text:  All that Pythagoras and Plato ever wrote of noble and elevating truths are merely flashes of that primeval light in the full flood of which man in his more perfect antediluvian state delighted to dwell; and it is remarkable in the case of Pythagoras Anaxagoras Thales and so many other of the Greek philosophers that the further we trace them back we come nearer to the divine truth which in the systems of Epicurus Aristippus Zeno or the shallow or cold philosophers of later origin altogether disappears