Surely this mystification must have originated with one of these nations and been carried to the others either by colonists, missionaries, or travelers. It is not admissible, or even presumable, that the same idea and mysticism has been attached to these numbers by all these different peoples without being communicated from one to another. Such abstruse speculations respecting the ontological properties of numbers can not be ascribed to the first workings of the human mind in its incipient steps toward intellectual development. In its awakening, human intellect, still unable to comprehend the causes of the natural phenomena that take place, as everyday occurrences, in the material existence of man, does not soar in the elevated regions of metaphysics or of philosophical and abstract theories. Do we not see, even in our midst, that men who live in ignorance ascribe the manifestations of the powers of nature to unseen, mighty beings, of whom they continually stand in awe; to whom they tribute homage, and address prayers filled with the superstitious fears that these fancies of their untutored imagination inspire in them? Abstract conceptions, numerical combinations, metaphysical speculations, philosophical hypothesis, are productions of highly cultivated intelligences, of minds accustomed to reason on causes and effects, to deduce things unseen from things seen. The mysticism with which these numbers have been invested, their symbolization in the sacred mysteries, must have had its origin in material causes, palpable to physical senses, the memory of which became lost in the course of ages, altered by being transported among peoples living far away from the nation that conceived the idea, by passing from mouth to mouth, in the secrecy of initiations, generation after generation. The idea of a sole and omnipotent Deity, who created all things, seems to have been the universal belief in early ages, among all the nations that had reached a high degree of civilization. This was the doctrine of the Egyptian priests. They called the Divine Intelligence _Kneph_, and placed him above and apart from the Triads. Damascius, an eclectic philosopher, who taught in the schools of Athens, about the year 526 of the Christian era, in his "Treatise on Principles," says that "they asserted nothing of the first principle of all things, but celebrated it as a thrice unknown darkness, transcending all intellectual perception." Proclus, platonic philosopher, director of the school of Athens in 450 after Christ, says: "the Demiurgos or Creator is triple, and the three intellects are the three kings, he who exists, he who possesses, he who beholds." These three intellects, therefore, he supposes to be the Demiurge; the same as the _three kings_ of Plato, and as the three whom Orpheus celebrates under the names of Phænes, Ouranos, and Kronos, kings of the great "Saturnian continent," in the Atlantic ocean.