at the psychological fact.What after all do we mean by revelation? It seems to me that it can be nothing but this; there is to begin with an eternal Truth of things which man has to know and of which all particular truths are [incomplete]

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