essions of
simple historic fact; and thus they have largely lost the true sense
of historic perspective, are unable to distinguish between fact and
fancy, and are strangers to the lessons of the past. For it must be
remembered that the teachings of former ages, and especially the
life-lessons and character-influences of those generations of men,
have less and less of significance to us the farther we throw them
back into the dim and hazy realm of the prehistoric and legendary. The
near past, with its familiar voices and its heroes of real flesh and
blood, brings to us an appeal to life and noble endeavour to which we
are always glad to respond; while the remote characters of myth and of
legend neither impress us with their reality nor inspire us to a
higher and better life.

And, in the same way, these immensely drawn-out aeons of the past make
it impossible for those who believe in them rightly to appreciate the
significance and importance of the present. One's presence in the
world and the value of his best activity for the world's good can mean
something to him if he appreciate the fact that there is no great
distance to the very beginning of human history. Though his span of
life is small, it nevertheless has a definite relationship to the
whole of history, and there is some encouragement for a man to work
for the good of his race. But this encouragement dwindles into
nothingness when a man believes in those many aeons of human life, each
aeon being in itself an immense reach of billions of years.

II

_The Cyclic Character of Hindu Chronology_

A very unique thing about this chronology is that it revolves in
cycles. Each _maha-yuga_ is composed of four _yugas_, and these are
ever the same series and of the same character. We pass on through the
long vista of _Kritha_, _Tretha_, _Dwapara_, and _Kali_ only to begin
once more on the same series; and thus forever we move in this
four-arc circle without ever getting outside of it. It is claimed
that this cycle of _yugas_ has already revolved about twenty million
times and will go on spinning twenty million times more, attaining
nothing and going nowhere. It is enough to make one dizzy to think of
this mighty chronological wheel, spending 4,320,000 years for every
one of its forty million revolutions, with nothing to vary the
monotony of these ever recurring epochs!

The first question which one would naturally ask, after assuming the
truth of this breathlessly