Only the intuitions can help us beyond the boundaries of the super-material world and they tell us that there never was a beginning to the things which are and that there will never be an end. This condition of Being, without ever a time of actual commencing, is paradoxical and confusing to the mind and we cannot easily realize that although apparently impossible it is true. But it is only one of many similar contradictions that attend upon the Contemplation of Infinity. We cannot even comprehend a beginning to the present cycle of our existence. The birth of this world is lost in the misty obscurity of the infinite Past and is as hopelessly beyond us as is the record of the countless myriads of similar creations which preceded it. It is therefore of little value to attempt to fix an era from which to begin tracing the evolution of man from the irresponsible, mindless monster that archaic teachings describe him to have been before he assumed conscious domination over the other creatures of this world. And it is equally vain to seek for information regarding the various changes through which he arrived at even that primitive condition of being only a mass of inert semi-conscious matter. Perhaps in this as in the other aspects of the transmigration of the Divine into the Finite, there never was any beginning. The Vedanta, which is that phase of Indian Philosophy that treats specially on this subject, says that the world proceeded from an inscrutable principle, darkness, neither existent nor non-existent and from "one that breathed without afflation, other than which there was nothing, beyond it nothing." According to the Vedanta there is but one substance or reality immutable and eternal, the supreme spirit, _the impersonal Self_, the spiritual absolute _atman_—and that of course is summed up in the idea of Deity. Science, which professes to reject all theories that cannot be proven, suggests tentatively that all of nature's innumerable products have evolved from the result of a fortuitous combination of unconscious causes that produced a beginning. But there should be something beyond mere accident in the movements of non-intelligent forces. There must always be a first cause even for a beginning and that first cause cannot be an accident. That should be an uncomfortable theory for those who are scientific enough to believe it, for they have no guarantee against other accidents of Nature. They can never feel secure against some awkward occurrence that might counteract that initial commingling of forces and restore this world to its original condition of nothingness.