We see by what facts, circumstances, and notions Muhammed was acted upon, whilst nourishing his religious enthusiasm by solitary contemplation in the cavern of mount Hara, to which he was wont to retire for one month in every year. In his fortieth year, at the same age at which Zoroaster began to teach 600 years before Christ (according to some chronologers), Muhammed, as many years after the Messiah, assumed the prophetic mission to reform the Arabians. He felt the necessity of seizing some safe and essential dogmas in the chaos of Magian, Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian notions; broke all the figures of planets in the temple of Mecca, and declared the most violent war against all plastic, graven, and painted idols; he left undisturbed only the _black stone_, Saturn’s emblem before, and at the time when the Jewish traditions claimed it for Abraham, and even transported it to heaven. Muhammed preferred the latter to the more ancient superstition; as to the rest, he abhorred the prevailing idolatry of the Sabaians; and blamed the corruption of monotheism in the Jews and Christians. He felt in himself the powerful spirit, and undertook to re-establish the _Touhid_, “the unity and spiritualism of God;” he preached with enthusiastic zeal the _Islam_, “devotedness und resignation to God.” But, in order to found and to expand the great and necessary truths, he knew no other means, but to attach the believers to his own person, and to accustom them to blind obedience to his dictates; he proclaimed: “There is no God but God, and Muhammed is his prophet;” he gave them the Koran, the only holy book, in which his precepts were as many commands proclaimed under the penalty of eternal damnation. In the Muhammedan all spontaneity is stifled; all desire, all attempt to be self-convinced is interdicted; every thing becomes exterior, the religious and civil Code but one.