Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

It is by the enunciation of names that a “more than human power” not merely designates existing things correctly but endows them with their being, and the All-maker can do this because He is omniscient of the hidden or titanic names of things that are not yet in themselves; it is by the foreknown names of mediate causes that He does all that must be done, including the creation of all separated beings.

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In India the traditional science of language is the special domain of the purvamimamsa, of which the characteristic is that “It lays stress on the proposition that articulate sounds are eternal, and on the consequent doctrine that the connection of a word with its sense is not due to convention, but is by nature inherent in the word itself.”

This edition of the text was published in Eye of the Heart: A Journal of Traditional Wisdom, Issue 1, 2008. Republished here with warm thanks.