Before the Vedic Age had come to a close an unknown poet, who was one of the world's great thinkers, had risen above the popular materialistic ideas concerning the hammer god and the humanized spirits of Nature, towards the conception of the World Soul and the First Cause—the “Unknown God”. He sang of the mysterious beginning of all things:
There was neither existence, nor non-existence, The kingdom of air, nor the sky beyond.
What was there to contain, to cover in— Was it but vast, unfathomed depths of water?
There was no death there, nor Immortality. No sun was there, dividing day from night.
Then was there only THAT, resting within itself. Apart from it, there was not anything.
At first within the darkness veiled in darkness, Chaos unknowable, the All lay hid.
Till straightway from the formless void made manifest By the great power of heat was born that germ.
The poet goes on to say that wise men had discovered in their hearts that the germ of Being existed in Not Being. But who, he asked, could tell how Being first originated? The gods came later, and are unable to reveal how Creation began. He who guards the Universe knows, or mayhap he does not know.
Other late Rigvedic poets summed up the eternal question regarding the Great Unknown in the interrogative pronoun “What?” (Ka). Men's minds were confronted by an inspiring and insoluble problem. In our own day the Agnostics say, “I do not know”; but this hackneyed phrase does not reflect the spirit of enquiry like the arresting “What?” of the pondering old forest hermits of ancient India.
The priests who systematized religious beliefs and practices in the _Brahmanas_ identified “Ka” with Praja´pati, the Creator, and with Brahma, another name of the Creator.
In the Vedas the word “brahma” signifies “devotion” or “the highest religious knowledge”. Later Brahmă (neuter) was applied to the World Soul, the All in All, the primary substance from which all that exists has issued forth, the Eternal Being “of which all are phases”; Brahmă was the Universal Self, the Self in the various Vedic gods, the Self in man, bird, beast, and fish, the Life of Life, the only reality, the unchangeable. This one essence or Self (Atman) permeates the whole Universe. Brahmă is the invisible force in the seed, as he is the “vital spark” in mobile creatures. In the _Khandogva Upanishad_ a young Brahman receives instruction from his father. The sage asks if his pupil has ever endeavoured to find out how he can hear what cannot be heard, how he can see what cannot be seen, and how he can know what cannot be known? He then asks for the fruit of the Nyagrodha tree.
