“Universal evolution is a chain without beginning or end, each link of which in turn appears and disappears in our field of consciousness. Brahma himself dies only to be reborn. But for the sovereign of the worlds, as for a random star or the least of organized creatures, there is death and dissolution only from the individual point of view. Darkness is the ransom to be paid for light, the evening balances the morning, age is the price of youth and death the reverse of life. In reality, however, all evolution is at the same time continuous and discontinuous; the Manvantaras and Pralayas are at once simultaneous and successive; each individual life is engendered by its elemental double and engenders its residual double. Every decline of life in a given place coincides with an increase of being in a corresponding place and proceeds by means of a rebirth in a fresh place. Fundamentally, there is no individual life. We are at once ourselves and another, ourselves and several others, ourselves and all others, ourselves and the Universe, ourselves and infinity. “The evolution of our terrestrial globe is an infinitesimal cycle of this universal evolution, corresponding merely with a day and a night of Brahma, and is divided into fourteen cycles, each consisting of a Manvantara and a Pralaya. The cycle of organic evolution upon our solidified globe represents only one of these subdivisions, that is to say, the radius of the organic sphere is only a fourteenth part of the radius of the mineral sphere. Mineral evolution is manifestly continuous from the formation of the globe to its dissolution. If, between the periods of geological activity, there exists a Pralaya of any kind, this latter, despite the etymology of the word, must be not a dissolution, which would be perfectly inconceivable from the logical and scientific point of view, but a period of inertia or abatement, of which the hypothesis is readily admissible and of which the glacial periods, occurring in the very course of the present Manvantara, afford us an example. In the earlier cycles of Manu, the earth passed in succession through the various stages of condensation which science regards as igneous and which correspond with the ethereal, gaseous and liquid evolution of the elements. During these long periods, the life of the present existed potentially in the soul of the earth and actually on other globes than ours.” 4