These prisons of the senses, sorrow fraught;
Sore was my ceaseless strife!
But now,
Thou builder of this tabernacle--Thou!
I know Thee.
Never shalt Thou build again
These walls of pain,
Nor raise the roof-tree of deceits, nor lay
Fresh rafters on the clay;
Broken Thy house is, and the ridge-pole split!
Delusion fashioned it!
Safe pass I thence--deliverance to obtain."[60]
[60] Edwin Arnold, The light of Asia.
Regarding the opinions of the ancients on the subject of the
eternity of matter, Higgins, in his learned work on Celtic
Druids, says:
"The eternity of matter is a well known tenet of the
Pythagoreans, and whether right or wrong there can be no doubt
that it was the doctrine of the oriental school, whence
Pythagoras drew his learning. It was a principle taken or
mistaken from, or found amongst, the debris of that mighty mass
of learning and science of a former period, of which, on looking
back as far as human ken can reach, the most learned men have
thought that 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
