[Illustration 2]

[Illustration 3]

The Egyptians in their constructions did little more than to place enormous stones on end, and pile one huge block upon another.  They used many columns placed close together:  the spaces which they spanned were inconsiderable.  The upright or supporting member may be said to have been in Egyptian architecture the predominant one.  A vertical line therefore may be taken as the simplest and most abstract symbol of Egyptian architecture (Illustration 2).  It remained for the Greeks fully to develop the lintel.  In their architecture the vertical member, or column, existed solely for the sake of the horizontal member, or lintel; it rarely stood alone as in the case of an Egyptian obelisk.  The columns of the Greek temples were reduced to those proportions most consistent with strength and beauty, and the intercolumnations were relatively greater than in Egyptian examples.  It may truly be said that Greek architecture exhibits the perfect equality and equipoise of vertical and horizontal elements and these only, no other factor entering in.  Its graphic symbol would therefore be composed of a vertical and a horizontal line (Illustration 3).  The Romans, while retaining the column and lintel of the Greeks, deprived them of their structural significance and subordinated them to the semicircular arch and the semi-cylindrical and hemispherical vault, the truly characteristic and determining forms of Roman architecture.  Our symbol grows therefore by the addition of the arc of a circle (Illustration 4).  In Gothic architecture column, lintel, arch and vault are all retained in changed form, but that which more than anything else differentiates Gothic architecture from any style which preceded it is the introduction of the principle of an equilibrium of forces, of a state of balance rather than a state of rest, arrived at by the opposition of one thrust with another contrary to it.  This fact can be indicated graphically by two opposing inclined lines, and these united to the preceding symbol yield an accurate abstract of the elements of Gothic architecture (Illustration 5).

[Illustration 4]

[Illustration 5]

All this is but an unusual application of a familiar theosophic teaching, namely, that it is the method of nature on every plane and in every department not to omit anything that has gone before, but to store it up and carry it along and bring it into manifestation later.  Nature everywhere proceeds like the jingle of The House that Jack Built:  she repeats each time all she has learned, and adds another line for subsequent repetition.

[Footnote A:  The quaint Oriental imagery here employed should not blind the reader to the precise scientific accuracy of the idea of which this imagery is the vehicle.  Schopenhauer says:  “Polarity, or the sundering of a force into two quantitively different and opposed activities striving after re-union,... is a fundamental type of almost all the phenomena of nature, from the magnet and the crystal to man himself.”]