1. The Approach of Modern Materialistic Science and the Trends in Modern History Inspired by It
"Modern Science, obsessed with the greatness of its physical discoveries and the idea of the sole existence of Matter, has long attempted to base upon physical data
"Modern Science, obsessed with the greatness of its physical discoveries and the idea of the sole existence of Matter, has long attempted to base upon physical data
even its study of Soul and Mind and of those workings of Nature in man and animal in which knowledge of psychology is as important as any of the physical sciences.
Its very psychology founded itself upon physiology and the scrutiny of the brain and nervous system. It is not surprising therefore that in history and sociology attention should have been concentrated on the external data, laws, institutions, rites, customs, economic factors,
and developments, while the deeper psychological elements so important in the activities of a mental, emotional, ideative being like man have been very much neglected. This kind of science would explain history and social development as much as possible by economic necessity or
motive, -by economy understood in its widest sense.
There are even historians who deny or put aside as of a very subsidiary importance the working of the idea and the influence of the thinker in the development of human institutions. The French Revolution, it is thought,
There are even historians who deny or put aside as of a very subsidiary importance the working of the idea and the influence of the thinker in the development of human institutions. The French Revolution, it is thought,
would have happened just as it did and when it did, by economic necessity, even if Rousseau and Voltaire had never written and the eighteenth-century philosophic movement in the world of thought had never worked out its bold and radical speculations.
Recently, however, the all-sufficiency of Matter to explain Mind and Soul has begun to be doubted and a movement of emancipation from the obsession of physical science has set in, although as yet it has not gone beyond a few awkward and rudimentary stumblings.
Still there is a beginning of a perception that behind that economic motives and causes of social and historical developments there are profound psychological, even perhaps soul factors..."
2. The Four Distinct Psychological Stages through Which a Human Society Progresses
"The theorist, Lamprecht, basing himself on European and particularly on German history, supposed that human society progresses through certain distinct psychological stages
"The theorist, Lamprecht, basing himself on European and particularly on German history, supposed that human society progresses through certain distinct psychological stages
which he terms respectively symbolic, typal and conventional, individualist and subjective.
This development forms, then, a sort of psychological cycle through which a nation or a civilisation is bound to proceed.
This development forms, then, a sort of psychological cycle through which a nation or a civilisation is bound to proceed.
Obviously, such classifications are likely to err by rigidity and to substitute a mental straight line for the coils and zigzags of Nature. The psychology of man and his societies is too complex, too synthetical of many-sided and intermixed tendencies to satisfy any such rigorous
and formal analysis. Nor does this theory of a psychological cycle tell us what is the inner meaning of its successive phases or the necessity of their succession or the term and end towards which they are driving.
But still to understand natural laws whether of Mind or Matter
But still to understand natural laws whether of Mind or Matter
it is necessary to analyse their working into its discoverable elements, main constituents, dominant forces, though these may not actually be found anywhere in isolation."
3. The Symbolic Stage
We find that this social stage is always religious and actively imaginative in its religion; for symbolism and a widespread imaginative or intuitive religious feeling have a natural kinship and especially in earlier or primitive formations they have gone
We find that this social stage is always religious and actively imaginative in its religion; for symbolism and a widespread imaginative or intuitive religious feeling have a natural kinship and especially in earlier or primitive formations they have gone
always together. When man begins to be predominantly intellectual, sceptical, ratiocinative he is already preparing for an individualist society and the age of symbols and age of conventions have passed or are losing their virtue.
The symbol then is of something which man feels to be present behind himself and his life and his activities, - the Divine, the Gods, the vast and deep unnameable, a hidden, living and mysterious nature of things.
All his religious and social institutions, all the moments and phases of his life are to him symbols in which he seeks to express what he knows or guesses of the mystic influences that are behind his life and shape and govern or at the least intervene in its movements.
If we look at the beginnings of Indian society, the far-off Vedic age which we no longer understand, for we have lost the mentality, we see that everything is symbolic. The religious institutions of sacrifice governs the whole society and all its hours and moments,
and the ritual of the sacrifice is at every turn and in every detail, as even a cursory study of the Brahmanas and Upanishads ought to show us, mystically symbolic. The theory that there was nothing in the sacrifice except a propitiation of Nature-gods for the gaining of
worldly prosperity and of Paradise, is a misunderstanding by a later humanity which had already become profoundly affected by an intellectual and practical bent of mind, practical even in its religion and even in its own mysticism and symbolism, and therefore
could no longer enter into the ancient spirit. Not only the actual religious worship but also the social institutions of the time were penetrated through and through with the symbolic spirit. Take the hymn of the RigVeda which is supposed to be marriage hymn for the union of
a human couple and was certainly used as such in the later Vedic ages. Yet the whole sense of the hymn turns about the successive marriages of Suryā, daughter of the Sun, with different gods and the human marriage is quite a subordinate matter overshadowed and governed entirely
by the divine and mystic figure and is spoken of in the terms of that figure. Mark, however, that the divine marriage here is not, as it would be in later ancient poetry, a decorative image or poetical ornamentation used to set off and embellish the human union;
on the contrary, the human is an inferior figure and image of the divine. The distinction marks off the entire contrast between the more ancient mentality and our modern regard upon things.
This symbolism influenced for a long time Indian ideas of marriage and is even now conventionally remembered though no longer understood or effective.
We may note also in passing that the Indian ideal of the relation between man and woman has always been governed by the symbolism of the relation between the Purusha and Prakriti (in the Veda Nri and Gna), the male and female divine Principles in the universe.
Even, there is to some degree a practical correlation between the position of the female sex and this idea. In the earlier Vedic times when the female principle stood on a sort of equality with the male in the symbolic cult, though with a certain predominance for the latter,
woman was as much the mate as the adjunct of man; in later times when the Prakriti has become subject in idea to the Purusha, the woman also depends entirely on the man, exists only for him and has hardly even a separate spiritual existence.
In the Tantrik Shakta religion which puts the female principle highest, there is an attempt which could not get itself translated into social practice, - even as this Tantrik cult could never entirely shake off the subjugation of the Vedantic idea,
- to elevate woman and make her an object of profound respect and even of worship."
4. The Typal and Conventional Stage
"The first, the symbolic stage of this evolution is predominantly religious and spiritual; the other elements, psychological, ethical, economic, physical are there but subordinated to the spiritual and religious idea.
"The first, the symbolic stage of this evolution is predominantly religious and spiritual; the other elements, psychological, ethical, economic, physical are there but subordinated to the spiritual and religious idea.
The second stage, which we may call the Typal, is predominantly psychological and ethical; all else, even the spiritual and religious, is subordinate to the psychological idea and to the ethical ideal which expresses it.
Religion then becomes a mystic sanction for the ethical motive and discipline, Dharma; that becomes its chief social utility, and for the rest it takes a more and more other-wordly turn.
The idea of the direct expression of the divine Being or cosmic Principle in man ceases to dominate or to be the leader and in the forefront; it recedes, stands in the background and finally disappears from the practice and in the end even from the theory of life.
This Typal stage creates the great social ideals which remain impressed upon the human mind even when the stage itself is passed. The principal active contribution it leaves behind when it is dead is the idea of social honour; the honour of the Brahmin which resides in purity,
in piety, in a high reverence for the things of the mind and spirit and a disinterested possession and exclusive pursuit of learning and knowledge; the honour of the Kshatriya which lives in courage, chivalry, strength, a certain proud self-restraint and self-mastery,
nobility of character and the obligations of that nobility; the honour of the Vaishya which maintains itself by rectitude of dealing, mercantile fidelity, sound production, order, liberality and philanthropy;
the honour of the Shudra which gives itself in obedience, subordination, faithful service, a disinterested attachment. But these more and more cease to have a living root in the clear psychological idea or to spring naturally out of the inner life of the man;
they become a convention, though the most noble of conventions. In the end they remain more as a tradition in the thought and on the lips than a reality of the life.
For the Typal passes naturally into the conventional stage, The conventional stage of human society is born when the external supports, the outward expressions of the spirit or the ideal become more important than the ideal,
the body or even the clothes more important than the person. Thus in the evolution of caste, the outward supports of the ethical fourfold oder, - birth, economic function, religious ritual, and sacrament, family custom, - each began to exaggerate enormously it's proportions
and its importance in the scheme. At first, birth does not seem to have been of the first importance in the social order, for faculty and capacity prevailed; but afterwards, as the type fixed itself, its maintenance by education and tradition became necessary and
education and tradition naturally fixed themselves in a hereditary groove. This the son of a Brahmin came always to be looked upon conventionally as a Brahmin; birth and profession were together the double bond of the hereditary convention at the time when it was most firm and
faithful to its own character. This rigidity once established, the maintenance of the ethical type passed from the first place to a secondary or even a quite tertiary importance.
Once the very basis of the system, it came now to be a not indispensable crown or pendent tassel, insisted upon indeed by the thinker and the ideal code-maker but not by the actual rule of society or its practice.
Once ceasing to be indispensable, it came inevitably to be dispensed with except as an ornamental fiction. Finally, even the economic basis began to disintegrate; birth, family custom and remnants, deformations, new accretions of meaningless or fanciful religious sign and ritual,
the very scarecrow and caricature of the old profound symbolism, became the riveting links of the system of caste in the iron age of the old society. In the full economic period of the caste the priest and the Pundit masquerade under the name of the Brahmin,
the aristocrat and the feudal baron under the name of Kshatriya, the trader and money-getter under the name of the Vaishya, the half-fed labourer and economic serf under the name of the Shudra.
When the economic basis also breaks down, then the unclean and diseased decriptude of the old system has begun; it has become a name, a shell, a sham and must either be dissolved in the crucible of an individualist period of society or else
fatally affect with weakness and falsehood the system of life that clings to it. That in visible fact is the last and present state of the caste system in India.
