In modern times Gibbon, Macaulay, Milman, Buckle, Lecky, many men of science, many theologians, many publicists and statesmen, many economists, many jurists and philosophers as well as philanthropists, have deeply studied and pondered the problems of human life, have delved with immense labor, patience and erudition into the past experience of the race. They have applied the fruits of their research in writings on the religions, sciences, arts, as developed by our ancestors in the individual, family and communal relations which make up a civilization. They are all stories of failures to achieve and maintain an ideal.
Humanity fails and falls, falls and fails.
This is the history of Man. The various races now existent, from the extreme of aboriginal savagery or decadence to the full and slackly held petals of the flower of our own civilization, do but present in living flesh before our eyes the story of the whole past. That which men dignify and revere as Philosophy, Religion, and Science is what she means. Whether in the form of established unquestioned Codes, or in the subtler form of individual and racial preconception and bias, they operate as an external Authority and an internal Sanction, to which each devotee submits and which each seeks to impose on others. Necessarily her work was both destructive and creative, and such must be the work of the Theosophist in clearing his own mind.