Rosicrucians or Fire-philosophers; and, even the ecstatic trance of mystics and of the modern mesmerists and spiritualists, are identical in nature, though various as to manifestation.  The search after man’s diviner “self,” so often and so erroneously interpreted as individual communion with a personal God, was the object of every mystic; and belief in its possibility seems to have been coeval with the genesis of humanity, each people giving it another name.  Thus Plato and Plotinus call “Noetic work” that which the Yogi and the Shrotriya term Vidya.  “By reflection, self-knowledge and intellectual discipline, the soul can be raised to the vision of eternal truth, goodness, and beauty—­that is, to the Vision of God.  This is the epopteia,” said the Greeks.  “To unite one’s soul to the Universal Soul,” says Porphyry, “requires but a perfectly pure mind.  Through self contemplation, perfect chastity, and purity of body, we may approach nearer to It, and receive, in that state, true knowledge and wonderful insight.”  And Swami Dayanund Saraswati, who has read neither Porphyry nor other Greek authors, but who is a thorough Vedic scholar, says in his “Veda Bhashya” (opasna prakaru ank. 9)—­“To obtain Diksha (highest initiation) and Yog, one has to practise according to the rules.....  The soul in the human body can perform the greatest wonders by knowing the Universal Spirit (or God) and acquainting itself with the properties and qualities (occult) of all the things in the universe.  A human being (a Dikshit or initiate) can thus acquire a power of seeing and hearing at great distances.”  Finally, Alfred R. Wallace, F.R.S., a spiritualist and yet a confessedly great naturalist, says, with brave candour:  “It is spirit that alone feels, and perceives, and thinks, that acquires knowledge, and reasons and aspires.....  There not unfrequently occur individuals so constituted that the spirit can perceive independently of the corporeal organs of sense, or can, perhaps, wholly or partially quit the body for a time and return to it again; the spirit communicates with spirit easier than with matter.”  We can now see how, after thousands of years have intervened between the age of the Gymnosophists* and our own highly civilized era, notwithstanding, or, perhaps, just because of such an enlightenment which pours its radiant light upon the psychological as well as upon the physical realms of Nature, over twenty millions of people today believe, under different form, in those same spiritual powers that were believed in by the Yogis and the Pythagoreans, nearly 3,000 years ago.

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* The reality of the Yog-power was affirmed by many Greek and Roman
writers, who call the Yogis Indian Gymnosophists—­by Strabo, Lucan,
Plutarch, Cicero (Tusculum), Pliny (vii. 2), &c.
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Thus, while the Aryan mystic claimed for himself the power of solving all the problems of life and death, when he had once obtained the power of acting independently