well say straight off that I stick to the solar plexus. That
statement alone, I hope, will thin their numbers considerably.

Finally, to the remnants of a remainder, in order to apologize for the
sudden lurch into cosmology, or cosmogony, in this book, I wish to say
that the whole thing hangs inevitably together. I am not a scientist.
I am an amateur of amateurs. As one of my critics said, you either
believe or you don't.

I am not a proper archaeologist nor an anthropologist nor an
ethnologist. I am no "scholar" of any sort. But I am very grateful to
scholars for their sound work. I have found hints, suggestions for
what I say here in all kinds of scholarly books, from the Yoga and
Plato and St. John the Evangel and the early Greek philosophers like
Herakleitos down to Fraser and his "Golden Bough," and even Freud and
Frobenius. Even then I only remember hints--and I proceed by
intuition. This leaves you quite free to dismiss the whole wordy mass
of revolting nonsense, without a qualm.

Only let me say, that to my mind there is a great field of science
which is as yet quite closed to us. I refer to the science which
proceeds in terms of life and is established on data of living
experience and of sure intuition. Call it subjective science if you
like. Our objective science of modern knowledge concerns itself only
with phenomena, and with phenomena as regarded in their
cause-and-effect relationship. I have nothing to say against our
science. It is perfect as far as it goes. But to regard it as
exhausting the whole scope of human possibility in knowledge seems to
me just puerile. Our science is a science of the dead world. Even
biology never considers life, but only mechanistic functioning and
apparatus of life.

I honestly think that the great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece
were the last living terms, the great pagan world which preceded our
own era once, had a vast and perhaps perfect science of its own, a
science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic
and charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles.

I believe that this great science previous to ours and quite different
in constitution and nature from our science once was universal,
established all over the then-existing globe. I believe it was
esoteric, invested in a large priesthood. Just as mathematics and
mechanics and physics are defined and expounded in the same way in
the universities of China or Bolivia or London or Moscow to-day,