(_b_) This attempt again was a failure. It allegorizes the vanity of _physical_ Nature’s unaided attempts to construct even a perfect animal—let alone man. For the Fathers, the Lower Angels, are all Nature‐ Spirits, and the higher Elementals also possess an intelligence of their own; but this is not enough to construct a _thinking_ man. “_Living_ Fire” was needed, that Fire which gives the human mind its self‐perception and self‐consciousness, or Manas; and the progeny of Pârvaka and Shuchi are the Animal‐Electric and Solar Fires, which create animals, and could thus furnish only a physical living constitution to that first astral model of man. The first Creators, then, were the Pygmalions of Primeval Man: they failed to animate the statue—_intellectually_. This Stanza we shall see is very suggestive. It explains the mystery of, and fills the gap between, the Informing Principle in man—the Higher Self or Human Monad—and the Animal Monad, both one and the same, although the former is endowed with _divine_ intelligence, the latter with _instinctual_ faculty alone. How is the difference to be explained, and the presence of that Higher Self in man accounted for? Says the Commentary: _The Sons of Mahat are the quickeners of the human Plant. They are the Waters falling upon the arid soil of latent life, and the Spark that vivifies the human Animal. They are the Lords of Spiritual Life Eternal.... In the beginning [in the Second Race] some [of the Lords] only breathed of their essence into Manushya [men], and some took in man their abode._ This shows that not all men became incarnations of the “Divine Rebels,” but only a few among them. The remainder had their fifth Principle simply quickened by the spark thrown into it, which accounts for the great difference between the intellectual capacities of men and races. Had not the “Sons of Mahat,” speaking allegorically, skipped the Intermediate Worlds, in their impulse toward intellectual freedom, the animal man would never have been able to reach upward from this Earth, and attain through self‐exertion his ultimate goal. The Cyclic Pilgrimage would have had to be performed through all the planes of existence half unconsciously, if not entirely so, as in the case of the animals. It is owing to this rebellion of intellectual life against the morbid inactivity of pure spirit, that we are what we are—self‐conscious, thinking men, with the capabilities and attributes of Gods in us, for good as much as for evil. Hence the Rebels are our Saviours. Let the Philosopher ponder well over this, and more than one mystery will become clear to him. It is only by the attractive force of the contrasts that the two opposites—Spirit and Matter—can be cemented together on Earth, and, smelted in the fire of self‐conscious experience and suffering, find themselves wedded in Eternity. This will reveal the meaning of many hitherto incomprehensible allegories, foolishly called “fables.”