so far as in him lay the life and increase of the world, and lessened the sphere in which the power of the evil spirits could operate. If the Indians by the elevation of Brahman arrived only at the great contrast between nature and spirit, between soul and body; if all nature was regarded as something evil and to be annihilated, so that the mortification and torturing of the body and annihilation of self became the highest ethical aims--the Bactrians or Arians in Iran were directed by their reform to more energetic work and activity against the harmful side of nature, and the evil part of the soul. With the free choice of this or that side, with the duty of working on nature, and educating self, the conditions of a more happy and powerful development were given them. It was the duty of any earnest and eminent adherents of the reform, and afterwards of the priestly races who joined it, or grew up in it, to guide the impulse it had given, and bring the new ideas and the rules to be deduced from them into harmony with the old conceptions. If the contrast between the beneficent and harmful powers once took the shape of opposing spirits, the next object was to represent more exactly the character and nature of these spirits, and define more closely the good and evil Deity. As the reform tended to elevate the natural side in these shapes into ethical qualities, it was inevitable that advance in this direction should lead at an early time to abstract views--that both spirits should be identified with the pure contrast of light and darkness, of truth and lying, of moral good and moral evil.