The tendency of the conventional age of society is to fix, to arrange firmly, to formalise, to erect a system of rigid grades and hierarchies, to stereotype religion, to bind education and training to a traditional and unchangeable form,
to subject thought to infallible authorities, to cast a stamp of finality on what seems to it the finished life of man. The conventional period of society has its golden age when the spirit and thought that inspired its forms are confined but yet living,
not yet altogether walled in, not yet stifled to death and petrified by the growing hardness of the structure in which they are cased. That golden age is often very beautiful and attractive to the distant view of posterity by its precise order, symmetry, fine social architecture,
the admirable subordination of its parts to a general and noble plan. Thus at one time the modern litterateur, artist or thinker looked back often with admiration and with something like longing to the medival age of Europe;
he forgot in its distant apperance of poetry, nobility, spirituality the much folly, ignorance, iniquity, cruelty and oppression of those harsh ages, the suffering and revolt that simmered below these fine surfaces,
the misery and squalor that was hidden behind that splendid façade
So too the Hindu orthodox idealist looks back to a perfectly regulated society devoutly obedient to the wise yoke of the Shastra, and that is his golden age,
So too the Hindu orthodox idealist looks back to a perfectly regulated society devoutly obedient to the wise yoke of the Shastra, and that is his golden age,
- a nobler one than the European in which the apparent gold was mostly hard burnished copper with a thin gold-leaf covering it, but still of an alloyed metal, not the true Satya Yuga.
In these conventional periods of society there is much indeed that is really fine and sound and helpful to human progress, but still they are its copper age and not the true golden; they are the age when the Truth we strive to arrive at is not realised, not accomplished, but
the exiguity of it eked out or its full appearance imitated by an artistic form, and what we have of the reality has begun to fossilise and is doomed to be lost in a hard mass of rule and order and convention.
For always the form prevails and the spirit recedes and diminishes. It attempts indeed to return, to revive the form, to modify it, anyhow to survive and even to make the form survive; but the time-tendency is too strong.
This is visible in the history of religion; the efforts of the saints and religious reformers become progressively more scattered, brief and superficial in their actual effects, however strong and vital the impulse.
We see this recession in the growing darkness and weakness of India in her last millennium; the constant effort of the most powerful spiritual personalities kept the soul of the people alive but failed to resuscitate the ancient free force
and truth and vigor or permanently revivify a conventionalised and stagnating society; in a generation or two the iron grip of that conventionalism has always fallen on the new movement and annexed the names of its founders.
We see it in Europe in the repeated moral tragedy of ecclesiasticism and Catholic monasticism. Then there arrives a period when the gulf between the convention and the truth becomes intolerable and the men of intellectual power arise, the great "swallowers of formulas",
who, rejecting robustly or fierceltly or with the calm light of reason symbol and type and convention, strike at the walls of the prison-house and seek by the individual reason, moral sense or emotional desire the Truth that society has lost or buried in its whited sepulchres.
It is then that the individualistic age of religion and thought and society is created; the Age of Protestantism has begun, the Age of Reason, the Age of Revolt, Progress, Freedom. A partial and external freedom, still betrayed by the conventional age that preceded it into the
idea that the Truth can be found in outsides, dreaming vainly that perfection can be determined by machinery, but still a necessary passage to the subjective period of humanity through which man has to circle back towards the recovery of his deeper self
and a new upward line or a new revolving cycle of civilisation."
5. The Age of Individualism and Reason: The Necessary Conditions for Its Advent
" An individualistic age of human society comes as a result of the corruption and failure of the conventional, as a revolt against the reign of the petrified typal figure.
" An individualistic age of human society comes as a result of the corruption and failure of the conventional, as a revolt against the reign of the petrified typal figure.
Before it can be born it is necessary that the old truths shall have been lost in the soul and practice of the race and that even the conventions which ape and replace them shall have become devoid of real sense and intelligence; stripped of all practical justification,
they exist only mechanically by fixed idea, by the force of custom, by attachment to the form. It is then that men in spite of the natural conservatism of the social mind are compelled at last to perceive that the Truth is dead in them and they are living by a lie.
The individualism of the new age is an attempt to get back from conventionalism of belief and practice to some solid bed-rock, no matter what, of real and tangible Truth. And it is necessarily individualistic, because all the old general standards have become bankrupt and
can no longer give any inner help; it is therefore the individual who has to become a discoverer, a pioneer, and to search out by his individual reason, intuition, idealism, desire, claim upon life or whatever other light he finds in himself the true law of the world and his own
being. By that, when he has found or thinks he has found it, he will strive to rebase on a firm foundation and remould in a more vital even if a poorer form religion, society, ethics, political institutions, his relations with his fellows,
his strivings for his own perfection and his labour for mankind."
6. The Birth of the New Age in Europe and the Helplessness of Asia
"It is in Europe that the age of individualism has taken birth and exercised its full sway; the East has entered into it only by contact and influence, not from an original impulse.
"It is in Europe that the age of individualism has taken birth and exercised its full sway; the East has entered into it only by contact and influence, not from an original impulse.
And it is to its passion for the discovery of the actual truth of things and for the governing of human life by whatever law of the truth it has found that the West owes its centuries of strenth, vigour, light, progress, irresistible expansion.
Equally, it is due not to any original falsehood in the ideals on which its life was founded, but to the loss of the living sense of the Truth it once held and its long contended slumber in the cramping bonds of a mechanical conventionalism that the East has found itself helpless
in the hour of its awakening, a giant empty of strength, inert masses of men who had forgotten how to deal freely with facts and forces because they had learned only how to live in a world of stereotyped thought and customary action.
Yet the truths which Europe has found by its individualistic age covered only the first more obvious, physical and outward facts of life and only such of their more hidden realities and powers as the habit of analytical reason and the pursuit of practical utility can give to man.
If its rationalistic civilisation has swept so triumphantly over the world, it is because it found no deeper and more powerful truth to confront it; for all the rest of mankind was still in the inactivity of the last dark hours of the conventional age."
7. The Movements of Reformation and Renascence in Europe
"The movement of religious freedom in Europe took its stand first on a limited, then on an absolute right of the individual experience and illumined reason to determine the true sense of inspired Scripture and the true
"The movement of religious freedom in Europe took its stand first on a limited, then on an absolute right of the individual experience and illumined reason to determine the true sense of inspired Scripture and the true
Christian ritual and order of the Church. The vehemence of its claim was measured by the vehemence of its revolt from the usurpations, pretensions and brutalities of the ecclesiastical power which claimed to withhold the Scripture from general knowledge and impose by
moral authority and physical violence its own arbitrary interpretation of Sacred Writ, if not indeed another and substituted doctrine, on the recalcitrant individual conscience. In its more tepid and moderate forms the revolt engendered such compromises as the
Episcopalian Churches, at a higher degree of fervour Calvinistic Puritanism, at white heat a riot of individual religious judgement and imaginations in such sects as the Anabaptist, Independent, Socinian and countless others.
In the East such a movement divorced from all political or any strongly iconoclastic social significance would have produced simply a series of religious reformers, illumined saints, new bodies of belief with their appropriate cultural and social practice;
in the West atheism, and secularism were its inevitable and predestined goal. At first questioning the conventional forms of religion, the mediation of the priesthood between God and the soul and the substitution of Papal authority for the authority of the Scripture,
it could not fail to go forward and question the Scripture itself and then all supernaturalism, religious belief or suprarational truth no less than outward creed and institute.
For eventually, the evolution of Europe was determined less by the Reformation than by the Renascence; it flowered by the vigorous return of the ancient Graeco-Roman mentality of the one rather than by the Hebraic and religio-ethical temperament of the other.
The Renascence gave back to Europe on one hand the free curiosity of the Greek mind, its eager search for first priniciples and rational laws, its delighted intellectual scrutiny of the facts of life by the force of direct observation and individual reasoning,
on the other, the Roman's large practicality and his sense for the ordering of life in harmony with a robust utility and the just priniciples of things.
But both these tendencies were pursued with a passion, a seriousness, a moral and almost religious ardour which, lacking in the ancient Graeco-Roman mentality, Europe owed to her long centuries of Judaeo-Christian discipline.
It was from these sources that the individualistic age of Western society sought ultimately for that principle of order and control which all human society needs and which more ancient times attempted to realise
first by the materialisation of fixed symbols of truth, then by ethical type and discipline, finally by infallible authority or stereotyped convention."
8. The Perils of the Unrestricted Use of Individual Illumination and Its Culminating Movement in Europe Based on the Triumphant March of the Discoveries of Physical Science
"... the unrestrained use of individual illumination or judgement without either any outer standard or generally recognisable source of truth is a perilous experiment for our imperfect race.
It is likely to lead rather to a continual fluctuation and disorder of opinion than to a progressive unfolding of the truth of things. No less, the pursuit of social justice through the stark assertion of individual rights or
class interests and desires must be a source of continual struggle and revolution and may end in an exaggerated assertion of the will in each to live his ownlife and to satisfy his own ideas and desires which will produce a serious malaise or a radical trouble in the social body.
Therefore on every individualistic age of mankind there is imperative the search for two supreme desiderata.
It must find a general standard of Truth to which the individual judgement of all will be inwardly compelled to subscribe without physical constraint or imposition of irrational authority.
And it must reach too some principle of social order which shall be equally founded on a universally recognisable truth of things;
an order is needed that will put a rein on desire and interest by providing at least some intellectual and moral test which these two powerful and dangerous forces must satisfy before they can feel justified in asserting their claims on life.
Speculative and scientific reason for their means, the pursuit of a practicable social justice and sound utility for their spirit, the progressive nations of Europe set out on their search for this light and this law.
They found and held it with enthusiasm in the discoveries of physical Science.
The triumphant domination, the all-shattering and irresistible victory of Science in nineteenth-century Europe is explained by the absolute perfection with which it at least seemed for a time to satisfy these great psychological wants of the Western mind.
Science seemed to it to fulfil impeccably its search for the two supreme desiderata of an individualistic age.
Here at last was a truth of things which depended on no doubtful Scripture or fallible human authority but which Mother Nature herself has written in her eternal book for all to read who had patience to observe and intellectual honesty to judge.
Here were laws, principles, fundamental facts of the world and of our being which all could verify at once for themselves and which must therefore satisfy and guide the free individual judgement, delivering it equally from alien compulsion and from erratic self-will.
Here were laws and truths which justified and yet controlled the claims and desires of the individual human being;
here a science which provided a standard, a norm of knowledge, a rational basis for life, a clear outline and sovereign means for the progress and perfection of the individual and the race.
The attempt to govern and organise human life by by verifiable Science, by a law, a truth of things, an order and principles which all can observe and verify in their ground and fact and to which therefore all may freely and must rationally subscribe,
is the culminating movement of European civilisation. It has been the fulfilment and triumph of the individualistic age of human society;
it has seemed likely also to be its end, the cause of the death of individualism and its putting away and burial among the monuments of the past."
9. The Two Idea-Forces of Master Potency Discovered by the Individualistic Age
"...the individualistic age of Europe has in its discovery of the individual fixed among the idea-forces of the future two of a master potency which cannot be entirely eliminated by any temporary reaction.
