of Aphrodite or Venus, and also that of Bacchus, originally
consisted in homage paid to the reproductive principles contained in the
earth, water, and sun, but, as is well known, this pure and beautiful
worship, in later times, and especially after it was carried to Greece,
became synonymous with the grossest practices and the most lawless
disregard of human decency.

With the light which in these later ages science and ethnological
research are throwing upon the physiological and religious disputes
of the ancients, the correctness of the primitive doctrines elaborated
under purer conditions at an age when human beings lived nearer to
Nature is being proved--namely, that matter like spirit is eternal
and indestructible, and therefore that the one is as difficult of
comprehension as the other, and that Nature, instead of being separated
from spirit, is filled with it and can not be divorced from it; also
that the female is the original organic unit of creation, without which
nothing is or can be created.

CHAPTER VI. CIVILIZATION OF AN ANCIENT RACE.

The profound doctrines of abstractions or emanations; of the absorption
of the individual soul into the divine ether or essence; of the renewal
of worlds and reincarnation, were doubtless elaborated after the
separation, in the human mind, of Spirit from matter, but before mankind
had lost the power to reason abstractly.

Although Pythagoras understood and believed these doctrines, he did not,
as is well known, receive them from his degenerate countrymen, but, on
the contrary, imbibed them from private sources among the orientals,
where fragments of their remarkable learning were still extant. He said
that religion consists in knowing the truth and doing good, and his
ideas show the grandeur and beauty of the earlier conception of a Deity.
He declared that there is only one God who is not, "as some are apt to
imagine, seated above the world, beyond the orb of the universe," but
that this great power is diffused throughout Nature. It is "the reason,
the life, and the motion of all things."

Plato believed that human beings are possessed of two souls, the
one mortal, which perishes with the body, the other immortal, which
continues to exist either in a state of happiness or misery; that the
righteous soul, freed from the limitations of matter, returns at death
to the source whence it came, and that the wicked, after having been
detained for a while in a place prepared