Chapter II.—Philosophical Basis, and Antecedents of Manichæism. "About 500 years before the commencement of the Christian era," writes Professor Monier Williams,2 "a great stir seems to have taken place in Indo-Aryan, as in Grecian minds, and indeed in thinking minds everywhere throughout the then civilized world.  Thus when Buddha arose in India, Greece had her thinkers in Pythagoras, Persia in Zoroaster, and China in Confucius.  Men began to ask themselves earnestly such questions as—What am I?  Whence have I come?  Whither am I going?  How can I explain my consciousness of personal existence?  What is the relationship between my material and immaterial nature?  What is the world in which I find myself? did a wise, good and all-powerful Being create it 8 out of nothing? or did it evolve out of an eternal germ? or did it come together by the com- bination of eternal atoms?  If created by a Being of infinite wisdom, how can I account for the inequality of condition in it—good and evil, happiness and misery.  Has the Creator form or is he formless?  Has he any qualities or none?" It is true that such questions pressed themselves with special importunity upon the thinkers of the age mentioned, but we should be far astray if we should think for a moment that now for the first time they suggested themselves and demanded solution.  The fact is that the earliest literary records of the human race bear evidence of high thinking on the fundamental problems of God, man, and the world, and the relations of these to each other.  Recent scholars have brought to light facts of the utmost interest with reference to the pre- Babylonian (Accadian) religion.  A rude nature-worship, with a pantheistic basis, but assum- ing a polytheistic form, seems to have prevailed in Mesopotamia from a very early period.  "Spirit everywhere dispersed produced all the phenomena of nature, and directed and anim- ated all created beings.  They caused evil and good, guided the movements of the celestial bodies, brought back the seasons in their order, made the wind to blow and the rain to fall, and produced by their influence atmospheric phenomena both beneficial and destructive; they also rendered the earth fertile, and caused plants to germinate and to bear fruit, presided over the births and preserved the lives of living beings, and yet at the same time sent death and disease.  There were spirits of this kind everywhere, in the starry heavens, in the earth, and in the intermediate region of the atmosphere; each element was full of them, earth, air, fire and water; and nothing could exist without them…As evil is everywhere present in nature side by side with good, plagues with favorable influences, death with life, destruction with fruitfulness; an idea of dualism as decided as in the religion of Zoroaster pervaded the conceptions of the supernatural world formed by the Accadian magicians, the evil beings of which they feared more than they valued the powers of good.  There were essentially good spirits, and others equally bad.  These opposing troops constituted a vast dualism, which embraced the whole universe and kept up a perpetual struggle in all parts of the creation."3  2 Indian Wisdom, 3rd ed. (1876), p. 49. 3 Lenormant, Chaldean Magic (1877),  p. 144-145. Philosophical Basis, and Antecedents of Manichæism. 12 Philosophical Basis, and Antecedents of Manichæism.