The first of these, now universally accepted, is the democratic conception of the right of all individuals as members of the society to the full life and the full development of which they are individually capable.
It is no longer possible that we should accept as an ideal any arrangement by which certain classes of society should arrogate development and full social fruition to themselves while assigning a bare and barren function of service alone to others.
It is now fixed that social development and well-being mean the development and well-being of all the individuals in the society and not merely a flourishing of the community in the mass which resolves itself really into the splendour and power of one or two classes.
This conception has been accepted in full by all progressive nations and is the basis of the present socialistic tendency of the world. But in addition there is this deeper truth which individualism has discovered, that
the individual is not merely a social unit; his existence, his right and claim to live and grow are not founded solely on his social work and function.
He is not merely a member of a human pack, hive or ant-hill; he is something in himself, a soul, a being, who has to fulfil his own individual truth and law as well as his natural or his assigned part in the truth and law of the collective existence.
He demands freedom, space, initiative for his soul, for his nature, for that puissant and tremendous thing which society so much distrusts and has laboured in the past either to supress altogether or
to relegate to the purely spiritual field, an individual thought, will and conscience.
If he is to merge these eventually, it cannot be into the dominating thought, will and conscience of others, but into something beyond into which he and all must be both allowed and helped freely to grow.
That is an idea, a truth which, intellectually recognised and given its full exterior and superficial significance by Europe, agrees at its root with the profoundest and highest spiritual conceptions of Asia and has a large part to play in the moulding of the future."
10. A Deeper View of Education
"Formerly, education was merely a mechanical forcing of the child's nature into arbitrary grooves of training and knowledge which his individual subjectivity was the last thing considered,
"Formerly, education was merely a mechanical forcing of the child's nature into arbitrary grooves of training and knowledge which his individual subjectivity was the last thing considered,
and his family upbringing was a constant repression and compulsory shaping of his habits, his thoughts, his character into the mould fixed for them by the conventional ideas or individual interests and ideals of the teachers and parents.
The discovery that education must be a bringing out of the child's own intellectual and moral capacities to their highest possible value and must be based on the psychology of the child-nature was a step forward towards a more healthy because a more subjective system;
but it still fell short because it still regarded him as an object to be handled and moulded by the teacher, to be educated.
But at least there was a glimmering of the realisation that each human being is a self-developing soul and that business of both parent and teacher is to enable and
to help the child to educate himself, to develop his own intellectual, moral, aesthetic and practical capacities and to grow freely as an organic being, not to be kneaded and pressed into form like an inert plastic material.
It is not yet realised what this soul is or that the true secret, whether with child or man, is to help him to find his deeper self, the real psychic entity within.
That, If we ever give it a chance to come forward, and still more if we call it into the foreground as "the leader of the March set in our front", will itself take up most of the business of education out of our hands and develop the capacity of the psychological being
towards a realisation of its potentialities of which our present mechanical view of our life and man and external routine methods of dealing with them prevent us from having any experience or forming any conception.
These new educational methods are on the straight way to this truer dealing. The closer touch attempted with the psychical entity behind the vital and physical mentality and an increasing reliance on its possibilities must lead to the
ultimate discovery that man is inwardly a soul and a conscious power of the Divine and that the evocation of this real man within is the right object of education and indeed of human life it would find and live according to the hidden Truth and deepest law of its own being."
11. The Ideal Law of Individual and Social Development
"...the group self has no true right to regard the individual as if he were only a cell of its body, a stone of its edifice, a passive instrument of its collective life and growth. Humanity is not so constituted.
"...the group self has no true right to regard the individual as if he were only a cell of its body, a stone of its edifice, a passive instrument of its collective life and growth. Humanity is not so constituted.
We miss the divine reality in man and the secret of the human birth if we do not see that each individual man is that Self and sums up all human potentiality in his own being. That potentiality he has to find, develop, workout from within.
No State or legislator or reformer can cut him rigorously into a perfect pattern; no Church or priest can give him a mechanical salvation;
no order, no class life or ideal, no nation, no civilisation or creed or ethical, social or religious Shastra can be allowed to say to him permanently, "In this way of mine and thus far shalt thou act and grow and in no other way and no farther shall thy growth be permitted."
These things may help him temporarily or they may curb and he grows in proportion as he can use them and then exceed them, train and teach his individuality by them, but assert it always in the end in its divine freedom.
Always he is the traveller of the cycles and his road is forward.
True, his life and growth are for the sake of the world, but he can help the world by his life and growth only in proportion as he can be more and more freely and widely his own real self.
True, his life and growth are for the sake of the world, but he can help the world by his life and growth only in proportion as he can be more and more freely and widely his own real self.
True, he has to use the ideals, disciplines, systems of cooperation which he finds upon his path; but he can only use them well, in their right way and to their right purpose
if they are to his life means towards something beyond them and not burdens to be borne by him for their own sake or despotic controls to be obeyed by him as their slave or subject;
for though laws and disciplines strive to be tyrants of the human soul, their only purpose is to be its instruments and servants and when their use is over they have to be rejected and broken.
True it is, too, that he has to gather in his material from the minds and lives of his fellow-men around him and to make the most of the experience of humanity's past ages and not confine himself in a narrow mentality;
but this he can only do successfully by making all this his own through assimilation of it to the principle of his own nature and through its subservience to the forward call of his enlarging future.
The liberty claimed by the struggling human mind for the individual is no mere egoistic challenge and revolt, however egoistically or with one-sided exaggeration and misapplication it may sometimes be advanced;
it is the divine instinct within him, the law of the Self, its claim to have room and the one primary condition for its natural self-unfolding.
Individual man belongs not only to humanity in general, his nature not only a variation of human nature in general, but he belongs also to his race-type, his class-type, his mental, vital, physical, spiritual type, in which he resembles some, differs from others.
According to these affinities he tends to group himself in Churches, sects, communities, classes, coteries, associations whose life he helps, and by them he enriches the life of the large economic, social and political group or society to which he belongs.
In modern times this society is the nation. By his enrichment of the national life, though not in that way only, he helps the total life of humanity.
But it must be noted that he is not limited and cannot be limited by any of these groupings; he is not merely the noble, merchant, warrior, priest, scholar, artist, cultivator or artisan, not merely the religionist or the worldling or the politician.
Nor can he be limited by nationality; he is not merely the Englishman or the Frenchman, the Japanese or the Indian; if by a part of himself he belongs to the nation, by another he exceeds it and belongs to humanity.
And even there is a part of him, the greatest, which is not limited by humanity; he belongs by it to God and to the world of all beings and to godheads of the future.
He has indeed the tendency of self-limitation and subjection to his environment and group, but he has also the equally necessary tendency of expansion and transcendence of environment and groupings.
The individual animal is dominated entirely by his type, subordinated to his group when he does group himself;
individual man has already begun to share something of the infinity, complexity, free variation of the Self we see manifested in the world.
Or at least he has it in possibility even if there be as yet no sign of it in his organised surface nature.
Or at least he has it in possibility even if there be as yet no sign of it in his organised surface nature.
There is here no principle of a mere shapeless fluidity; it is the tendency to enrich himself with the largest possible material constantly brought in, constantly assimilated and changed by the law of his individual nature into stuff of his growth and divine expansion."
"The nation or community is an aggregate life that expresses the Self according to the general law of human nature and aids and partially fulfils the development and the destiny of mankind by its own development and
the pursuit of its own destiny according to the law of its being and the nature of its corporate individuality. It has like the individual the right to be itself, and its just claim, as against any attempt at domination by other nations or of attack upon its separate development
by any excessive tendency of human uniformity and regimentation, is to defend its existence, to insist on being itself, to persist in developing according to the law of its own nature.
This right it must assert not only or even principally for its own sake, but in the interests of humanity. For the only things that we can really call our rights are those conditions which are necessary to our free and sound development,
and that again is our right because it is necessary for its development of the world and the fulfilment of the destiny of mankind,
...As the individual lives by the life of other individuals, so does the nation by the life of other nations, by accepting from them material for its own mental, economic and physical life;
but it has to assimilate this material, subject it to the law of its own nature, change it into stuff of itself, work upon it by its own free will and consciousness, if it would live securely and grow soundly.
To have the principle or rule of another nature imposed upon it by force or a de-individualising pressure is a menace to its existence, a wound to its being, a fetter upon its march.
As the free development of individuals from within is the best condition for the growth and perfection of the community, so the free development of the community or nation from within is the best condition for the growth and perfection of mankind.
Thus the law for the individual is to perfect his individuality by free development from within, but to respect and to aid and be aided by the same free development in others.
His law is to harmonise his life with the life of the social aggregate and to pour himself out as a force for growth and perfection on humanity.
The law for the community or nation is equally to perfect its corporate existence by a free development fr within, aiding and taking full advantage of that of the individual, but to respect and aid and be aided by the same free development of other communities and nations.
Its law is to harmonise its life with that of the human aggregate and to pour itself out as a force for growth and perfection on humanity. The law for humanity is to pursue its upward evolution towards the finding and expression of the Divine in the type of mankind,
taking full advantage of the free development and gains of all individuals and nations and groupings of men, to work towards the day when mankind may be really and not only ideally one divine family,
but even then, when it has succeeded in unifying itself, to respect, aid and be aided by the free growth and activity of its individuals and constituent aggregates.
Naturally, this is an ideal law which the imperfect human race has never yet really attained and it may be very long before it can attain to it.
Man, not possessing, but only seeking to find himself, not knowing consciously, obeying only in the rough subconsciously or half-consciously the urge of the law of his own nature with stumblings and hesitations and deviations and a series of violences done to himself and others,
has had to advance by a tangle of truth and error, right and wrong, compulsion and revolt and clumsy adjustments,
and he has as yet neither the wideness of knowledge nor the flexibility of mind nor the purity of temperament which would enable him to follow the law of liberty and harmony rather than the law of discord and regimentation, compulsion and adjustment and strife.
Still it is the very business of a subjective age when knowledge is increasing and diffusing itself with an unprecedented rapidity, when capacity is generalising itself,
when men and nations are drawn close together and partially united though in an inextricable, confused entanglement of chaotic unity, when they are being compelled to know each other and impelled to know more profoundly themselves, mankind, God and the world and
when the idea of self-realisation for men and nations is coming consciously to the surface, -it is the natural work and should be the conscious hope of man in such an age to know himself truly,
to find the ideal law of his being and his development and, if he cannot even then follow it ideally owing to the difficulties of his egoistic nature,
still to hold it before him and find out gradually the way by which it can become more and more the moulding principle of his individual and social existence."
