With the light which in these later ages science and ethnological research are throwing upon the physiological and religious disputes of the ancients, the correctness of the primitive doctrines elaborated under purer conditions at an age when human beings lived nearer to Nature is being proved--namely, that matter like spirit is eternal and indestructible, and therefore that the one is as difficult of comprehension as the other, and that Nature, instead of being separated from spirit, is filled with it and can not be divorced from it; also that the female is the original organic unit of creation, without which nothing is or can be created. CHAPTER VI. CIVILIZATION OF AN ANCIENT RACE. The profound doctrines of abstractions or emanations; of the absorption of the individual soul into the divine ether or essence; of the renewal of worlds and reincarnation, were doubtless elaborated after the separation, in the human mind, of Spirit from matter, but before mankind had lost the power to reason abstractly. Although Pythagoras understood and believed these doctrines, he did not, as is well known, receive them from his degenerate countrymen, but, on the contrary, imbibed them from private sources among the orientals, where fragments of their remarkable learning were still extant. He said that religion consists in knowing the truth and doing good, and his ideas show the grandeur and beauty of the earlier conception of a Deity. He declared that there is only one God who is not, "as some are apt to imagine, seated above the world, beyond the orb of the universe," but that this great power is diffused throughout Nature. It is "the reason, the life, and the motion of all things." Plato believed that human beings are possessed of two souls, the one mortal, which perishes with the body, the other immortal, which continues to exist either in a state of happiness or misery; that the righteous soul, freed from the limitations of matter, returns at death to the source whence it came, and that the wicked, after having been detained for a while in a place prepared for their reception, are sent back to earth to reanimate other bodies. Aristotle held the opinion that the souls of human beings are sparks from the divine flame, while Zeno, the founder of the Stoic philosophy, taught that spirit acting upon matter produced the elements and the earth. There is plenty of evidence going to show that the early Fathers in the Christian church believed in the doctrines of reincarnation and the renewal of worlds. Neither is there any doubt but that this philosophy came from the East, where it originated. It is thought that the ancient philosophers who elaborated these doctrines were unable to account for the existence of evil without a belief in the immortality of the soul. Spirit was eternal, as was also matter.