Indeed, it has been stated upon good authority that the idea of a gradual evolution according to law and of a God from whom all being emanates, from whom all power proceeds, is an inherent necessity of the Aryan mind as opposed to the Semitic idea of an outdwelling God and of supernaturalism. Thus, all down the ages the Aryan mind has revolted from time to time against the religious ideas superimposed upon it by the Semitic mind. This accounts for the numerous heresies within the bosom of the Church as well as for the scientific advance against the superstitions of the Church. Generalizations of this sweeping order are apt to contain only partial truth. It would probably be nearer the whole truth, as we are enabled to-day to trace historical development, to say that, starting with opposite conceptions, these two orders of mind have worked toward each other and the harmonization of their respective points of view, and, furthermore, that this difference in mind belongs to a period prior even to the emergence of the Aryan or the Semitic. Researches in mythology and folklore seem to indicate that no matter how far back one may go in the records of human thought there will be found these two orders of mind--one which naturally thinks of the universe as the outcome of law, and one which naturally thinks of it as the outcome of creation. There are primitive myths in which mankind is supposed to be descended from a primitive ancestor, which may range all the way from a serpent to an oak tree, or, as in a certain Zulu myth, a bed of reeds growing on the back of a small animal. And there are equally primitive myths in which mankind is created out of the trees or the earth by an external agent, varying in importance from a grasshopper to a more or less spiritual being. Browning did not need to depend upon Paracelsus for his knowledge of evolution. He may not have known that the ancient Hindu in the dim mists of the past had an intuition of the cosmic egg from which all life had evolved, and that he did not know of the theory as it is developed in the great German philosophers we are certain, because he, himself, asseverated that he had never read the German philosophers, but it is hardly possible that he did not know something of it as it appears in the writings of the Greek philosophers, for Greek literature was among the earliest of his studies. He might, for instance, have taken a hint from the speculations of that half mythical marvel of a man, Empedocles, with which the Paracelsus theory of the universe, as it appears in the passage under discussion, has many points of contact.