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12. The Necessity of a Period of Materialistic Negation and, as a Result, the Dawn of Economic Barbarism
12. The Necessity of a Period of Materialistic Negation and, as a Result, the Dawn of Economic Barbarism
" It is true that the first tendencies of Science have been materialistic and its indubitable triumphs have been confined to the knowledge of the physical universe and the body and physical life.
But this materialism is a very different thing from the old identification of the self with the body. Whatever its apparent tendencies, it has been really an assertion of man the mental being and of the supremacy of intelligence.
Science in its very nature is knowledge, is intellectuality, and its whole work has been that of the Mind turning its gaze upon its vital and physical frame and environment to know and conquer and dominate Life and Matter.
The scientist is Man the thinker mastering the forces of material Nature by knowing them.
Life and Matter are after all our standing-ground, our lower basis and to know their processes and their own proper possibilities and the opportunities they give to the human being is part of the knowledge necessary for transcending them.
Life and the body have to be exceeded, but they have also to be utilised and perfected. Neither the laws nor the possibilities of physical Nature can be entirely known unless we know also the laws and possibilities of supraphysical Nature;
therefore the development of new and the recovery of old mental and psychic sciences have to follow upon the perfection of our physical knowledge, and that new era is already beginning to open upo us.
But the perfection of the physical sciences was a prior necessity and had to be the first field for the training of the mind of man in his new endeavour to know Nature and possess his world.
Even in its negative work the materialism of Science had a task to perform which will be useful in the end to the human mind in its exceeding of materialism.
But Science in its heyday of triumphant Materialism despised and cast aside Philosophy; its predominance discouraged by its positive and pragmatic turn the spirit of poetry and art and pushed them from their position of leadership in the front of culture;
poetry entered into an era of decline and decadence, adopted the form and rhythm of a versified prose and lost its appeal and the support of all but a very limited audience, painting followed the curve of Cubist extravagance and espoused monstrosities of shape and suggestion;
the ideal receded and visible matter of fact was enthroned in its place and encouraged an ugly realism and utilitarianism; in its war against religious obscurantism Science almost succeeded in slaying religion and the religious spirit.
But philosophy had become too much a thing of abstractions, a seeking for abstract truths in a world of ideas and words rather than what it should be, a discovery of real reality of things by which human existence can learn its law and aim and the principle of its perfection.
Poetry and art had become too much cultured pursuits to be ranked among the elegances and ornaments of life, concerned with beauty of words and forms and imaginations, rather than a concrete seeing and significant presentation of truth and beauty and of the living idea
and the secret divinity in things concealed by the sensible appearances of the universe.
Religion itself had become fixed in dogmas and ceremonies, sects and churches
Religion itself had become fixed in dogmas and ceremonies, sects and churches
and had lost for the most part, except for a few individuals, direct contact with the living founts of spirituality. They had to be driven back and in upon themselves, nearer to their own eternal sources.
Now that the stress of negation is past and they are raising their heads, we see them seeking for their own truth, reviving by virtue of a return upon themselves and a new self-discovery.
They have learned or are learning from the example of Science that Truth is the secret of life and power and that by finding the truth proper to themselves they must become the ministers of human existence.
But if Science has thus prepared us for an age of wider and deep culture and if in spite of and even partly by its materialism it has rendered impossible the return of the true materialism, that if the barbarian mentality,
it has encouraged more or less indirectly both by its attitude to life and its discoveries another kind of barbarism, - for it can be called by no other name, - that of the industrial, the commercial, the economic age which is now progressing to its culmination and its close.
This economic barbarism is essentially that of the vital man who mistakes the vital being for the self and accepts its satisfaction as the first aim of life. The characteristic of Life is desire and the instinct of possession.
Just as the physical barbarian makes the excellence of the body and the development of physical force, health and prowess his standard and aim,
so the vitalistic or economic barbarian makes the satisfaction of wants and desires and the accumulation of possessions his standard and aim.
His ideal man is not the cultured or noble or thoughtful or moral or religious, but the successful man. To arrive, to succeed, to produce, to accumulate, to possess is his existence.
The accumulation of wealth and more wealth, the adding of possessions to possessions, opulence, show, pleasure, a cumbrous inartistic luxury,
a plethora of conveniences, life devoid of beauty and nobility, religion vulgarised or coldly formalised, politics and government turned into a trade and profession, enjoyment itself made a business, this commercialism.
To the natural unredeemed economic man beauty is a thing otiose or a nuisance, art and poetry a frivolity or an ostentation and a means of advertisement.
His idea of civilisation is comfort, his idea of morals social respectability, his idea of politics the encouragement of industry, the opening of markets, exploitation and trade following the flag,
his idea of religion at best a pietistic formalism or the satisfaction of certain vitalistic emotions.
He values education for its utility in fitting a man for success in a competitive or, it may be, a socialised industrial existence,
science for the useful inventions and knowledge, the comfort and conveniences, machinery of production with which it arms him, its power for organisation, regulation, stimulus to production.
The opulent plutocrat and the successful mammoth capitalist and organiser of industry are the supermen of the commercial age and the true, if often occult rulers of its society.
The essential barbarism of all this is its pursuit of vital success, satisfaction, productiveness, accumulation, possession, enjoyment, comfort, convenience for their own sake.
The vital part of the being is an element integral human existence as much as the physical part; it has its place but must not exceed its place. A full and well-appointed life is desirable for man living in society, but on condition that it is also a true and beautiful life.
Neither the life not the body exist for their own sake, but as vehicle and instrument of a good higher than their own.
They must be subordinated to the superior needs of the mental being, chastened and purified by a greater law of truth, good and beauty before they can take their proper place in the integrality of human perfection.
Therefore in a commercial age with its ideal, vulgar and barbarous, of success, vitalistic satisfaction, productiveness and possession the soul of man may linger a while for certain gains and experiences, but cannot permanently rest.
If it persisted too long, Life would become clogged and perish of its own plethora or burst in its straining to a gross expansion.
Like the too massive Titan it will collapse by its own mass, 𝑚𝑜𝑙𝑒 𝑟𝑢𝑒𝑡 𝑠𝑢𝑎."
Like the too massive Titan it will collapse by its own mass, 𝑚𝑜𝑙𝑒 𝑟𝑢𝑒𝑡 𝑠𝑢𝑎."
𝟏𝟑. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞
"There is in our mentality a side of will, conduct, character which creates the ethical man;
"There is in our mentality a side of will, conduct, character which creates the ethical man;
there is another side of sensibility to the beautiful, - understanding beauty in no narrow or hyper-artistic sense, - which creates the artistic and aesthetic man.
Therefore there can be such a thing as a predominantly or even exclusively ethical culture; there can be too, evidently, a predominantly or even exclusively aesthetic culture.
There are at once created two conflicting ideals which must naturally stand opposed and look askance at each other with a mutual distrust or even reprobation.
The aesthetic man tends to be impatient of the ethical rule; he feels it to be a barrier to his aesthetic freedom and an oppression on the play of his artistic sense and his artistic faculty;
he is naturally hedonistic, - for beauty and delight are inseparable powers,
- and the ethical rule tramples on pleasure, even very often on quite innocent pleasures, an tries to put a strait waistcoat on the human impulse to delight.
He may accept the ethical rule when it makes itself beautiful or even seize on it as one of his instruments for creating beauty, but only when he can subordinate it to the aesthetic principle of his nature,
- just as he is often drawn to religion by its side of beauty, pomp, magnificent ritual, emotional satisfaction, repose of poetic ideality and aspiration, - we might almost say, by the hedonistic aspects of religion.
Even when fully accepted, it is not for their own sake that he accepts them.
The ethical man repays this natural repulsion with interest.
He tends to distrust art and the aesthetic sense as something lax and emollient, something in its nature undisciplined and by its attractive appeals to the passions and emotions destructive of a high and strict self-control.
He sees that it is hedonistic and he finds that the hedonistic impulse is non-moral and often immoral. It is difficult for him to see how the indulgence of the aesthetic impulse beyond a very narrow and carefully guarded limit can be combined with a strict ethical life.
He evolves the puritan who objects to pleasure on principle;..."
𝟏𝟒. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐄𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈𝐭𝐬 𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲: 𝐈𝐭𝐬 𝐂𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐩𝐬𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐋𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐋𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐑𝐞𝐩𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐑𝐨𝐦𝐞
"Republican Rome - before it was touched and finally taken captive by conquered Greece - stands out in relief as one of the mostly striking psychological phenomena of human history.
From the point of view of human development it presents itself as an almost unique experiment in high and strong character-building divorced as far as may be from the sweetness which the sense of beauty and the light which the play of the reason brings into character and
uninspired by the religious temperament; for the early Roman creed was a superstition, a superficial religiosity and had nothing in it of the true religious spirit.
Rome was the human will oppressing and disciplining the emotional and sensational mind in order to arrive at the self-mastery of a definite ethical type;
and it was this self-mastery which enabled the Roman republic to arrive also at the mastery of its environing world and impose on the nations its public order and law.
All supremely successful imperial nations have had in their culture or in their nature, in their formative or expansive periods, the predominance of the will, the character, the impulse to self-discipline and self-mastery which constitutes the very basis of the ethical tendency.
Rome and Sparta like other ethical civilisations had their considerable moral deficiencies, tolerated or deliberately encouraged customs and practices which we should call immoral,
failed to develop the gentler and more delicate side of moral character, but this is if no essential importance. The ethical idea in man changes and enlarges its scope, but the kernel of the true ethical being remains always the same,-will, character,self-discipline,self-mastery.
Its limitations at once appear, when we look back at its prominent examples.
Early Rome and Sparta were barren of thought, art, poetry, literature, the larger mental life, all the amenity and pleasure of human existence; their art of life excluded or discouraged the delight of living.
They were distrustful, as the exclusively ethical man is always distrustful, of free and flexible thought and the aesthetic impulse.
The earlier spirit of republican Rome held at arm's length as long as possible the Greek influences that invaded her, closed the schools of the Greek teachers, banished the philosophers,
and her most typical minds looked upon the Greek language as a peril and Greek culture as an abomination: she felt instinctively the arrival at her gates of an enemy, divined a hostile and destructive force fatal to her principle of living.
Sparta, though a Hellenic city, admitted as almost the sole aesthetic element of her deliberate ethical training and education a martial music and poetry, and even then, when she wanted a poet of war, she had to import an Athenian.
