The Oriental belief that former golden ages were necessarily happier, wiser, and better ones than ours is true only in a superficial sense. While the people of those times were still primitive and had only partially developed their latent possibilities, the character of mankind was only partially developed for evil, too. But since then, they have had to evolve the powers of intellect applied to practical life and to individualize themselves out of tribal dependence. The consequence has been less communal spirit and greater personal selfishness, less response to spiritual intuitions and more reliance on materialistic sense promptings. Again, while the planet was still thinly peopled, the struggle of man against man was less, hence the call on his evil propensities was less, too. Actually, we have all lived through this or other planetary evolutions before and therefore have all possessed those manifold qualities and characteristics which belonged to the men of those earlier ages. If they were happier and better, then so were we. Those qualities and characteristics are still within us, but they have been overshadowed for a time by the other ones which evolution has since stressed. Lapsed for a time they may be, but lost forever they cannot be. Evolution does not discard its former gains but takes them up into itself, preserves and transmutes them while it moves onward.
Empires built upon pyramids of skulls and rivers of blood rise but to fall. Where is the Assyrian Kingdom today? The Greek might has cracked and dwindled. The broken clay bricks of vanished Babylon afford fit haunts for spiders and cockroaches. But the Assyrians, the Greeks, and the Babylonians themselves have not vanished. They are with us today, albeit in different bodies and in other lands. The law of physical rebirth has brought them back to the school of life, either to learn fresh lessons or to re-learn the old ones which were insufficiently mastered. Hence we have within us today the stored experiences, the unfolded capacities, and the accumulated knowledge of all the previously- born races of mankind. Only, some of them are temporarily overlaid or temporarily neglected or even temporarily inaccessible. But they are there. We have to recover or express them alongside what we have additionally gained since then. Over-concentration on the intellectual-physical phase of life may have made us materialists, but the shift of emphasis which the tide of evolution has now to bring about will make us something better. The time has indeed come to restore the balance, to realize that what we once were in the distant past we still are and much more besides, to open out all sides of our nature to fullest bloom in equal measure. In an age which has experienced awful disintegrations, we should begin to integrate ourselves. Such a rich integral life was not possible in primitive times. History has made us more ready for such a fuller quest than were earlier races. That is why we of this century must have the boldness to be ourselves and not pale imitations of the men of the distant past. Every historical period must find its own outlook, work out its own world-view afresh. How much more must this be the case in a period of such unique character as the one in which we live today!
-- Notebooks Category 13: Human Experience > Chapter 4 : World Crisis > # 266
