48 The Week. 



years, but which must have been entirely obsolete and 

 forgotten before the other pyramids in its vicinity were 

 built ; probably about 4,000 years ago. The Great Pyramid 

 should thus be clearly antediluvian. 



It seems also above all improbable that any flood should 

 destroy so entirely all relics of a civilisation established — 

 not on a low level — but on the elevated lands of high Asia. 

 It seems to me that subsequent experience of the decadence 

 of other civilisations gives a better key to the obliteration of 

 that, which — I think with M. Bailly — certainly existed over 

 fifty centuries ago to the north of Bokhara and Samarcand. 

 We have every reason to believe that the esoteric 

 system of the monopoly of knowledge by a small number of 

 persons, prevailed in the greatest exaggeration in the most 

 distant times. The vitality of the principle — which, though 

 exploded in theory and in conscious practice, has still in a 

 modified form its advocates — is a guarantee of its antiquity. 

 I believe that that monopoly of knowledge and thence of 

 wealth, necessarily produced an antagonism of classes, which, 

 in the inevitable ultimate collision between them, resulted 

 in the annihilation of the instructed few by the exasperated 

 ignorant many ; and that this same cause has always been 

 the main factor in the evanescence and destruction of past 

 civilisations. This is in any case a most important problem, 

 which has met with wonderful neglect. But is it not 

 absolutely accordant with the allegorical Oriental habit, and 

 the esoteric system too, to understand this great deluge as 

 an irresistible flood of barbarism and ignorance overwhelming 

 all extant human wisdom ? Have not such deluges been too 

 frequent within historical time ? Can the old legend be 

 thus explained in a form in which — in strict accordance with 

 the spirit of the record — the misrepresentation of natural 

 catastrophes as possible manifestations of divine anger, is 

 transformed into important historical admonition ? I think 

 so. I think — passing over many equally significant instances, 

 such as the Egyptian, Persian, Tyrian, Greek, and Roman 

 extinct glories, to one within our more immediate know- 

 ledge, — that the French revolution, which was essentially an 

 outcome of a like antagonism of classes, similarly produced, 

 and capable of entirely overwhelming a less distributed 

 civilisation, was merely history repeating itself for perhaps 

 the thousandth time ; and that the only security we possess 

 for the stability of our civilisation, lies in the wider and 

 wider dissemination of knowledge, which prevents its 