We have a curious example of the repercussion of this instinctive distrust even on a large and aesthetic Athenian mind in the utopian speculations of Plato who felt himself obliged in his Republic first to censure and then to banish the poets from his ideal polity.
The end of these purely ethical cultures bears witness to their insufficiency. Either they pass away leaving nothing or little behind them by which the future can be attracted and satisfied, as Sparta passed,
or they collapse in a revolt of the complex nature of man against an unnatural restriction and repression, as the early Roman type collapsed into the egoistic and often orgiastic license of later republican and imperial Rome.
The human mind needs to think, feel, enjoy, expand; expansion is its very nature and restriction is only useful to it in so far as it helps to steady, guide and strengthen its expansion.
It readily refuses the name of culture to those civilisations or periods, however noble their aim or even however beautiful in itself their order, which have not allowed an intelligent freedom of development."
𝟏𝟓. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐤 𝐀𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐂𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐱𝐜𝐥𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐀𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐨𝐫 𝐄𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐕𝐢𝐞𝐰𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐋𝐢𝐟𝐞
"...we are tempted to give the name of a full culture to all those periods and civilisations, whatever their defects, which have encouraged a freely human development and like ancient Athens have concentrated on thought and beauty and the delight of living.
But there were in the Athenian development two distinct periods, one of art and beauty, the Athens of Phidias and Sophocles, and one of thought, the the Athens of the philosophers.
In the first period the sense of beauty and the need for freedom of life and the enjoyment of life are the determining forces. This Athens thought, but it thought in the terms of art and poetry, in figures of music and drama and architecture and sculpture;
it delighted in intellectual discussion, but not so much with any will to arrive at truth as for the pleasure of thinking and the beauty of ideas.
It had its moral order, for without that no society can exist, but it had no true ethical impulse or ethical type, only a conventional and customary morality;
and when it thought about ethics, it tended to express it in terms of beauty, to 𝑘𝑎𝑙𝑜𝑛, to 𝑒𝑝𝑖𝑒𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑠, the beautiful, the becoming.
its very religion was a religion of beauty and an occasion for pleasant ritual and festivals and for artistic creation, an aesthetic enjoyment touched with a superficial religious sense.
But without character, without some kind of high or strong discipline there is no enduring power of life.
Athens exhausted its vitality within one wonderful century which left it enervated, will-less, unable to succeed in the struggle of life, uncreative.
It turned indeed for a time precisely to that which has been lacking to it, the serious pursuit of truth and evolution of systems of ethical self-discipline; but it could only think, it could not successfully practise.
The later Hellenic mind and Athenian centre of culture gave to Rome the great Stoic system of ethical discipline which saved her in the midst of the orgies of her first imperial century, but could not itself be stoical in its practice;
for to Athens and to the characteristic temperament of Hellas, this thought was a straining to something it had not and could not have; it was the opposite of its nature and not its fulfilment.
This insufficiency of the aesthetic view of life becomes yet more evident when we come down to its other great example, Italy of the Renascence.
The Renascence was regarded at one time as pre-eminently a revival of learning, but in its Mediterranean birth-place it was rather the efflorescence of art and poetry and the beauty of life.
Much more than was possible even in the laxest times of Hellas, aesthetic culture was divorced from the ethical impulse and at times was even anti-ethical and reminiscent of the license of imperial Rome.
It had learning and curiosity, but gave very little of itself to high thought and truth and the more finished achievements of the reason, although it helped to make free the way for philosophy and science.
It so corrupted religion as to provoke in the ethically minded Teutonic nations the violent revolt of the Reformation, which, though it vindicated the freedom of the religious mind, was an insurgence not so much of the reason, - that was left to Science,
- but of the moral instinct and its ethical need. The subsequent prostration and loose weakness of Italy was the inevitable result of the great defect of its period of fine culture,
and it needed for its revival the new impulse of thought and will and character given to it by Mazzini.
If the ethical impulse is not sufficient by itself for the development of the human being, yet are will, character, self-discipline, self-mastery indispensable to that development. They are the backbone of the mental body.
Neither the ethical being nor the aesthetic being is the whole man, nor can either be his sovereign principle; they are merely two powerful elements.
Ethical conduct is not the whole of life; even to say that it is three-fourths of life is to indulge in a very doubtful mathematics.
We cannot assign to it its position in any such definite language, but can at best say that its kernel of will, character and self-discipline are almost the first condition for human self-perfection.
The aesthetic sense is equally indispensable, for without that the self-perfection of the mental being cannot arrive at its object, which is on the mental plane the right and harmonious possession and enjoyment of the truth, power, beauty and delight of human existence.
But neither can be the highest principle of the human order. We can combine them; we can enlarge the sense of ethics by the sense of beauty and delight and introduce into it to correct its tendency of hardness and austerity the element of gentleness, love, amenity,
the hedonistic side of morals; we can steady, guide and strengthen the delight of life by the introduction of the necessary will and austerity and self-discipline which will give it endurance and purity.
These two powers of our psychological being, which represent in us the essential principle of energy and the essential principle of delight, - the Indian terms are more profound and expressive, Tapas and Ananda, - can be thus helped by each other, the one to a richer,
the other to a greater self-expression.
But that even this much reconciliation may come about they must be taken up and enlightened by a higher principle which must be capable of understanding and comprehending both equally and of disengaging and combining disinterestedly their purposes and potentialities.
That higher principle seems to be provided for us by the human faculty of reason and intelligent will. Our crowning capacity, it would seem to be by right the crowned sovereign of our nature."
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐕𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐌𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐊𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐥𝐞𝐝𝐠𝐞
"The intellectual reason is not man's only means of knowledge.
"The intellectual reason is not man's only means of knowledge.
All action, all perception, all aesthesis and sensation, all impulse and will, all imagination and creation imply a universal, many-sided force of knowledge at work and each form or power of this knowledge has its own distinct nature and law,
its own principle of order and arrangement, its logic proper to itself, and neet not follow, still less be identical with the law of nature, order and arrangement which the intellectual reason would assign to it or itself follow if it had control of all these movements.
But the intellect has this advantage over the others that it can disengage itself from the work, stand back from it to study and understand it disinterestedly, analyse its processes, disengage its principles.
None of the other powers and faculties of the living being can do this; for each exists for its own action, is confined by the work it is doing, is unable to see beyond it, around it, into it as the reason can;
the principle of knowledge inherent within each force is involved and carried along in the action of force, helps to shape it, but is also itself limited by its own formulations.
It exists for the fulfilment of the action, not for knowledge, or for knowledge only as part of the action.
Moreover, it is concerned only with the particular action or working of the moment and does not look back reflectively or forward intelligently or at other actions and forces with a power of clear coordination.
No doubt, the other evolved powers of the living being, as for instance the instinct whether animal or human, - the latter inferior precisely because it is disturbed by the questionings and seekings of reason,
- carry in themselves their own own force of past experience, of instinctive self-adaptation, all of which is really accumulated knowledge, and they hold sometimes this store so firmly that they are transmitted as a sure inheritance from generation to generation.
But all this, just because it is instinctive, not turned upon itself reflectively, is of great use indeed to life for the conduct of its operations, but of none - so long as it is not taken up by the reason
- for the particular purpose man has in view, a new order of the dealings of the soul in Nature, a free, rational, intelligently coordinating, intelligently self-observing, intelligently experimenting mastery of the workings of force by the conscious spirit.
Reason, on the other hand, exists for the sake of knowledge, can prevent itself from being carried away by the action, can stand back from it, intelligently study, accept, refuse, modify, alter, improve, combine and recombine the workings and capacities ofthe forces in operation,
can repress here, indulge there, strive towards an intelligent, intelligible, willed and organised perfection.
Reason is science, it is conscious art, it is invention. It is observation and can seize and arrange truth of facts; it is speculation and can extricate and forecast truth of potentiality. It is the idea and its fulfilment, the ideal and its upbringing to fruition.
It can look through the immediate appearance and unveil the hidden truths behind it.
It is the servant and yet the master of all utilities; and it can, putting away all utilities, seek disinterestedly Truth for its own sake and by finding it reveal a whole world of new possible utilities.
Therefore it is the sovereign power by which man has become possessed of himself, student and master of his own forces, the godhead on which the other godheads in him have leaned for help in their ascent;
it has been the Prometheus of the mythical parable, the helper, instructor, elevating friend, civiliser of mankind."
𝟏𝟕. 𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐏𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐅𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐬: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐨𝐨𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐲
"...when it attempts a higher action reason separates itself from life. Its very attempt a disinterested and dispassionate knowledge carries it to an elevation where it loses hold of that other knowledge which our instincts and impulses carry within themselves
and which, however imperfect, obscure and limited, is still a hidden action of the universal Knowledge-Will inherent in existence that creates and directs all things according to their nature.
True, even Science and Philosophy are never entirely dispassionate and disinterested.
They fall into subjection to the tyranny of their own ideas, their partial systems, their hasty generalisations and by the innate drive of man towards practice they seek to impose these upon the life.
But even so they enter into a world either of abstract ideas or of ideals or of rigid laws from which the complexity of life escapes.
The idealist, the thinker, the philosopher, the poet and artist, even the moralist, all those who live much in ideas, when they come to grapple at close quarters with practical life, seem to find themselves something at a loss
and are constantly defeated in their endeavour to govern life by their ideas.
They exercise a powerful influence, but it is indirectly, more by throwing their ideas into Life which does with them what the secret Will in it chooses than by a direct and successfully ordered action.
Not that the pure empiric, the practical man really succeeds any better by his direct action; for that too is taken by the secret Will in life and turned to quite other ends than the practical man had intended.
On the contrary, ideals and idealists are necessary; ideals are the savour and sap of life, idealists the most powerful diviners and assistants of its purposes.
But reduce your ideal to a system and it at once begins to fail; apply your general laws and fixed ideas systematically as the doctrinaire would do,
and Life very soon breaks through or writhes out of their hold or transforms your system, even while it normally exists, into something the originator would not recognise and would repudiate perhaps as the very contradiction of the principles which he sought to eternise.
The root of the difficulty is this that at the very basis of all our life and existence, internal and external, there is something on which the intellect can never lay a controlling hold, the Absolute, the Infinite.
Behind everything in life there is an Absolute, which that thing is seeking after in its own way; everything finite is striving to express an infinite which it feels to be its real truth.
Moreover, it is not only each class, each type, each tendency in Nature that is thus impelled to strive after its own secret truth in its own way, but each individual brings in his own variations.
