“Such, and many other things are affirmed of reproduction and of the soul.  Like Plato, they devise fables concerning the immortality of the soul, and the judgment in the infernal regions, and other similar notions.  These things are said of the Brachmanes.”

Clemens Alexandrinus, after saying that philosophy flourished in ancient times amongst the barbarians, and afterwards was introduced amongst the Greeks, instances the prophets of the Egyptians, the Chaldees of the Assyrians, the Druids of the Gauls (Galatae), the Samauaeans of the Bactrians, the philosophers of the Celts, the Magi of the Persians, and the Gymnosophists of the Indians.  The Greek authors distinctly speak of the Brahmins as the chief of the castes or divisions of the Indian people from the time of Megasthenes, who wrote of them in the fourth century B.C.

Sir William Jones, in a paper on the philosophy of the Asiatics, pointed out that “the old philosophers of Europe had some idea of centripetal force, and a principle of universal gravitation,” and affirms that “much of the theology and philosophy of our immortal Newton may be found in the Vedas.”

“That most subtle spirit which he suspected to pervade natural bodies, and lying concealed in them, to cause attraction and repulsion, the emission, reflection and refraction of light, electricity, calefaction, sensation, and muscular motion, is described by the Hindus as a fifth element, endowed with these very powers; and the Vedas abound with allusions to a force universally attractive, which they chiefly ascribe to the sun, thence called ‘Aditya, or the attractor,’ a name designed by the mythologists to mean the child of the goddess Aditi.  But the most wonderful passage on the theory of attractions occurs in the charming allegorical poem of ’Shi’ri’n and Ferhai’d, or the Divine Spirit, and a human soul disinterestedly pious,’ a work which, from the first verse to the last, is a blaze of religious and poetical fire.

“The whole passage appears to me so curious that I make no apology for giving you a faithful translation of it:—­

“There is a strong propensity which dances through every atom, and attracts the minutest particle to some peculiar object; search this universe from its base to its summit, from fire to air, from water to earth (the four elements!), from all below the moon to all above the celestial spheres, and thou wilt not find a corpuscle destitute of that natural attractability.  The very point of the first thread in this apparently tangled skein is no other than such a principle of attraction, and all principles beside are void of a real basis:  from such a propensity arises every motion perceived in heavenly or in terrestrial bodies; it is a disposition to be attracted which taught hard steel to rush from its place and rivet itself on the magnet; it is the same disposition which impels the light straw to attach itself firmly on amber; it is this quality which gives every substance in nature a tendency towards another, and an inclination forcibly directed to a determinate point.”