we are told that this people is of the
Fourth, the most material of the Races; while we are on the
proud upward arc of the Fifth? And how is it that H. P. Blavatsky
speaks of the Chinese civilization as being younger than that of
the Aryans of India, the Sanskrit speakers,--Fifth certainly? Is
this, possibly, the explanation: that the ancestors of the
Chinese, a colony from Atlantis some time perhaps long before the
Atlantean degeneration and fall, were held under major pralaya
apart from the world-currents for hundreds of thousands of years,
until some time later than 160,000 years ago--the time of the
beginning our our sub-race? A pralaya, like sleep, is a period
of refreshment, spiritual and physical; it depends upon your
mood as you enter it, to what degree you shall reap its benefits:
whether it shall regenerate you; whether you shall arise from it
spiritually cleansed and invigorated by contact with the bright
Immortal Self within. Africa entered such a rest-period from an
orgy of black magic, and her night was filled with evil dreams
and sorceries, and her people became what they are. But
if China entered it guided by white Atlantean Adepts, it
would have been for her Fairyland; it would have been the
Fortunate Islands; it would have been the Garden of Siwang Mu,
the paradise of the West; and when she came forth it would
have been--it might have been--with a bent not towards intellectual,
but towards spiritual achievements.

Compare her civilization, in historic times, with that of the
West. Historic times are very little to go by, but they are all
we have at present.--She attained marvelous heights; but they
were not the same kind of heights the West has attained. Through
her most troublous, stirring, and perilous times, she carried
whole provinces of Devachan with her. It was while she was
falling to pieces, that Ssu-K'ung T'u wrote his divinely delicate
meditations. When the iron most entered her soul, she would
weep, but not tear her hair or rage and grow passionate; she
would condescend to be heart-broken, but never vulgar. In her
gayest moments, wine-flushed and Spring-flushed, she never forgot
herself to give utterance to the unseemly. There is no line in
her poetry to be excused or regretted on that score. She
worshipped Beauty, as perhaps only Greece and France in the West
have done; but unlike Greece or France, she sought her divinity
only in the impersonal and dispassionate: never mist