From the first to the last chapters, the translators of the Jewish Sacred Books misconstrued this meaning. They have even changed the spelling of the name of God, as Sir W. Drummond proves. Thus _El_, if written correctly, would read _Al_, for it stands in the original אל—Al, and, according to Higgins, this word means the god Mithra, the _Sun_, the preserver and savior. Sir W. Drummond shows that _Beth-El_ means the House of the _Sun_ in its literal translation, and not of God. “_El_, in the composition of these Canaanite names, does not signify _Deus_, but _Sol_.”[65] Thus Theology has disfigured ancient Theosophy, and Science ancient Philosophy.[66] For lack of comprehension of this great philosophical principle, the methods of modern science, however exact, must end in nullity. In no one branch can it demonstrate the origin and ultimate of things. Instead of tracing the effect from its primal source, its progress is the reverse. Its higher types, as it teaches, are all evolved from antecedent lower ones. It starts from the bottom of the cycle, led on step by step in the great labyrinth of nature by a thread of matter. As soon as this breaks and the clue is lost, it recoils in affright {14} from the Incomprehensible, and confesses itself _powerless_. Not so did Plato and his disciples. With him _the lower types were but the concrete images of the higher abstract ones_. The soul, which is immortal, has an arithmetical, as the body has a geometrical, beginning. This beginning, as the reflection of the great universal ARCHÆUS, is self-moving, and from the centre diffuses itself over the whole body of the microcosm. It was the sad perception of this truth that made Tyndall confess how powerless is science, even over the world of matter. “The first marshalling of the atoms, on which all subsequent action depends, baffles a keener power than that of the microscope.” “Through pure excess of complexity, and long before observation can have any voice in the matter, the most highly trained intellect, the most refined and disciplined imagination, _retires in bewilderment from the contemplation of the problem_. We are struck dumb by an astonishment which no microscope can relieve, doubting not only the power of our instrument, but even whether we ourselves possess the intellectual elements which will ever enable us to grapple with the ultimate structural energies of nature.” The fundamental geometrical figure of the Kabala—that figure which tradition and the esoteric doctrines tell us was given by the Deity itself to Moses on Mount Sinai[67]—contains in its grandiose, because simple combination, the key to the universal problem. This figure contains in itself all the others. For those who are able to master it, there is no need to exercise imagination. No earthly microscope can be compared with the keenness of the spiritual perception.