in se omnia
cognoscit_--He who knows himself, knows all in himself--as Q. Fabius
Pictor tells us. And, therefore, the essential of moral and spiritual
training in ancient times was the attainment of Self-Knowledge--that is
to say, the attainment of the certitude that there is a divine nature
within every man, which is of infinite capacity to absorb universal
Wisdom; that, in brief, Man was _essentially_ one with Deity.

With Simon, as with the Hermetic philosophers of ancient Egypt, all
things were interrelated by correspondence, analogy, and similitude.
"As above, so below," is the teaching on the Smaragdine Table of
Hermes. Therefore, whatever happened to the divine Epinoia, the Supreme
Mother, among the Aeons, happened also to the human Spiritual Soul or
Monadic Essence, in its evolution through all stages of manifestation.
This Soul is shut into all forms and bodies, successively up to the
stage of man.

From one point of view this teaching has been conclusively proved by
Modern Science. The evolution of the external form has been traced
throughout all the kingdoms and is no longer in question. The ancient
teachers of evolution, though less exact in detail, were more accurate
in fact, in postulating a "something within" which alone could make the
external evolution of form of any intelligible purpose. The Spiritual
Soul--the Life, Consciousness, Spirit, Intelligence, whatever we may
choose to call it--was formless in itself, but ever assuming new forms
by a process called metempsychosis, metasomatosis, metangismos, etc.,
which in the human stage becomes reincarnation, the rebirth or
Punarjanman of the Hindus.

So much has been written on metempsychosis and reincarnation of late
that it is hardly necessary to dwell on a now so familiar idea. In its
widest sense the whole process of nature is subject to this mode of
existence, and in its more restricted sense it is the path of pilgrimage
of the Soul in the desert of Matter. In treating of a philosophical
conception, which has already been completely established as far as its
"visible side" is concerned by the researches of Modern Science in the
field of evolution, it is a waste of time to obscure the main issue by a
rehashing of the superstitious belief that the human Soul might pass
back to the brute. It may be that this superstition arose from the
consideration that the body and lower vestures of the Soul were shed off
and gradually absorbed by the lower creatio