Legend is living tradition, and three times out of four it is truer than what we call History.[1160]
While Materialists deny everything in the Universe, save Matter, Archæologists are trying to dwarf Antiquity, and seek to destroy every claim of Ancient Wisdom by tampering with Chronology. Our present-day Orientalists and historical writers are to Ancient History that which the white ants are to the buildings in India. More dangerous even than those Termites, the modern Archæologists—the “authorities” of the future in the matter of Universal History—are preparing for the history of past nations the fate of certain edifices in tropical countries. As said Michelet:
History will tumble down and break into atoms in the lap of the twentieth century, devoured to its foundations by her annalists.
Very soon, indeed, under their combined efforts, it will share the fate of those ruined cities in both Americas, which lie deeply buried under impassable virgin forests. Historical facts will remain concealed from view by the inextricable jungles of modern hypotheses, denials and scepticism. But very happily actual History repeats herself, for she proceeds, like everything else, in cycles; and dead facts, and events deliberately drowned in the sea of modern scepticism, will ascend once more and reappear on the surface.
In Volume II, the very fact that a work with pretensions to Philosophy, which is also an exposition of the most abstruse problems, has to be commenced by tracing the evolution of mankind from what are regarded as supernatural beings—Spirits—will arouse the most malevolent criticism. Believers in, and the defenders of, the Secret Doctrine, [pg 740] however, will have to bear the accusation of madness and worse, as philosophically as for long years already the writer has done. Whenever a Theosophist is taxed with insanity, he ought to reply by quoting from Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes:
By opening so freely their lunatic asylums to their supposed madmen, men only seek to assure each other that they are not themselves mad.
[Transcriber's Note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected.]