Will this eminent Darwinian admit the possibility of his “Pithecoid Ancestry” being assignable to the list of “wholly intolerable beliefs,” in the “larger knowledge” of Occultists? But whence the savage? Mere “rising to the civilized state” does not account for the evolution of form. In the same letter, “The Evolution of Man,” Dr. Wilson makes other strange confessions. Thus, he observes, in answer to the queries put to _Knowledge_, by “G. M.”: “Has evolution effected any change in man? If so, what change? If not, why not?”... If we refuse to admit [as science does] that man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded, there exists only another supposition—that of evolution. If man has arisen from a savage to a civilized state, that surely is evolution. _We do not yet know because such knowledge is difficult to acquire, if the human frame is subject to the same influences as those of lower animals._ But there is little doubt that elevation from savagery to civilized life means and implies “evolution,” and that of considerable extent. Mentally, man’s evolution cannot be doubted; the ever‐widening sphere of thought has sprung from small and rude beginnings, like language itself. But man’s ways of life, his power of adaptation to his surroundings, and countless other circumstances, have made the facts and course of his “evolution” very difficult to trace. This very difficulty ought to make the Evolutionists more cautious in their affirmations. But why is evolution impossible, if “man was created a perfect being, and then became degraded”? At best it can only apply to the _outward, physical man_. As remarked in _Isis Unveiled_, Darwin’s evolution begins at the middle point, instead of commencing for man, as for everything else, from universals. The Aristotle‐Baconian method may have its advantages, but it has, undeniably, already demonstrated its defects. Pythagoras and Plato, who proceeded from universals downwards, are now shown more learned, in the light of Modern Science, than was Aristotle. For the latter opposed and denounced the idea of the revolution of the Earth and even of its rotundity, when writing: Almost all those who affirm that they have studied heaven in its uniformity, claim that the earth is in the centre, but the philosophers of the Italian School, otherwise called the Pythagoreans, teach entirely the contrary. This, because the Pythagoreans were Initiates, and followed the deductive method. Whereas Aristotle, the father of the inductive system, complained of those who taught that: The centre of our system was occupied by the sun, and the earth was only a star, which by a rotatory motion around the same centre, produces night and day.(354)