However we may regard a claim to so great age, a little reflection will
convince us that the Buddhistic view of what may fairly be called the
natural history of the human soul is very old, for it seems to have been
essentially the doctrine of Pythagoras, who was not its founder, but who
may have got it either from Egypt or from India, since he visited and
studied in both those countries. If, as Sinnett asserts, the true
Chinese belong to the fourth root-race, as appears not improbable, did
not the system come into India from China? Plato was a Buddhist, says
our author. Quintilian, perhaps getting his idea from Cicero, says of
Plato that he learned his philosophy from the Egyptian priests. It is
much more probable that the latter received it from the Atlantids--if we
are to believe in them--than that it came from India. Indeed, when we
seem to trace the same teachings to the Indians, on the one side, and to
the Egyptians on the other, putting the one, through Thibet,--the land,
above all others, of occult science,--into communication with the true
Chinese, and the other, through their tradition, with the lost race of
the Atlantic, the asserted history of the fourth root-race of humanity
assumes a very attractive degree of reasonableness.

That Cicero held to the Buddhist doctrines at points so important as to
make it improbable that he did not have esoteric teaching in the system,
any one will, I believe, admit, who will read the last chapter of the
Somnium Scipionis. And Cicero's ideas must have been those of the
students and scholars of his day. He puts them forward in a manner too
commonplace, too much as if they were things of course, for us to
suppose that there was anything unusual in them. On this subject of the
wide extension of that philosophy which in India we call Buddhism, I
will make only one other suggestion. It is the guess that it lay at the
foundation of the famous Eleusinian Mysteries.