THE THREE CLASSES OF MIND 189 



day. The mind of imagination was that which gave birth to 

 the earliest forms of civilisation until the evolution of com- 

 prehension developed agriculture and religion, and so prepared 

 the way for civilisation and government (see chapter on Cain 

 and Abel in Book II.). 



Now it appears to me that the conditions of evolution about 

 the seventh day point to a time when forces were at work to 

 enable mankind to evolve the soul of Comprehension as an 

 advancement on the lower order of the mind of imagination, 

 so that he might evolve the rudiments of religion by the 

 creation of idolatry, and also as evolution advanced the mind 

 of understanding and government to a knowledge of God and 

 His Trinity under prehistoric Buddhism. Modern Buddhism, 

 dating from 1500 B.C., points to some earlier form 

 of creed, prior to that date, whose doctrine of a creator with 

 infinite powers to rule and control, of which power human 

 authority w r as the symbol, had an existence, but that this 

 creed was abolished some three to four thousand years before 

 Christ, because it created an aristocracy so powerful and 

 arrogant that the people rebelled against its abuse of truth and 

 created modern Buddhism in its stead, somewhere between 

 1500 and 500 B.C. Yet it is probable that to this religious 

 doctrine, whose dogmas are long ago matters of past evolu- 

 tion, we owe the origin of the qualities of sympathy, honour, 

 mercy and justice, which have since become the birthright of 

 the Aryan races. And it is also probable that the account in 

 Genesis is mainly a record of the historical and astronomical 

 and religious studies of the prehistoric philosophers of India 

 and Persia and Southern Siberia, transmitted through the 

 channels of antique and long-forgotten and contorted fables, 

 legends and parables, descriptive of long lost, past and* con- 

 fused memories of religious and mental evolutions that may 

 well make us marvel at the exactness of the truths of divine 

 revelation they contain, much as they are jumbled up like 

 dice in a dice-box, and perverted in the course of verbal trans- 

 mission, yet are in reality mainly records of mankind's 

 indistinct recollections of the manner in which in the course of 

 evolution he slowly evolved in turn the three different classes 

 of mind, which are ultimately to be the foundation upon which 

 is to be reared the edifice of his soul of human wisdom, when 

 in a subsequent stage of creation he is to start to evolve 



