It lives in perpetual conflict.

Its virtues are all the virtues of a soldier.
Its defects and merits are, both, the polar opposites of those of China.
If the everlasting peace of China tends to moral stagnation and death, the perpetual struggle and conflict of Persia tends to exhaustion.

The Persian empire rushed through a short career of flame to its tomb; the Chinese empire vegetates, unchanged, through a myriad of years.
* * * * * If Brahmanism and Buddhism occupy the opposite poles of the same axis of thought,--if the system of Confucius stands opposed, on another axis, to that of Zoroaster,--we find a third development of like polar antagonisms in the systems of ancient Egypt and Greece.

Egypt stands for Nature; Greece for Man.

Inscrutable as is the mystery of that Sphinx of the Nile, the old religion of Egypt, we can yet trace some phases of its secret.