But the great mysteries of Eleusis certainly fostered the hope of immortality. The conviction grew stronger that the initiated would have a happier lot in the life to come, so that Diogenes sarcastically inquired whether an initiated robber would be better off than an uninitiated honest man. The inscriptions of {240} the last centuries before our era show nothing like the consensus of feeling in an Egyptian cemetery or a modern English graveyard. The soul is piously committed to the ether, or, if there be rewards in the realm below, is confided to Persephonê; or it is reverently placed among the stars, in the councils of the immortals, or in the home of the gods. Such were the popular conventions. Philosophical speculation gathered round the idea of transmigration, or pleaded for at least a continuance of consciousness till the great conflagration which should end the world; while Orphic religion held out the hope that the soul, entangled in this earthly scene, might after long discipline rise once more to its home with God. The theories of continuance all assume that the world will go upon its usual way. Generation will follow generation in this life, but the lower culture does not ask what will happen in the next. It cannot take big time-surveys, like the Egyptian "millions of years" or the Hebrew "ages of ages." The future will be like the present, as the present has been like the past. Imagination can conceive a beginning, it does not at first advance to an end. But the development of astronomy in Babylonia, with the discovery of regular periodicities in Nature, seems to have suggested the idea of a great World-Year, an immense period beginning with creation, which would be brought to an end by some {241} great catastrophe such as flood or fire. The flood had already taken place. Traditions of it floated to India and Greece; they were incorporated in ancient Hebrew story. After another immense revolution of time would there be a similar close? There is some evidence that this was part of Babylonian teaching in the days of Berosus, in the middle of the third century B.C. (p. 39), but it has not yet been discovered in the ancient cuneiform texts. The next agency of dissolution would be heat. It was part of early Buddhist speculation, and lodged itself in Indian thought; and from the days of Pythagoras, in the sixth century B.C., it formed part of the Greek philosophical outlook in different schools towards the "last things." When the next periodic destruction took place, what would happen? According to one answer the restoration of all things would set in, and the entire cycle would be repeated over again. Eudemus, a pupil of Aristotle, is said to have observed in one of his lectures that if the Pythagoreans were to be trusted, his audience would have the privilege of hearing him again: "You will be sitting there in the same way, and I shall be telling you my story, holding my little stick, and everything