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188 The Human Cycleand more effective on the mass. The mystics become the sowersof the seed of an immense spiritual development in which wholeclasses of society and even men from all classes seek the light, ashappened in India in the age of the Upanishads. The solitary individualthinkers are replaced by a great number of writers, poets,thinkers, rhetoricians, sophists, scientific inquirers, who pourout a profuse flood of acute speculation and inquiry stimulatingthe thought-habit and creating even in the mass a generalisedactivity of the intelligence, — as happened in Greece in the ageof the sophists. The spiritual development, arising uncurbed byreason in an infrarational society, has often a tendency to outrunat first the rational and intellectual movement. For the greatestilluminating force of the infrarational man, as he develops, isan inferior intuition, an instinctively intuitional sight arisingout of the force of life in him, and the transition from thisto an intensity of inner life and the growth of a deeper spiritualintuition which outleaps the intellect and seems to dispense withit, is an easy passage in the individual man. But for humanityat large this movement cannot last; the mind and intellect mustdevelop to their fullness so that the spirituality of the race mayrise securely upward upon a broad basis of the developed lowernature in man, the intelligent mental being. Therefore we seethat the reason in its growth either does away with the distinctspiritual tendency for a time, as in ancient Greece, or accepts itbut spins out around its first data and activities a vast web ofthe workings of the intelligence, so that, as in India, the earlymystic seer is replaced by the philosopher-mystic, the religiousthinker and even the philosopher pure and simple.For a time the new growth and impulse may seem to takepossession of a whole community as in Athens or in old AryanIndia. But these early dawns cannot endure in their purity, solong as the race is not ready. There is a crystallisation, a lesseningof the first impetus, a new growth of infrarational forms inwhich the thought or the spirituality is overgrown with inferioraccretions or it is imbedded in the form and may even die in it,while the tradition of the living knowledge, the loftier life andactivity remains the property of the higher classes or a highest