Thus, there is not only an Absolute, an Infinite in itself which governs its own expression in many forms and tendencies, but there is also a principle of infinite potentiality and variation quite baffling to the reasoning intelligence;
for the reason deals successfully only with the settled and the finite.
In man this difficulty reaches its acme. For not only is mankind unlimited in potentiality; not only is each of its powers and tendencies seeking after its own absolute in its own way and therefore naturally restless under any rigid control by the reason;
but in each man their degrees, methods, combinations vary, each man belongs not only to the common humanity, but to the Infinite in himself and is therefore unique.
It is because this is the reality of our existence that the intellectual reason and the intelligent will cannot deal with life as its sovereign, even though they may be at present our supreme instruments and may have been in our evolution supremely important and helpful.
The reason can govern, but only as a minister,imperfectly,or as a general arbiter and giver of suggestions which are not really supreme commands,or as one channel of sovereign authority,because that hidden Power acts at present not directly but through many agents and messengers.
The real sovereign is another than the reasoning intelligence.
Man's impulse to be free master of Nature in himself and his environment cannot be really fulfilled until his self-consciousness has grown beyond the rational mentality,
become aware of the true sovereign and either identified itself with him or entered into constant communion with his supreme will and knowledge."
𝟏𝟖. 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 - 𝐚𝐧 𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐉𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐧 𝐂𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐬
"...reason in its nature an imperfect light with a large but still restricted mission and that once it applies itself to life and action it becomes subject to what it studies and the servant and counsellor of the forces in whose obscure and ill-understood struggle it intervenes.
It can in its nature be used and has always been used to justify any idea, theory of life, system of society or government, ideal of individual or collective action to which the will of man attaches itself for the moment or through the centuries.
In philosophy it gives equally good reasons for monism and pluralism or for any halting-place between them, for the belief in Being or for the belief in Becoming, for optimism and pessimism, for activism and quietism.
It can justify the most mystic religionism and the most positive atheism, get rid of God or see nothing else.
In aesthetics it supplies the basis equally for classicism and romanticism, for an idealistic, religious or mystic theory of art or for the most earthy realism. It can with equal power base austerely a strict and narrow moralism or prove triumphantly the thesis of the antinomian.
It has been the sufficient and convincing prophet of every kind of autocracy or oligarchy and of every species of democracy; it supplies excellent and satisfying reasons for communism or against communism and for State socialism or for one variety of socialism against another.
It can place itself with equal effectivity at the service of utilitarianism,economism, hedonism,aestheticism, sensualism,ethicism,idealism or any other essential need or activity of man and build around it a philosophy, a political and social system, a theory of conduct and life.
Ask it not to lean to one idea alone, but to make an eclectic combination or a synthetic harmony and it will satisfy you; only, there being any number of possible combinations or harmonies,
it will equally well justify the one or the other and setup or throw down any one of them according as the spirit in man is attracted to or withdraws from it.
For it is really that which decides and the reason is only a brilliant servant and minister of this veiled and secret sovereign."
𝟏𝟗. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐰𝐨 𝐀𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐅𝐚𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐌𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧
"...the rationalist .. is supported by two constant articles of faith, first that his own reason is right and reason of others who differ from him is wrong,
and secondly that whatever may be the present deficiencies of human intellect, the collective human reason will eventually arrive at purity and be able to found human thought and life securely on a clear rational basis entirely satisfying to the intelligence.
His first article of faith is no doubt the common expression of our egoism and arrogant fallibility, but it is also something more;
it expresses this truth that it is the legitimate function of the reason to justify to man his action and his hope and the faith that is in him and to give him that idea and knowledge, however restricted,
and that dynamic conviction, however narrow and intolerant, which he needs in order that he may live, act and grow in the highest light available to him.
The reason cannot grasp all truth in its embrace because truth is too infinite for it; but still it does grasp the something of it which we immediately need, and its insufficiency does not detract from the value of its work, but is rather the measure of its value.
For man is not intended to grasp the whole truth of his being at once, but to move towards it through a succession of experiences and a constant, though not by any means a perfectly continuous self-enlargement.
The first business of reason then is to justify and enlighten to him his various experiences and to give him faith and conviction in holding on to his self-enlargings.
It justifies to him now this, now that, the experience of the moment, the receding light of the past, the half-seen vision of the future. Its inconstancy, its divisibility against itself, its power of sustaining opposite views are the whole secret of its value.
It would not do indeed for it to support too conflicting views in the same individual, except at moments of awakening and transition, but in the collective body of men and in the successions of Time that is its whole business.
For so man moves towards the infinity of the Truth by the experience of its variety; so his reason helps him to build, change, destroy what he has built
and prepare a new construction, in a word, to progress, grow, enlarge himself in his self-knowledge and world-knowledge and their works.
The second article of faith of the believer in reason is also an error and yet contains a truth.
The reason cannot arrive at any final truth because it can neither get to the root of things nor embrace the totality of their secrets; it deals with the finite, the separate, the limited aggregate, and has no measure for the all and the infinite.
Nor can reason found a perfect life for man or a perfect society. A purely rational human life would be a life baulked and deprived of its most powerful dynamic sources; it would be a substitution of the minister for the sovereign.
A purely rational society could not come into being and, if it could be born, either could not live or would sterilise and petrify human existence.
The root powers of human life, its intimate causes are below, irrational, and they are above, suprarational.
But this is true that by constant enlargement, purification, openness the reason of man is bound to arrive at an intelligent sense even of that which is hidden from it, a power of passive, yet sympathetic reflection of the Light that surpasses it.
Its limit is reached, its function is finished when it can say to man, "There is a Soul, a Self, a God in the world and in man who works concealed and all is his self-concealing and gradual self-unfolding.
His minister I have been, slowly to unseal to your eyes, remove the thick integuments of your vision until there is only my own luminous veil between you and him.
Remove that and make the soul of man one in fact and nature with this Divine; then you will know yourself, discover the highest and widest law of your being,
become the possessors or at least the receivers and instruments of a higher will and knowledge than mine and lay hold at last on the true secret and the whole sense of a human and yet divine living."
𝟐𝟎. 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐨𝐧
"Here is a realm at which the intellectual reason gazes with the bewildered mind of a foreigner who hears a language of which the words and the spirit are unintelligible to him
"Here is a realm at which the intellectual reason gazes with the bewildered mind of a foreigner who hears a language of which the words and the spirit are unintelligible to him
and sees everywhere forms of life and principles of thought and action which are absolutely strange to his experience.
He may try to learn this speech and understand this strange and alien life; but it is with pain and difficulty, and he cannot succeed unless he has, so to speak, unlearned himself and become one in spirit and nature with the natives of this celestial empire.
Till then his efforts to understand and interpret them in his own language and according to his own notions end at the worst in a gross misunderstanding and deformation.
The attempts of the positive critical reason to dissect the phenomena of the religious life sound to men of spiritual experience like the prattle of a child who is trying to shape into the mould of his own habitual notions the life of adults
or the blunders of an ignorant mind which thinks fit to criticise patronisingly or adversely the labours of a profound thinker or a great scientist.
At the best even this futile labour can extract, can account for only the externals of the things it attempts to explain;
the spirit is missed, the inner matter is left out, and as a result of that capital omission even the account of the externals is left without real truth and has only an apparent correctness.
The unaided intellectual reason faced with the phenomena of the religious life is naturally apt to adopt one of two attitudes, both of them shallow in the extreme, hastily presumptuous and erroneous.
Either it views the whole thing as a mass of superstition, a mystical nonsense, a farrago of ignorant barbaric survivals, - that was the extreme spirit of the rationalist now happily, though not dead, yet much weakened and almost moribund,
- or it patronises religion, tries to explain its origins, to get rid of it by the process of explaining it away; or it labours gently or forcefully to reject or correct its superstitions, crudities, absurdities, to purify it into an abstract nothingness
or persuade it to purify itself in the light of reasoning intelligence; or it allows it a role, leaves it perhaps for the edification of the ignorant, admits its value as a moralising influence or its utility to the State for keeping the lower classes in order,
even perhaps tries to invent that strange chimera, a rational religion.
The former attitude has on its positive side played a powerful part in the history of human thought, has even been of a considerable utility in its own way - we shall have to note briefly hereafter how and why - to human progress and in the end even to religion;
but its intolerant negations are an arrogant falsity, as the human mind has now sufficiently begun to perceive.
Its mistake is like that of a foreigner who thinks everything in an alien country absurd and inferior because these things are not his own ways of acting and thinking and cannot be cut out by his own measures or suited to his own standards.
So the thoroughgoing rationalist asks th religious spirit, if it is to stand, to satisfy the material reason and even to give physical proof of its truths, while the very essence of religion is the discovery of the immaterial Spirit and the play of a supraphysical consciousness.
So too he tries to judge religion by his idea of its externalities, just as an ignorant and obstreperous foreigner might try to judge a civilisation by the dress, outward colour of life and some of the most external peculiarities in the social manners of the inhabitants.
That in this he errs in company with certain of the so-called religious themselves, may be his excuse, but cannot be the justification of his ignorance. The more moderate attitude of the rational mind has also played its part in the history of human thought.
Its attempts to explain religion have resulted in the compilation of an immense mass of an amazingly ingenious perversions, such as certain pseudo-scientific attempts to form a comparative Science of Religion.
It has built up in the approved modern style immense façades of theory with stray bricks of misunderstood facts for their material. Its mild condonations of religion have led to superficial phases of thought which have passed quickly away and left no trace behind them.
Its efforts at the creation of a rational religion, perfectly well-intentioned, but helpless and unconvincing, have had no appreciable effect and have failed like a dispersing cloud, 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘯ā𝘣𝘩𝘳𝘢𝘮 𝘪𝘷𝘢 𝘯𝘢ś𝘺𝘢𝘵𝘪."
" The deepest heart, the inmost essence of religion, apart from its outward machinery of creed, cult, ceremony and symbol, is the search for God and the finding of God.
Its aspiration is to discover the Infinite, the Absolute, the One, the Divine, who is all these things and yet no abstraction but a Being.
Its work is a sincere living out of the true and intimate relations between man and God, relations of unity, relations of difference, relations of an illuminated knowledge, an ecstatic love and delight,
an absolute surrender and service, a casting of every part of our existence out of its normal status into an uprush of man towards the Divine and descent of the Divine into man.
All this has nothing to do with the realm of reason or its normal activities; its aim, its sphere, its process is suprarational. The Knowledge of God is not to be gained by weighing the feeble arguments of reason for or against his existence:
it is to be gained only by a self-transcending and absolute consecration, aspiration and experience.
