Believed in no [miracles] ... but applied himself to discover the method by which the theurgists could produce them; in a word, his philosophy brought him to the conclusion that magic was entirely confined to the application and the imitation of the laws and the works of nature. Who then can still call the Magic of the Ancients “superstition”? In this respect the opinion of Democritus is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerable time with the Egyptian priests.(36) For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius,(37) _treated of nature_—facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye‐witnesses, had, and could have taken place, for all, even the most _incredible_, were produced according to _the _“hidden laws of nature”.(38) ... Add to this that Greece, the “later cradle of the arts and sciences,” and India, cradle of religions, were, and one of them still is, devoted to its study and practice—and who shall venture to discredit its dignity as a study, and its profundity as a science?(39) No true Theosophist will ever do so. For, as a member of our great Oriental body, he knows indubitably that the Secret Doctrine of the East contains the Alpha and the Omega of Universal Science; that in its obscure texts, under the luxuriant, though perhaps too exuberant, growth of allegorical Symbolism, lie concealed the corner‐ and the key‐stones of all ancient and modern knowledge. That Stone, brought down by the Divine Builder, is now rejected by the too‐human workman, and this because, in his lethal materiality, man has lost every recollection, not only of his holy childhood, but of his very adolescence, when he was one of the Builders himself; when “the morning stars sang together, and the Sons of God shouted for joy,” after they had laid the measures for the foundations of the earth—to use the deeply significant and poetical language of Job, the Arabian Initiate. But those who are still able to make room in their innermost selves for the Divine Ray, and who accept, therefore, the data of the Secret Sciences in good faith and humility, they know well that it is in this Stone that remains buried the absolute in Philosophy, which is the key to all those dark problems of Life and Death, some of which, at any rate, may find an explanation in these volumes.