These endless emanations of the one First Cause, all of which were gradually transformed by the popular fancy into distinct gods, spirits, angels, and demons, were so little considered immortal, that all were assigned a limited existence. And this belief, common to all the peoples of antiquity, to the Chaldean Magi as well as to the Egyptians, and even in our day held by the Brahmanists and Buddhists, most triumphantly evidences the monotheism of the ancient religious systems. This doctrine calls the life-period of all the inferior divinities, “one day of Parabrahma.” After a cycle of fourteen milliards, three hundred and twenty-millions of human years--the tradition says--the trinity itself, with all the lesser divinities, will be annihilated, together with the universe, and cease to exist. Then another universe will gradually emerge from the pralaya (dissolution), and men on earth will be enabled to comprehend SWAYAMBHUVA as he is. Alone, this primal cause will exist forever, in all his glory, filling the infinite space. What better proof could be adduced of the deep reverential feeling with which the “heathen” regard the one Supreme eternal cause of all things visible and invisible. This is again the source from which the ancient kabalists derived identical doctrines. If the Christians understood _Genesis_ in their own way, and, if accepting the texts literally, they enforced upon the uneducated masses the belief in a creation of our world out of nothing; and moreover assigned to it a _beginning_, it is surely not the Tanaïm, the sole expounders of the hidden meaning contained in the _Bible_, who are to be blamed. No more than any other philosophers had they ever believed either in spontaneous, limited, or _ex nihilo_ creations. The _Kabala_ has survived to show that their philosophy was precisely that of the modern Nepäl Buddhists, the Svâbhâvikas. They believed _in the eternity and the indestructibility of matter_, and hence in many prior creations and destructions of worlds, before our own. “There were old worlds which perished.”[411] “From this we see that the Holy One, blessed be His name, had successively created and destroyed sundry worlds, before he created the present world; and when he created this world he said: ‘This pleases me; the previous ones did not please me.’”[412] Moreover, they believed, again like the Svâbhâvikas, now termed Atheists, that every thing proceeds (is created) from its own nature and that once that the first impulse is given by that Creative Force inherent in the “Self-created substance,” or Sephira, everything evolves out of itself, following its pattern, the more spiritual prototype which precedes it in the scale of infinite creation. “The indivisible point which has no limit, and cannot be comprehended (for it is absolute), expanded from within, and formed a brightness which served as a garment (a veil) to the indivisible points.... It, too, expanded from within.... Thus, _everything originated