There was another point universally held by the ancients which utterly forbade their believing in the soul's immortality. They held to a periodical destruction of all things, not excepting the soul. Thus writes Mr. Leland: "It was a notion which generally obtained among them [the philosophers], that at certain periods which the Stoics termed conflagrations, and which were to happen at the end of what they as well as the Pythagoreans and Platonists called the great year, there should be an utter end put to the present state of things; and the souls of all men, and even of those of them which had become gods, demons, or heroes, were to be resumed into the universal soul, and thereby lose their individual existence." (Leland's Revelation, vol. i. part iii. chap. v. p. 341.) Watson confirms this testimony thus: "Another notion equally extensive and equally destructive of the original doctrine of the immortality of the human soul, and a state of future rewards and punishments, which sprung up in the Egyptian schools, and was from thence transmitted into Greece, India, and throughout all Asia, was that of a periodical destruction and renovation of all things." (Theol. Inst., vol. i. part i. p. 52.) "When the universal inundation takes place," says Enfield, "the whole surface of the earth is covered with water and all animal life is destroyed; after which nature is renewed, and subsists as before till the element of fire, becoming prevalent in its turn, dries up all the moisture, converts every substance into its own nature, and at last, by universal conflagration, reduces the world to its pristine state. At this period, all material forms are lost in one chaotic mass; all animated nature is reunited to the Deity, and nature again exists in its original form, as one whole, consisting of God and matter. From this chaotic state, however, it again emerges, by the energy of the Efficient Principle, and gods, and men, and all the forms of regulated nature, are renewed, to be dissolved and renewed in endless successions." (Hist. of Phil., book ii. chap. ii. sec. 1, p. 195.) Then none among them could possibly believe in the immortality of the soul as a separate personality.