The whole of this combination of the progression of numbers in the idea of creation is Hindu. The Being existing through himself, Swayambhu or Swayambhuva, as he is called by some, is one. He emanates from himself the _creative faculty_, Brahma or Purusha (the divine male), and the one becomes _Two_; out of this Duad, union of the purely {xvii} intellectual principle with the principle of matter, evolves a third, which is Viradj, the phenomenal world. It is out of this invisible and incomprehensible trinity, the Brahmanic Trimurty, that evolves the second triad which represents the three faculties—the creative, the conservative, and the transforming. These are typified by Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, but are again and ever blended into one. _Unity_, Brahma, or as the _Vedas_ called him, Tridandi, is the god triply manifested, which gave rise to the symbolical _Aum_ or the abbreviated Trimurty. It is but under this trinity, ever active and tangible to all our senses, that the invisible and unknown Monas can manifest itself to the world of mortals. When he becomes _Sarira_, or he who puts on a visible form, he typifies all the principles of matter, all the germs of life, he is Purusha, the god of the three visages, or triple power, the essence of the Vedic triad. “Let the Brahmas know the sacred Syllable (Aum), the three words of the Savitri, and read the _Vedas_ daily” (_Manu_, book iv., sloka 125). “After having produced the universe, He whose power is incomprehensible vanished again, absorbed in the Supreme Soul.... Having retired into the primitive darkness, the great Soul remains within the unknown, and is void of all form.... “When having again reünited the subtile elementary principles, it introduces itself into either a vegetable or animal seed, it assumes at each a new form.” “It is thus that, by an alternative waking and rest, the Immutable Being causes to revive and die eternally all the existing creatures, active and inert” (_Manu_, book i., sloka 50, and others). He who has studied Pythagoras and his speculations on the Monad, which, after having emanated the Duad retires into silence and darkness, and thus creates the Triad can realize whence came the philosophy of the great Samian Sage, and after him that of Socrates and Plato.