This is a brief account of Mānī's fantastic Cosmology.[16:1] He rejects the Zoroastrian hypothesis of creative agencies to explain the problem of objective existence. Taking a thoroughly materialistic view of the question, he ascribes the phenomenal universe to the _mixture_ of two independent, eternal principles, one of which (darkness) is not only a part of the universe--stuff, but also the source wherein activity resides, as it were, slumbering, and starts up into being when the favourable moment arrives. The essential idea of his cosmology, therefore, has a curious resemblance with that of the great Hindū thinker Kapila, who accounts for the production of the universe by the hypothesis of three gunas, i.e. Sattwa (goodness), Tamas (darkness), and Rajas (motion or passion) which mix together to form Nature, when the equilibrium of the primordial matter (Prakritī) is upset. Of the various solutions[17:1] of the problem of diversity which the Vedāntist solved by postulating the mysterious power of "Māyā", and Leibniz, long afterwards, explained by his doctrine of the Identity of Indiscernibles, Mānī's solution, though childish, must find a place in the historical development of philosophical ideas. Its philosophical value may be insignificant; but one thing is certain, i.e. Mānī was the first to venture the suggestion that the Universe is due to the activity of the Devil, and hence essentially evil--a proposition which seems to me to be the only logical justification of a system which preaches renunciation as the guiding principle of life. In our own times Schopenhauer has been led to the same conclusion; though, unlike Mānī, he supposes the principle of objectification or individuation--"the sinful bent" of the will to life--to exist in the very nature of the Primal Will and not independent of it. [16:1] It is interesting to compare Mānī's Philosophy of Nature with the Chinese notion of Creation, according to which all that exists flows from the Union of Yin and Yang. But the Chinese reduced these two principles to a higher unity:--Tai Keih. To Mānī such a reduction was not possible; since he could not conceive that things of opposite nature could proceed from the same principle. [17:1] Thomas Aquinas states and criticises Mānī's contrariety of Primal agents in the following manner:-- (a) What all things seek even a principle of evil would seek. But all things seek their own self-preservation. ⁂ Even a principle of evil would seek its own self-preservation. (b) What all things seek is good. But self-preservation is what all things seek. ⁂ Self-preservation is good. But a principle of evil would seek its own self-preservation. ⁂ A principle of evil would seek some good--which shows that it is self-contradictory. God and His Creatures, Book II, p. 105. Rickaby's Tr.