Quo pater, Aeneas, quo dires Tullus et Ancus,

—­we cannot make them interestingly alive.  But it does not follow that they did not live when they are supposed to have lived, or do the things attributed to them.  Their architecture was ephemeral, and bears no witness to them; they built no pyramids to flout time; they raised no monument but a people, a culture, an idea, that still endures.

Then, too, we shall see that at the beginning of the last Chinese manvantara a conscious attempt was made to break wholly with the past,—­to wipe it from human memory, and begin all anew.  Such a thing happened in Babylon once; there had been a Sargon in remote antiquity with great deeds to his credit; thousands of years after, another Sargon arose, who envied his fame; and, being a kind, and absolute, decreed that all the years intervening should never have existed—­merged his own in the personality of his remote predecessor, and so provided a good deal of muddlement for archaeologists to come.  Indeed, such a thing almost happened in France at the Revolution.  It is said that in some French schools now you find children with a vague idea that things more or less began with the taking of the Bastille:  that there was a misty indefinable period between the 12th of October (or on whatever day it was Eve’s apple ripened) and the glorious 14th of July:—­an age of prehistory, wandered through by unimportant legendary figures such as Jeanne Darc, Henri Quatre, Louis Quatorze, which we may leave to the superstitious—­and come quickly to the real flesh and blood of M. de Mirabeau and Citizen Danton.—­Even so, in our own time, China herself, wearied with the astral molds and inner burdens of two millenniums, has been writhing in a fever of destruction:  has burnt down the Hanlin College, symbol and center of a thousand years of culture; destroyed old and famous cities; sent up priceless encyclopaedias in smoke; replaced the Empire with a republic, and the Dragon of wisdom with five meaningless stripes;—­breaking with all she was in her brilliant greatness, and all she has been since in her weakness and squalid decline.—­ We ask why history is not continuous; why there are these strange hiatuses and droppings out?—­the answer is simple enough.  It is because Karma, long piled up, must sometime break out upon the world.  The inner realms become clogged with the detritus of ages and activity, till all power to think and do is gone:  there is no room nor scope left for it.  The weight of what has been thought and done, of old habit, presses down on men, obstructs and torments them, till they go mad and riot and destroy.  The manvantara opens:  the Crest-Wave, the great tide of life, rushes in.  It finds the world of mind cluttered up and encumbered; there is an acute disparity between the future and the past, which produces a kind of psychic maelstrom.  Blessed is that nation then, which has a man at its head who can guide