who passed as seers or prophets of the nation, had no difficulty in attributing to God the cause of Evil.[354] They were obviously authorized by the history of the downfall of the first man, and by the dogma of original sin, which they took according to the meaning attached to it by the vulgar. It also happened, after the establishment of Christianity and of Islamism, that this dogma, received by both cults in all its extent and in all its literal obscurity, has necessarily drawn with it predestination, which is, in other words, only the fatality of the ancients. Mohammed, more enthusiast than learned, and stronger in imagination than in reasoning, has not hesitated a moment, admitting it as an inevitable result of the Unity of God, which he announced after Moses.[355] It is true that a few Christian doctors, when they have been capable of perceiving the inferences in it have denied this predestination, and have wished, either by allegorizing the dogma of original sin, as Origen, or rejecting it wholly, as Pelagius, to establish the free will and the power of the will; but it is easy to see, in reading the history of the church, that the most rigid Christians, such as Saint Augustine and the ecclesiastical authority itself, have always upheld predestination as proceeding necessarily from the divine Prescience and from the All-Powerful, without which there is no Unity. The length of this examination forces me to suspend the proofs that I was going to give regarding this last assertion; but further on I will return to it. 8. _Be sober, diligent, and chaste; avoid all wrath. In public or in secret ne’er permit thou Any evil; and above all else respect thyself._ Pythagoras considered man under three principal modifications, like the Universe; and this is why he gave to man the name of the microcosm or the small world.[356] Nothing was more common among the ancient nations than to compare the Universe to a grand man, and man, to a small Universe.[357] The Universe, considered as a grand and animated All, composed of intelligence, soul and body, was called Pan or Phanes.[358][359] Man, or microcosm, was composed in the same way but in an inverse manner, of body, soul, and intelligence; and each of these three parts was, in its turn, considered under three modifications, so that the ternary ruling in the whole ruled equally in the least of its subdivisions. Each ternary, from that which embraced Immensity, to that which constituted the weakest individual was, according to Pythagoras, included in an absolute or relative Unity, and formed thus, as I have already said, the Quaternary or Sacred Tetrad of the Pythagoreans. This Quaternary was universal or particular. Pythagoras was not, however, the inventor of this doctrine: it was spread from China to the depths of Scandinavia.[360] One finds it likewise expressed in the oracles of Zoroaster.[361] In the Universe a Ternary shines forth, And the Monad is its principle.