knows when? on a high
spiritual plane in the pure religion of the Teacher we call
Zoroaster; a high system of ethics expressed in long generations
of clean and noble lives. From that spirituality the impulse
descending reached the planes of intellect and culture; with
results we cannot measure now; nothing remains but the splendor
of a few ruins in the wilderness--the course the lion and the
lizard keep. It reached the plane of military power, and flowed
over all the lands between the Indus and the Nile; covering them
with a well-ordered, highly civilized and wisely governed empire.
Then it began to ebb; meeting a counter-impulse arising in
Eastern Europe.

Which, too, had it source on spiritual planes; in the heart and
on the lyre of blind Maeonides; and worked downward and outward,
till it had wrought on this plane a stable firmness in Sparta, an
alertness in Athens. It contacted then the crest of the Persian
wave, and received from the impact huge accession of vigor. It
blossomed in the Age of Pericles on the plane of mind and
creative imagination. It came down presently on to the plane of
militarism, and swelled out under Alexander as far as to the
eastern limits of the Persian Empire he overthrew. Where it met
a tide beginning to rise in India; and receded or remained
stationary before that. And at last it was spent, and itself
overthrown by a new impulse arisen in Italy; which took on
impetus from contact with Greece, as Greece had done from contact
with Persia.

The Greeks of Homer's and Hesiod's time, before the European
manvantara, elsewhere begun, had reached or quickened them, were
uncouth and barbarous enough; they may have stood, to their
great West Asian neighbors, as the Moors of today to the nations
of Europe; they may have stood, in things cultural, to the
unknown nations of the north or west already at that time
awakened, as the Chinese now and recently to the Japanese. Like
Moors, like Chinese, they had behind them traditions of an
ancient greatness; but pralaya, fall, adversity, squalor, had
done their work on them, developing the plebeian qualities. Now
that they have emerged into modern history, as then when
they were emerging into ancient, we find them with many like
characteristics; a turn for democracy, for example; the which
they assuredly had not when they were passing into pralaya under
the Byzantine Empire. A turn for democracy; plebeian qualities;
these are the things one w