Observe, moreover, that a host of more or less intelligent _illuminati_, of elderly women and unbalanced spinsters, of simple-minded people who accept, blindly and off-hand, that which they do not understand, of discontented, unsuccessful, vain or crafty persons who fish in troubled waters, in a word, all the usual suspect mob that gathers round any more or less mysterious doctrine, science or phenomenon, has discredited these first esoteric interpretations, of which the very source is none too dear. Lastly, let us add that the burning of the famous library of Alexandria, in which all the knowledge of the east was amassed, the destruction in the sixteenth century, under the Mogul Akbar, of thousands of Sanskrit volumes, the systematic and merciless demolition, especially during the first few centuries of the Church and in the Middle Ages, of all that referred or alluded to this dreaded and embarrassing revelation, have deprived us of our best means of control. The adepts, it is true, assert on the other hand that the true texts, as well as the ancient commentaries which alone enable them to be understood, still exist in the secret crypts and subterranean libraries of Thibet or the Himalayas, libraries of books more innumerable than any which we possess in the west, and that they will reappear in a more enlightened age. It is possible, but in the meanwhile they are of no help to us. 11 Be this as it may, what we have is enough to perplex us greatly; and the control allowed by the fragments which have been saved from historic antiquity absolutely removes all suspicion of more or less recent fraud or deception in respect of the essentials. Moreover, any fraud or deception of this nature seems hardly possible and would be so ingenious that we should be obliged to marvel at it as a phenomenon almost as remarkable as that whereof it would be seeking to give the illusion; and we should have to admit that the mind of man has never insinuated itself so far into the infinity of time and space, or into the origin of things, and has never risen to such heights. Had this revelation profited by all the attainments of our latter-day science and thought, it could not have furnished us with theories more satisfactory, more logical, more coherent, more plausible, more synthetic, or worthier of the infinity which they strive to embrace and often seem to attain, on the rhythm of the eternities, the ebb and flow of the eternal Becoming, the never-ending cycle and the periodic existences of the ego, the birth, movement and evolution of the worlds, the divine breath and the intelligence that animate it, on Maya, the eternal illusion of ignorance, the struggle for life, natural selection, the gradual development and transformation of stars and men, the functions and energies of the ether, immortal and infallible justice, the intermolecular and fantastic activity of matter, on the nature of the soul and the existence of the vast, nameless power that