Nor does that experience proceed by anything like rational scientific experiment or rational philosophic thinking.
Even in those parts of religious discipline which seem most to resemble scientific experiment, the method is a verification of things which exceed the reason and its timid scope.
Even in those parts of religious knowledge which seem most to resemble intellectual operations, the illuminating faculties are not imagination, logic and rational judgement,
but revelations, inspirations, intuitions, intuitive discernments that leap down to us from a plane of suprarational light.
The love of God is an infinite and absolute feeling which does not admit of any rational limitation and does not use a language of rational worship and adoration; the delight in God is that peace and bliss which passes all understanding.
The surrender to God is the surrender of the whole being to a suprarational light,will, power and love and his service takes no account of the compromises with life which the practical reason of man uses as the best part of its method in the ordinary conduct of mundane existence.
Wherever religion really finds itself, wherever it opens itself to its own spirit, - there is a plenty of that sort of religious practice which is halting, imperfect, half-sincere, only half-sure of itself and in which reason can get in a word,
- its way is absolute and its fruits are ineffable."
𝟐𝟏. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐧 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬
"It is found that civilisation has created many more problems that it can solve, has multiplied excessive needs and desires the satisfaction of which it has not sufficient vital force to sustain,
"It is found that civilisation has created many more problems that it can solve, has multiplied excessive needs and desires the satisfaction of which it has not sufficient vital force to sustain,
has developed a jungle of claims and artificial instincts in the midst of which life loses its way and has no longer any sight of its aim.
The more advanced minds begin to declare civilisation a failure and society begins to feel that they are right.
But the remedy proposed is either a halt or even a retrogression, which which means in the end more confusion, stagnation and decay, or a reversion to "Nature" which is impossible or can only come about by a cataclysm and disintegration of society;
or even a cure is aimed at by carrying artificial remedies to their acme, by more and more Science, more and more mechanical devices, a more scientific organisation of life,
which means that the engine shall replace life, the arbitrary logical reason substitute itself for complex Nature and man be saved by machinery. As well say that to carry a disease to its height is the best way to its cure.
It may be suggested on the contrary and with some chance of knocking at the right door that the radical defect of all our systems is their deficient development of just that which society has most neglected, the spiritual element, the soul in man which is his true being.
Even to have a healthy body, a strong vitality and an active and clarified mind and a field for their actions and enjoyment, carries man no more than a certain distance; afterwards he flags and tires for want of a real self-finding, a satisfying aim for his action and progress.
These three things do not make the sum of a complete manhood; they are means to an ulterior end and cannot be made for ever an aim in themselves.
Add a rich emotional life governed by a well-ordered ethical standard, and still there is the savour of something left out, se supreme good which these things mean, but do not in themselves arrive at, do not discover till they go beyond themselves.
Add a religious system and a widespread spirit of belief and piety, and still you have not found the means of social salvation. All these things human society has developed, but none of them has saved it from disillusionment, weariness and decay.
The ancient intellectual cultures of Europe ended in disruptive doubt and sceptical impotence, the pieties of Asia in stagnation and decline.
Modern society has discovered a principle of survival, progress, but the aim of that progress it has never discovered, - unless the aim is more knowledge, more equipment, convenience and comfort,
more enjoyment, a greater and still greater complexity of the social economy, a more and more cumbrously opulent life.
But these things must lead in the end where the old led, for they are only the same thing on a larger scale; they lead in a circle, that is to say, nowhere:
they do not escape from the cycle of birth, growth, decay and death, they do not really find the secret of self-prolongation by constant self-renewal which is the principle of immortality,
but only seem for a moment to find it by the illusion of a series of experiments each of which ends in disappointment.
That so far has been the nature of modern progress."
That so far has been the nature of modern progress."
𝟐𝟐. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐏𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐀𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐒𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐝
"This was one principal reason of the failure of past attempts to spiritualise mankind, that they endeavoured to spiritualise at once the material man by a sort of rapid miracle,
and though that can be done, the miracle is not likely to be of an enduring character if it overleaps the stages of his ascent and leaves the intervening levels untrodden and therefore unmastered.
The endeavour may succeed with individuals, - Indian thought would say with those who have made themselves ready in a past existence, - but it must fail with the mass.
When it passes beyond the few, the forceful miracle of the spirit flags; unable to transform by inner force, the new religion - for that is what it becomes
- tries to save by machinery, is entangled in the mechanical turning of its own instruments, loses the spirit and perishes quickly or decays slowly.
That is the fate which overtakes all attempts of the vitalistic, the intellectual and mental, the spiritual endeavour to deal with material man through his physical mind chiefly or alone;
the endeavour is overpowered by the machinery it creates and becomes the slave and victim of the machine.
That is the revenge which our material Nature, herself mechanical, takes upon all such violent endeavours; she waits to master them by their concessions to her own law.
It may be questioned whether such a mass progress or conversion is possible; but if it is not, then the spiritualisation of mankind as a whole is a chimera."
𝟐𝟑. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐢𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐒𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐲
"...a society which was even initially spiritualised would make the revealing and finding of the divine Self in man the supreme,
"...a society which was even initially spiritualised would make the revealing and finding of the divine Self in man the supreme,
even the guiding aim of all its activities, its education, its knowledge, its science, its ethics, its art, its economical and political structure.
As it was to some imperfect extent in the ancient Vedic times with the cultural education of the higher classes, so it would be then with all education.
It would embrace all knowledge in its scope, but would make the whole trend and aim and the permeating spirit not mere worldly efficiency, though that efficiency would not be neglected, but this self-developing and self-finding and all else as its powers.
It would pursue the physical and psychic sciences not in order merely to know the world and Nature in her processes and to use them for material human ends,
but still more to know through and in and under and over all things the Divine in the world and the ways of the Spirit in its masks and behind them.
It would make it the aim of ethics not to establish a rule of action whether supplementary to the social law or partially corrective of it,
the social law that is after all only the rule, often clumsy and ignorant, of the biped pack, the human herd, but to develop the divine nature in the human being.
It would make it the aim of Art not merely to present images of the subjective and objective world,
but to see them with the significant and creative vision that goes behind their appearances and to reveal the Truth and Beauty of which things visible to us and invisible are the forms, the masks or the symbols and significant figures.
A spiritualised society would treat in its sociology the individual, from saint to the criminal, not as units of a social problem to be passed through some skilfully devised devised machinery and either flattened into the social mould or crushed out of it,
but as souls suffering and entangled in a net and to be rescued, souls growing and to be encouraged to grow, souls grown and from whom help and power can be drawn by the lesser spirits who are not yet adult.
The aim of its economics would be not to create a huge engine of production, whether of the competitive or the cooperative kind, but to give to men - not only to some but to all men each in his highest possible measure
- the joy of work according to their own nature and free leisure to grow inwardly, as well as a simply rich and beautiful life for all.
In its politics it would not regard the nations within the scope of their own internal life as enormous State machines regulated and armoured with man living for the sake of the machine and worshipping it as his God and his larger self,
content at the first call to kill others upon its altar and to bleed there himself so that the machine may remain intact and powerful and be made ever larger, more complex, more cumbrous, more mechanically efficient and entire.
Neither would it be content to maintain these nations or States in their mutual relations as noxious engines meant to discharge poisonous gas upon each other in peace and to rush in times of clash upon each other's armed hosts and unarmed millions,
full of belching shot and men missioned to murder like war-planes or hostile tanks in a modern battlefield.
It would regard the peoples as group-souls, the Divinity concealed and to be self-discovered in its human collectives,
group-souls meant like the individual to grow according to their own nature and by that growth to help each other, to help the whole race in the one common work of humanity.
And that work would be to find the divine Self in the individual and the collectivity and to realise spiritually, mentally, vitally, materially its greatest, largest, richest, and deepest possibilities in the inner life of all and their outer action and nature.
For it is into the Divine within them that men and mankind have to grow; it is not an external idea or rule that has to be imposed on them from without.
Therefore the law of a growing inner freedom is that which will be most honoured in the spiritual age of mankind.
True it is that so long as man has not come within measurable distance of self-knowledge and has not set his face towards it, he cannot escape from the law of external compulsion and all his efforts to do so must be vain.
He is and always must be, so long as that lasts, the slave of others, the slave of his family, his caste, his clan, his Church, his society, his nation;
and he cannot but be that and they too cannot help throwing their crude and mechanical compulsion on him, because he and they are the slaves of their own ego, of their own lower nature.
We must feel and obey the compulsion of the Spirit if we would establish our inner right to escape other compulsion:
we must make our lower nature the willing slave, the conscious and illumined instrument or the ennobled but still self-subjected portion, consort or partner of the divine Being within us,
for it is that subjection which is the condition of our freedom, since spiritual freedom is not the egoistic assertion of our separate mind and life but obedience to the Divine Truth in ourself and our members and in all around us.
But we have, even so, to remark that God respects the freedom of the natural members of our being and that he gives them room to grow in their own nature so that by natural growth and not by self-extinction they may find the Divine in themselves.
The subjection which they finally accept, complete and absolute, must be a willing subjection of recognition and aspiration to their own source of light and power and their highest being.
Therefore even in the unregenerated state we find that the healthiest, the truest, the most living growth and action is that which arises in the largest possible freedom
and that all excess of compulsion is either the law of a gradual atrophy or a tyranny varied or cured by outbreaks of rabid disorder.
And as soon as man comes to know his spiritual self, he does by that discovery, often even by the very seeking for it, as ancient thought and religion saw, escape from the outer law and enter into the law of freedom.
A spiritual age of mankind will perceive this truth. It will not try to make man perfect by machinery or keep him straight by typing up all his limbs.
It will not present to the member of the society and his higher self in the person of the policeman, the official and the corporal, nor, let us say, in the form of a socialistic bureaucracy or a Labour Soviet.
Its aim will be to diminish as soon and as far as possible the need of the element of external compulsion in human life by awakening the inner divine compulsion of the spirit within and all the preliminary means it will use will have that for its aim.
In the end it will employ chiefly if not solely the spiritual compulsion which even the spiritual individual can exercise on those around him, - and how much more should a spiritual society be able to do it,
- that which awakens within us in spite of all inner resistance and outer denial the compulsion of the Light, the desire and the power to grow through one's own nature into the Divine.
For the perfectly spiritualised society will be one in which, as is dreamed by the spiritual anarchist, all men will be deeply free, and it will be so because the preliminary condition will have been satisfied.
