In this closing period of the Rig Veda—­a period which in many ways, the sudden completeness of caste, the recognition of several Vedas, etc., is much farther removed from the beginning of the work than it is from the period of Brahmanic speculation—­philosophy is hard at work upon the problems of the origin of gods and of being.  As in the last hymn, water is the origin of all things; out of this springs fire, and the wind which is the breath of god.  So in the great hymn of creation:  “There was then neither not-being nor being; there was no atmosphere, no sky.  What hid (it)?  Where and in the protection of what?  Was it water, deep darkness?  There was no death nor immortality.  There was no difference between night and day.  That One breathed ... nothing other than this or above it existed.  Darkness was concealed in darkness in the beginning.  Undifferentiated water was all this (universe).”  Creation is then declared to have arisen by virtue of desire, which, in the beginning was the origin of mind;[30] and “the gods,” it is said further, “were created after this.”  Whether entity springs from non-entity or vice versa is discussed in another hymn of the same book.[31] The most celebrated of the pantheistic hymns is that in which the universe is regarded as portions of the deity conceived as the primal Person:  “Purusha (the Male Person) is this all, what has been and will be ... all created things are a fourth of him; that which is immortal in the sky is three-fourths of him.”  The hymn is too well known to be quoted entire.  All the castes, all gods, all animals, and the three (or four) Vedas are parts of him.[32]

Such is the mental height to which the seers have raised themselves before the end of the Rig Veda.  The figure of the Father-god, Praj[=a]pati, ‘lord of beings,’ begins here; at first an epithet of Savitar, and finally the type of the head of a pantheon, such as one finds him to be in the Br[=a]hmanas.  In one hymn only (x. 121) is Praj[=a]pati found as the personal Father-god and All-god.  At a time when philosophy created the one Universal Male Person, the popular religion, keeping pace, as far as it could, with philosophy, invented the more anthropomorphized, more human, Father-god—­whose name is ultimately interpreted as an interrogation, God Who?  This trait lasts from now on through all speculation.  The philosopher conceived of a first source.  The vulgar made it a personal god.

One of the most remarkable hymns of this epoch is that on V[=a]c, Speech, or The Word.  Weber has sought in this the prototype of the Logos doctrine (below).  The Word, V[=a]c (feminine) is introduced as speaking (x. 125):