“The worlds and universes—­yea, even the world of Brahm, a single day of which is like unto a thousand Yugas (four billion years of the earth), and his night as much—­these worlds must come and go...  The Days of Brahm are succeeded by the Nights of Brahm.  In these Brahmic Days all things emerge from invisibility, and become visible.  And, on the coming of the Brahmic Night, all visible things again melt into invisibility.  The Universe having once existed, melteth away; and lo! is again re-created.”

And, in the same edition, on page 80, we find these words, attributed to the same speaker: 

“At the end of a Kalpa—­a Day of Brahm—­a period of Creative Activity—­I withdraw into my nature, all things and beings.  And, at the beginning of another Kalpa, I emanate all things and beings, and re-perform my creative act.”

We may say here, in passing, that Modern Science now holds to the theory of periods of Rhythmic Change; of Rise and Fall; of Evolution and Dissolution.

It holds that, beginning at some time in the past aeons of time, there was the beginning of an upward or evolutionary movement, which is now under way; and that, according to the law of Nature, there must come a time when the highest point will be reached, and then will come the beginning of the downward path, which in time must come to an end, being succeeded by a long period of inactivity, which will then be followed by the beginning of a new period of Creative Activity and Evolution—­“a Day of Brahm.”

This thought of this law of Rhythm, in its Universal form, has been entertained by the thinkers of all times and races.  Herbert Spencer expressly held to it in his “First Principles,” expressing it in many ways akin to this:  “Evolution must come to a close in complete equilibrium or rest;” and again, “It is not inferable from the general progress towards equilibrium, that a state of universal quiescence or death will be reached; but that if a process of reasoning ends in that conclusion, a further process of reasoning points to renewals of activity and life;” and again, “Rhythm in the totality of changes—­alternate eras of evolution and dissolution.”  The Ancient Western Philosophers also indulged in this idea.  Heraclitus taught that the universe manifested itself in cycles, and the Stoics taught that “the world moves in an endless cycle, through the same stages.”  The followers of Pythagoras went even further, and claimed that “the succeeding worlds resemble each other, down to the minutest detail,” this latter idea, however—­the idea of the “Eternal Recurrence”—­while held by a number of thinkers, is not held by the Yogi teachers, who teach infinite progression—­an Evolution of Evolution, as it were.  The Yogi teachings, in this last mentioned particular, are resembled more by the line of Lotze’s thinking, as expressed in this sentence from his Micro-cosmos: “The series of Cosmic Periods, ... each link of which is bound together with every other; ... the successive order of these sections shall compose the unity of an onward-advancing melody.”  And, so through the pages of Heraclitus, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Empedocles, Virgil, down to the present time, in Nietzsche, and his followers, we find this thought of Universal Rhythm—­that fundamental conception of the ancient Yogi Philosophy.