Certain learned authorities--as, for instance, Ewald and M. Maury--have striven to discover in the general order of Biblical history traces of this system of the four ages. But impartial criticism must admit that they have not made out their case; the foundations on which they have tried to establish their demonstration are so entirely artificial, so opposed to the spirit of the Scripture narrative, that they break down of themselves.[52] And, indeed, M. Maury is the first to allow that there is a fundamental opposition between the Biblical tradition and the legend of Brahminical India or of Hesiod. In this last, as he himself remarks, we see "no trace of a predisposition to sin transmitted by inheritance from the first man to his descendants, no vestige of original sin."
No doubt, as Pascal has so eloquently said, "it is in this abyss that the problem of our condition gathers its complications and intricacies, so that man is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to man;" but the truth of the fall and of original sin is one of those against which human pride has most constantly rebelled, is, indeed, the one from which it spontaneously seeks to escape. Hence of all portions of primeval tradition as to the beginnings of humanity it has been the earliest obliterated. As soon as men felt the sense of exultation to which the progress of their civilization and their conquests in the material world gave birth, they repudiated the idea. Religious philosophers springing up outside the revelation which was held in trust by the chosen people took no account of the Fall; and, indeed, how could that doctrine have been made to harmonize with the dreams of Pantheism and emanation? By rejecting the notion of original sin, and substituting the doctrine of emanation for that of creation, most of the peoples of pagan antiquity were led to the melancholy theory of the four ages, such as we find it in the Sacred Books of India and the poetry of Hesiod. It was by the law of decadence and continual deterioration that the ancient world believed itself so heavily laden. In proportion as time passed and things departed further and further from their point of emanation, they corrupt themselves and grow ever worse. This is the effect of an inexorable fate and of the very force of their development. In this fatal evolution towards decline, there is no room left for human freedom; the whole revolves in a circle from which there is no means of escaping. With Hesiod, each age marks a decadence from the one that preceded it; and, as the poet explicitly declares regarding the iron age inaugurated by heroes, each of these ages taken separately follows the same descending scale as does their totality. In India the conception of the four ages or _Yuga_, by developing itself and producing its natural consequences, engenders that of the _Manvantara_. According to this new theory the world, after having accomplished its four ages of constant degeneration, undergoes dissolution (_pralaya_), things having reached such a pitch of corruption as to be no longer capable of subsisting. Then there springs up a new universe, with a new humanity--doomed to the same cycle of necessary and fatal evolution, which the four _Yugas_ in turn go through, till a new dissolution takes place; and so on to infinity. Here we have, indeed, fatalism under the most cruelly inexorable form, and also the most destructive of all true morality. For there can be no responsibility where there is no freedom, nor is there in reality any good or evil where corruption is the effect of an irresistible law of evolution.