And now we will leave the rostrum to Mr. Darwin: “I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors.”[541] Again: “I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth, have descended from some one primordial form.[542]... I view all beings, not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long _before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited_.”[543] In short, they lived in the Sanchoniathonian chaos, and in the _ilus_ of Manu. Vyasa and Kapila go still farther than Darwin and Manu. “They see in Brahma but the name of the universal germ; _they deny the existence of a First Cause_; and pretend that everything in nature found itself developed only in consequence of material and fatal forces,” says Jacolliot.[544] Correct as may be this latter quotation from Kapila, it demands a few words of explanation. Jacolliot repeatedly compares Kapila and Veda Vyasa with Pyrrho and Littré. We have nothing against such a comparison with the Greek philosopher, but we must decidedly object to any with the French Comtist; we find it an unmerited fling at the memory of the great Aryan sage. Nowhere does this prolific writer state the repudiation by either ancient or modern Brahmans of God--the “unknown,” universal Spirit; nor does any other Orientalist accuse the Hindus of the same, however perverted the general deductions of our savants about Buddhistic atheism. On the contrary, Jacolliot states more than once that the learned Pundits and educated Brahmans have never shared the popular superstitions; and affirms their unshaken belief in the unity of God and the soul’s immortality, although most assuredly neither Kapila, nor the initiated Brahmans, nor the followers of the Vedanta school would ever admit the existence of an anthropomorphic creator, a “First Cause” in the Christian sense. Jacolliot, in his _Indo-European and African Traditions_, is the first to make an onslaught on Professor Müller, for remarking that the Hindu gods were “masks without actors ... names without being, and not beings without names.”[545] Quoting, in support of his argument, numerous verses from the sacred Hindu books, he adds: “Is it possible to refuse to the author of these stanzas a definite and clear conception of the divine force, of the Unique Being, master and Sovereign of the Universe?... Were the altars then built to a metaphor?”[546]