Man [at birth] again enters into the great Machinery (of evolution),  from which all things come forth . . . . Decay and growth, fullness and emptiness, when they end, begin again.

. . . Origen holds that there is a constant upward progress.  Each world-order is better than the last . . .

I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as a plant and rose to animal,
I died as an animal and I was a man.
Why should I fear?  When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as a man, to soar
with angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on . . .

. . . I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist; and, with all the inconveniences human life is liable to, I shall not object to a new edition of mine, hoping, however, that the errata of the last may be corrected.

If we take into our unprejudiced thinking the picture of reincarnation as the process of human evolution, we shall find in it the answer to the problems of the new world situation . . .

. . . in contrast to the savage, there are many civilized men with small actual brain force who are not savage in nature because the indwelling Ego has had long experience in civilization during other lives, and being a more developed soul, has power to use the brain to its highest limit.

The aim for present man is his initiation into complete knowledge and for the other kingdoms below him that they may be raised up gradually from stage to stage to be in time initiated also.

                                 The Synthesis of Occult Science

. . . evolution is . . . a glimpse of what might be; a hope of what should be.  But in the light of karma and reincarnation, evolution becomes the logic of what MUST be.

I was once already boy and girl,
Thicket and bird, and mute fish in the waves.
All things doth Nature change, enwrapping souls
In unfamiliar tunics of the flesh,
The worthiest dwellings for the souls of men.

. . . Spiritual evolution should unfold concomitantly with the development of form because "the divine perfection" of the individual soul is the aim of all progression.

Life is a current of spiritual forces.  In perpetual tides, the stream traverses its vessels to vary its pulsations and perspective of things . . . . Vast systems of sympathies, antedating and extending beyond our mundane experiences, absorb us within their sphere, relating us to other worlds of life or light . . . .

Evolution has a satisfactory meaning only when we admit that the soul is developed and educated by passing through many bodies . . . . If we are to believe in evolution, let us have the assistance of the soul itself in the development of new species.

The individual soul . . . progresses through a series of reincarnations, each leading it to a more perfect development, and the rapidity of its advance depends on its own purification.  And as the individual has his progress through a series of existences, so collective man progresses ever through the human generations.

The double process of evolution, natural and spiritual, can be traced for ages into the past, and be believed that it will continue for ages beyond ages . . . .

As the laggards in a race struggle and plod in their first quarter  while the victor darts past the good, so, in the race [toward consciousness] immortality; some souls outspeed all the rest and reach the end, while their myriad competitors are toiling under the load of matter, close to the starting point.

                                 The Secret Doctrine

The pivotal doctrine of the Esoteric Philosophy admits no privileges or special gifts in man, save those won by his own ego through personal effort and merit throughout a long series of metempsychoses and reincarnations . . . .

No man descended from a Palaolithic cave dweller could ever evolve the extraordinary knowledge possessed by the ancients, even in millenniums of thought and intellectual evolution . . . .

. . . we often see a deformed human being . . . having a happy disposition, an excellent intellect, sound judgment, and every good moral quality; this very instance leads us to the conclusion that karma must be of several different kinds . . .

. . . evolution having brought Manas the Thinker and immortal person on to this plane, cannot send him back to the brute which has not manas.