CHAPTER II

Summary

The earliest doctrines of the Indian and Egyptian schools of philosophy, agreed in ascribing the first creation of the world to an omnipotent and infinite Being. They concurred also in representing this Being, who had existed from all eternity, as having repeatedly destroyed and reproduced the world and all its inhabitants. In the “Institutes of Menù’ the sacred volume of the Hindoos, to which, in its present form, Sir William Jones ascribes an antiquity of at least eight hundred and eighty years before Christ, we find this system of the alternate destruction and renovation of the world, proposed in the following remarkable verses.

“The Being, whose powers are incomprehensible, having created me (Menù) and this universe, again became absorbed in the supreme spirit, changing the time of energy for the hour of repose.

“When that power awakes, then has this world its full expansion; but when he slumbers with a tranquil spirit, then the whole system fades away…. For while he reposes as it were, embodied spirits endowed with principles of action depart from their several acts, and the mind itself becomes inert.”

Menù then describes the absorption of all beings into the Supreme essence, and the Divine soul itself is said to slumber, and to remain for a time immersed in “the first idea, or in darkness.” He then proceeds, (verse fifty-seven,) “Thus that immutable power, by waking and reposing alternately, revivifies and destroys, in eternal succession, this whole assemblage of locomotive and immoveable creatures.”