ith what it might have retained of
personality, of hereditary impairments, perhaps, that should have
vanished had he lived past his young manhood, these will not
hinder you from understanding the greatness and beauty and
tragedy of that life apparently wasted. But we shall come to him
in our time.)

Back in the sixth century B. C., when all those Great Teachers
came: when the forces that until then had been pent up in the
Mysteries were suddenly let loose upon the world,--and the more
vehement for their having been so pent up, and their now being so
let loose;--what a flood of vision they brought with them! In
Greece, to rouse up almost at once that wonderful wave of
artistic creation; in Persia, to create quickly a splendid and
chivalrous empire; in India, (so far as we know) to pervade as
an ethical illumination the life of the people for some centuries
before manifesting in art or empire; in China, to work in a
twofold current, on one side upon the imagination, on the other
upon the moral conceptions of the race, until the Chinese
manvantara began. Its effect in each case was according to the
cyclic position of the country at the time: those, seemingly,
being the most fortunate, that had to wait longest for the full
fruition. Thus it struck China in the midst of pralaya, and lay
in the soil fructifying until the pralaya had passed; then,
appearing and re-appearing according to cyclic law, was a saving
health in the nation for fifteen centuries at least;--India, I
imagine, when the manvantara there some five centuries old, and
under a minor shadow; which shadow once passed, it produced its
splendors in the Maurya time; and was in all effective for a
thousand years. But it came to Persia in the autumn of the great
cycle, when the forces it brought had to ripen quickly, and
descend at once on to the military (the lowest) plane;--and to
Greece just at noon or early summer,--just before the most
intellectual moment,--and so there, too, had no time to ripen,
but must burst out at once in artistic creation without ever a
chance first to work in and affect the moral life of the race.
This last is what Pythagoras at Croton had in mind to do: had
Croton endured, there would have been a stable moral basis for
the intellectual spendors.--I believe that you have here the very
archeus and central clue to history. In China, it was enough for
Laotse to float his magical ideas, and for confucius to give out
his extremely