theosophical concepts are applicable here. Of these none is more
familiar and none more fundamental than the idea of reincarnation. By
reincarnation more than mere physical re-birth is meant, for physical
re-birth is but a single manifestation of that universal law of
alternation of state, of animation of vehicles, and progression
through related planes, in accordance with which all things move,
and as it were make music--each cycle complete, yet part of a larger
cycle, the incarnate monad passing through correlated changes,
carrying along and bringing into manifestation in each successive arc
of the spiral the experience accumulated in all preceding states,
and at the same time unfolding that power of the Self peculiar to the
plane in which it is momentarily manifesting.

This law finds exemplification in the history of architecture in the
orderly flow of the building impulse from one nation and one country
to a different nation and a different country: its new vehicle of
manifestation; also in the continuity and increasing complexity of
the development of that impulse in manifestation; each "incarnation"
summarizing all those which have gone before, and adding some new
factor peculiar to itself alone; each being a growth, a life, with
periods corresponding to childhood, youth, maturity and decadence;
each also typifying in its entirety some single one of these
life-periods, and revealing some special aspect or power of the Self.

For the sake of clearness and brevity the consideration of only one
of several architectural evolutions will be attempted: that which,
arising in the north of Africa, spread to southern Europe, thence to
the northwest of Europe and to England--the architecture, in short, of
the so-called civilized world.