And, in the same way, these immensely drawn-out aeons of the past make it impossible for those who believe in them rightly to appreciate the significance and importance of the present. One's presence in the world and the value of his best activity for the world's good can mean something to him if he appreciate the fact that there is no great distance to the very beginning of human history. Though his span of life is small, it nevertheless has a definite relationship to the whole of history, and there is some encouragement for a man to work for the good of his race. But this encouragement dwindles into nothingness when a man believes in those many aeons of human life, each aeon being in itself an immense reach of billions of years. II _The Cyclic Character of Hindu Chronology_ A very unique thing about this chronology is that it revolves in cycles. Each _maha-yuga_ is composed of four _yugas_, and these are ever the same series and of the same character. We pass on through the long vista of _Kritha_, _Tretha_, _Dwapara_, and _Kali_ only to begin once more on the same series; and thus forever we move in this four-arc circle without ever getting outside of it. It is claimed that this cycle of _yugas_ has already revolved about twenty million times and will go on spinning twenty million times more, attaining nothing and going nowhere. It is enough to make one dizzy to think of this mighty chronological wheel, spending 4,320,000 years for every one of its forty million revolutions, with nothing to vary the monotony of these ever recurring epochs! The first question which one would naturally ask, after assuming the truth of this breathlessly long system, is whether it could forever return upon itself after this fashion. Is there no _progress_ in time? Is it true, in this sense also, that "there is nothing new under the sun"? While other people are refreshed by the sense that they are moving forward and upward in the fulfilment of some great destiny, are ever adding new increments to their wisdom, and are rising higher upon "their dead selves" to ever nobler achievements, is it right that the people of this great land should be doomed to think that there is no permanent advance for India, but that she alone must forever return whence she started and repeat the weary cycle of the past? As a matter of fact, no people can be thus tied down to any mechanical order of time. Every race and nation is either making for progress or for degeneracy. It will never return to its old moorings. The past has told upon it. It has accumulated some wealth of knowledge, of experience, of character, which, as the centuries roll, brings it farther on in its career. It is true that a nation, like a man, may have lapses by which it may fall down a step or more in the ladder of its upward progress. But this cannot be a necessity of its nature or a relentless law of its being.