The Crest-Wave of Evolution - A Course of Lectures in History, Given to the Graduates' Class in the Raja-Yoga College, Point Loma, in the College-Year 1918-19 by Kenneth Morris
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page 26 of 787 (03%)
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thing was that you should kindle the pride in your eye, and puff
up the highness of your stomach. . . . So the practical Roman despised him, and presently conquered him. Here is another curious fact: the greater number, if not all, of the words in the Teutonic languages denoting social order and the machinery of government, are of Celtic derivation. Words such as _Reich_ and _Amt,_ to give two examples I happen to remember out of a list quoted by Mr. T. W. Rollestone in one of his books. And now I think we have material before us wherewith to reconstruct a sketch or plan of ancient European history. Let me remind you again that our object is simply the discovery of Laws. That, in the eyes of the Law, there are no most favored nations. That there are no such things as permanent racial characteristics; but that each race adopts the characteristics appropriate to its stage of growth. It is a case of the pendulum swing, of ebb and flow. For two thousand years the Teutons have been pressing on and, dominating the Celts. They started at the beginning of that time with the plebeian qualities--and have evolved, generally speaking, a large measure of the patrician qualities. The Celts, meanwhile, have been pushed to the extremities of the world; their history has been a long record of disasters. But in the preceding period the case was just the reverse. Then the Celts held the empire. They ruled over large Teutonic populations. Holding all the machinery of government in their hands, they imposed on the languages of their Teuton subjects the words concerned with that machinery; just as in Welsh now our words of that kind are mostly straight |
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