[449] “Wultke,” ii. 262.
[450] Daniel vii. 9, 10.
[451] Book of Enoch, xiv. 7, ff.
[452] This proposition, which will be branded as preposterous, but which we are ready to show, on the authority of Plato (see Jowett’s Introd. to “the Timæus;” last page), as a Pythagorean doctrine, together with that other of the sun being but the lens through which the light passes, is strangely corroborated at the present day, by the observations of General Pleasonton of Philadelphia. This experimentalist boldly comes out as a revolutionist of modern science, and calls Newton’s centripetal and centrifugal forces, and the law of gravitation, “fallacies.” He fearlessly maintains his ground against the Tyndalls and Huxleys of the day. We are glad to find such a learned defender of one of the oldest (and hitherto treated as the most absurd) of hermetic hallucinations (?) (See General Pleasonton’s book, “The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight, and of the Blue Color of the Sky, in developing Animal and Vegetable Life,” addressed to the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture.)
[453] In no country were the true esoteric doctrines trusted to writing. The Hindu Brahma Maia, was passed from one generation to another by oral tradition. The Kabala was never written; and Moses intrusted it orally but to his elect. The primitive pure Oriental gnosticism was completely corrupted and degraded by the different subsequent sects. Philo, in the “de Sacrificiis Abeli et Caini,” states that there is a mystery not to be revealed to the uninitiated. Plato is silent on many things, and his disciples refer to this fact constantly. Any one who has studied, even superficially, these philosophers, on reading the institutes of Manu, will clearly perceive that they all drew from the same source. “This universe,” says Manu, “existed only in the first divine idea, yet unexpanded, as if involved in darkness, imperceptible, indefinable, undiscoverable by reason, and undiscovered by revelation, as if it were wholly immersed in sleep; then the sole self-existing Power himself undiscerned, appeared with undiminished glory, expanding his idea, or dispelling the gloom.” Thus speaks the first code of Buddhism. Plato’s idea is the Will, or Logos, the deity which manifests itself. It is the Eternal Light from which proceeds, as an emanation, the visible and material light.
[454] It appears that in descending from Mont Blanc, Tyndall suffered severely from the heat, though he was knee-deep in the snow at the time. The Professor attributed this to the burning rays of the sun, but Pleasonton maintains that if the rays of the sun had been so intense as described, they would have melted the snow, which they did not; he concludes that the heat from which the Professor suffered came from his own body, and was due to the electrical action of sunlight upon his dark woolen clothes, which had become electrified positively by the heat of his body. The cold, dry ether of planetary space and the upper atmosphere of the earth became negatively electrified, and falling upon his warm body and clothes, positively electrified, evolved an increased heat (see “The Influence of the Blue Ray,” etc., pp. 39, 40, 41, etc.).
[455] The most curious of all “curious coincidences,” to our mind is, that our men of science should put aside facts, striking enough to cause them to use such an expression when speaking of them, instead of setting to work to give us a philosophical explanation of the same.
[456] See Charles Elam, M.D.: “A Physician’s Problems,” London, 1869, p. 159.
[457] Jowett: “Timæus.”
[458] Ibid.