t they could see a faint glimmering. Indeed, I think I may
say something more than a faint glimmering. For all the really valuable
moral and philosophical doctrines we possess, Dutens has shown to have
existed there."

From what is known relative to the speculations of an ancient race, the
fact is observed that creation was but a re-formation of matter. Wisdom,
or Minerva, formed the earth and the planets; she did not create the
heavens and the earth, as did the later Jewish God.

Of the seven principles of the universe, matter was the first, and of
the seven principles of man, the physical body was the earliest. Through
evolutionary processes, or through cyclic periods involving millions
of years, mind was developed, and in course of time spirit was finally
manifested.

Mai, the Mother of Gotama Buddha, was simply matter, or illusion, from
which its higher manifestation, mind or spirit, was emerging. She was
also the mother of Mercury. A clearer knowledge of the philosophical
doctrines which were elaborated at a time when Nature-worship was
beginning to decay, reveals the fact that the god-idea comprehended a
profound knowledge of Nature and her laws; that while this people did
not pretend to account for the existence of matter, they recognized a
force operating through it whose laws were unchanged and unchanging.

With these facts relative to the intelligence of an older race before
us, the question naturally arises: What was the degree of civilization
attained at a time when the Deity worshipped was an abstract principle
involving the actual creative processes throughout Nature? and,
notwithstanding our prejudices, we are constrained to acknowledge that
these earlier conceptions are scarcely compatible with the barbarism
which we have been taught to regard as the condition of all the peoples
which existed prior to the first Greek Olympiad. On the contrary, the
origin of the philosophical opinions entertained by the most ancient
oriental philosophers, and which must have arisen out of a profound
knowledge or appreciation of Nature and her operations, point to a race
far superior to any of those peoples which appear in early historic
times. Regarding these opinions, Godfrey Higgins remarks:

"From their philosophical truth and universal reception I am strongly
inclined to refer them to the authors of the Neros, or to that
enlightened race, supposed by Bailly to have formerly existed, and to
have been saved from a