[549] This statement, neither Herbert Spencer nor Huxley will be likely to traverse. But Father Felix seems insensible of his own debt to science; if he had said this in February, 1600, he might have shared the fate of poor Bruno.
[550] “Le Mystère et la Science,” conferences, P. Felix de Notre Dame; des Mousseaux: “Hauts Phen. Magie.”
[551] Damascius, in the “Theogony,” calls it Dis, “the disposer of all things.” Cory: “Ancient Fragments,” p. 314.
[552] Plato: “Timæus.”
[553] “Suidas: v. Tyrrhenia.”
[554] The reader will understand that by “years” is meant “ages,” not mere periods of twelve lunar months each.
[555] See the Greek translation by Philo Byblius.
[556] Cory: “Ancient Fragments.”
[557] We give the spelling and words of this Kabalist who lived and published his works in the seventeenth century. Generally he is considered as one of the most famous alchemists among the Hermetic philosophers.
[558] The most positive of materialistic philosophers agree that all that exists was evolved from ether; hence, air, water, earth, and fire, the four primordial elements must also proceed from ether and chaos the first Duad; all the imponderables, whether now known or unknown, proceed from the same source. Now, if there is a spiritual essence in matter, and that essence forces it to shape itself into millions of individual forms, why is it illogical to assert that each of these spiritual kingdoms in nature is peopled with beings evolved out of its own material? Chemistry teaches us that in man’s body there are air, water, earth, and heat, or fire—air is present in its components; water in the secretions; earth in the inorganic constituents; and fire in the animal heat. The Kabalist knows by experience that an elemental spirit contains only one, and that each one of the four kingdoms has its own peculiar elemental spirits; man being higher than they, the law of evolution finds its illustration in the combination of all four in him.