In that state each man will be not a law to himself, but 𝑡ℎ𝑒 law, the divine Law, because he will be a soul living in the Divine Reality and not an ego living mainly if not entirely for its own interest and purpose.
His life will be led by the law of his own divine nature liberated from the ego."
𝟐𝟒. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐬 𝐖𝐡𝐨 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐌𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐇𝐞𝐥𝐩 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲
"...the individuals who will most help the future of humanity in the new age wil be those who will recognise a spiritual evolution as the destiny and therefore the great need of the human being.
Even as the animal man has been largely converted into a mentalised and at the top a highly mentalised humanity, so too now or in the future an evolution or conversion - it does not greatly matter which figure we use or what theory we adopt to support it
- of the present type of humanity into a spiritualised humanity is the need of the race and surely the intention of Nature; that evolution or conversion will be their ideal and endeavour.
They will be comparatively indifferent to particular belief and form and leave men to resort to the beliefs and forms to which they are naturally drawn.
They will only hold as essential the faith in this spiritual conversion, the attempt to live it out and whatever knowledge - the form of opinion into which it is thrown does not so much matter - can be converted into this living.
They will especially not make the mistake of thinking that this change can be effected by machinery and outward institutions; they will know and never forget that it has to be lived out by each man inwardly or it can never be made a reality for the kind.
They will adopt in its heart of meaning the inward view of the East which bids man seek the secret of his destiny and salvation within;
but also they will accept, though with a different turn given to it, the importance which the West rightly attaches to life and to the making the best we know and can attain the general rule of all life.
They will not make society a shadowy background to a few luminous spiritual figures or a rigidly fenced and earth-bound root for the growth of a comparatively rare and sterile flower of ascetic spirituality.
They will not accept the theory that the many must necessarily remain for ever on the lower ranges of life and only a few climb into the free air and the light,
but will start from the standpoint of the great spirits who have striven to regenerate the life of the earth and held that faith in spite of all previous failure.
Failures must be originally numerous in everything great and difficult, but the time comes when the experience of past failures can be profitably used and the gate that so long resisted opens.
In this as in all great human aspirations and endeavours, an 𝑎 𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑜𝑟𝑖 declaration of impossibility is a sign of ignorance and weakness, and the motto of the aspirant's endeavour must be the 𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑣𝑖𝑡𝑢𝑟 𝑎𝑚𝑏𝑢𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑜 of the discoverer.
For by the doing the difficulty will be solved. A true beginning has to be made; the rest is a work for Time in its sudden achievements or its long patient labour.
The thing to be done is as large as human life, and therefore the individuals who lead the way will take all human life for their province. These pioneers will consider nothing as alien to them, nothing as outside their scope.
For every part of human life has to be taken up by the spiritual, - not only the intellectual, the aesthetic, the ethical, but the dynamic, the vital, the physical;
therefore for none of these things or the activities that spring from them will they have contempt or aversion, however they may insist on a change of the spirit and a transmutation of the form.
In each power of our nature they will seek for its own proper means of conversion; knowing that the Divine is concealed in all, they will hold that all can be made the spirit's means of self-finding and all can be converted into its instruments of divine being.
And they will see that the great necessity is the conversion of the normal into the spiritual mind and the opening of that mind again into its own higher reaches and more and more integral movement.
For before the decisive change can be made, the stumbling intellectual reason has to be converted into the precise and luminous intuitive, until that again can rise into higher ranges to overmind and supermind or gnosis.
The uncertain and stumbling mental will has to rise towards the sure intuitive and into a higher divine and gnostic will,
the psychic sweetness, fire and light of the soul behind the heart, ℎ𝑟̣𝑑𝑎𝑦𝑒 𝑔𝑢ℎ𝑎̄𝑦𝑎̄𝑚, has to alchemise our crude emotions and the hard egosims and clamant desires of our vital nature.
All our other members have to pass through a similar conversion under the compelling force and light from above. The leaders of the spiritual march will start from and use the knowledge and the means that past effort has developed in this direction,
but they will not take them as they are without any deep necessary change or limit themselves by what is now known or cleave only to fixed and stereotyped systems or given groupings of results, but will follow the method of the Spirit in Nature.
A constant rediscovery and new formulation and larger synthesis in the mind,
a mighty remoulding in its deeper parts because of a greater enlarging Truth not discovered or not well fixed before, is that Spirit's way with our past achievement when he moves to the greatnesses of the future."
𝟐𝟓. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐖𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐫, 𝐋𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐒𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐞 𝐋𝐚𝐰 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐀𝐢𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐄𝐱𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞
"The surfaces of life are easy to understand; their laws, characteristic movements, practical utilities are ready to our hand and we can seize on them and turn them to account with a sufficient facility and rapidity. But they do not carry us very far.
They suffice for an active superficial life from day to day, but they do not solve the great problems of existence. On the other hand, the knowledge of life's profundities, its potent secrets, its great, hidden, all-determining laws is exceedingly difficult to us.
We have found no plummet that can fathom these depths; they seem to us a vague, indeterminate movement, a profound obscurity from which the mind recoils willingly to play with the fret and foam and facile radiances of the surface.
Yet it is these depths and their unseen forces that we ought to know if we would understand existence;
on the surface we get only Nature's secondary rules and practical bye-laws which help us to tide over the difficulties of the moment and to organise empirically without understanding them her continual transitions.
Nothing is more obscure to humanity or less seized by its understanding, whether in the power that moves it or the sense of the aim towards which it moves, than its own communal and collective life.
Sociology does not help us, for it only gives us the general story of the past and the external conditions under which communities have survived. History teaches us nothing; it is a confused torrent of events and personalities or a kaleidoscope of changing institutions.
We do not seize the real sense of all this change and this continual streaming forward of human life in the channels of Time. What we do seize are current or recurrent phenomena, facile generalisations, partial ideas .
We talk of democracy, aristocracy and autocracy, collectivism and individualism, imperialism and nationalism, the State and the commune, capitalism and labour;
we advance hasty generalisations and make absolute systems which are positively announced today only to be abandoned perforce tomorrow;
we espouse causes and ardent enthusiasms whose triumph turns to an early disillusionment and then forsake them for others, perhaps for those that we have taken so much trouble to destroy.
For a whole century mankind thirsts and battles after liberty and earns it with a bitter expense of toil, tears and blood;
the century that enjoys without having fought for it turns away as from a puerile illusion and is ready to renounce the depreciated gain as the price of some new good.
And all this happens because our whole thought and action with regard to our collective life is shallow and empirical; it does not seek for, it does not base itself on a firm, profound and complete knowledge.
The moral is not the vanity of human life, of its ardours and enthusiasms and of the ideals it pursues, but the necessity of a wiser, larger, more patient search after its true law and aim."
𝟐𝟔. 𝐄𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬
"Constitutions can only disguise facts, they cannot abrogate them; for whatever ideas the form of the constitution may embody, its working is always that of the actually realised forces which can use it with effect.
"Constitutions can only disguise facts, they cannot abrogate them; for whatever ideas the form of the constitution may embody, its working is always that of the actually realised forces which can use it with effect.
Most governments either have now or have passed through a democratic form, but nowhere yet has there been a real democracy; it has been everywhere the propertied and professional classes and the bourgeoisie who governed in the name of the people.
So too in any international council or control it would be a few great empires that would govern in the name of humanity."
𝟐𝟕. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐒𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 - 𝐚 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐟 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐝
"In principle, then, the ideal unification of mankind would be a system in which, as a first rule of common and harmonious life, the human peoples would be allowed to form their own groupings according to their natural divisions of locality, race, culture,
economic convenience and not according to the more violent accidents of history or egoistic will of powerful nations whose policy it must always be to compel the smaller or less timely organised to serve their interests as dependents or obey their commands as subjects.
The present arrangement of the world has been worked out by economic forces, by political diplomacies, treaties and purchases and by military violence without regard to any moral principle or any general rule of the good of mankind.
It has served roughly certain ends of the World-Force in its development and helped at much cost of bloodshed, suffering, cruelty, oppression and revolt to bring humanity more together.
Like all things that, though in themselves unideal, have been and have asserted themselves with force, it had its justification, not moral but biological, in the necessity of the rough methods which Nature has to use with a half-animal mankind as with her animal creation.
But the great step of unification once taken, the artificial arrangements which have resulted would no longer have any reason for existence.
It would be so in the first place because the convenience and good of the world at large and not the satisfaction of egoism, pride and greed of particular nations would be the object to be held in view,
in the second because whatever legitimate claim any nation might have upon others, such as necessities of economic well-being and expansion, would be arranged for in a soundly organised world-union or world-state no longer on the principle of strife and competition,
but on a principle of cooperation or mutual adjustment or at least of competition regulated by law and equity and just interchange.
Therefore no ground would remain for forced and artificial groupings except that of historical tradition or accomplished fact which would obviously have little weight in a
great change of world conditions impossible to achieve unless the race is prepared to break hundreds of traditions and unsettle the great majority of accomplished facts.
The first principle of human unity, groupings being necessary, should be a system of free and natural groupings which would leave no room for internal discords, mutual incompatibilities and repression and revolt as between race and race or people and people.
For otherwise the world-state would be founded in part at least upon a system of legalised injustice and repression or at the best upon a principle of force and compulsion, however mitigated.
Such a system would contain dissatisfied elements eager to seize upon any hope of change and throw their moral force and whatever material power they might still keep on the side of any velleities
that might appear in the race towards disorder, secession, dissolution of the system and perhaps a return to the old order of things.
Moral centres of revolt would thus be preserved which, given the restlessness of the human mind, could not fail to have, in periods favourable to them, a great power of contagion and self-diffusion.
In fact, any system which would appear to stereotype anomalies, eternise injustice and inequality or rest permanently on a principle of compulsion and forced subjection, could have no security and would be condemned by its very nature to transience."
𝟐𝟖. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝-𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞
"The World-State must now either be brought about by a mutual understanding or by the force of circumstances and a series of new and disastrous shocks.
"The World-State must now either be brought about by a mutual understanding or by the force of circumstances and a series of new and disastrous shocks.
For the old still-prevailing order of things was founded on circumstances and conditions which no longer exist.
A new order is demanded by the new conditions and, so long as it is not created, there will be a transitional era of continued trouble or recurrent disorders,
inevitable crises through which Nature will effect in her own violent way the working out of the necessity which she has evolved."
`
𝟐𝟗. 𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐋𝐢𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐲
"Democracy is by no means a sure preservative of liberty;
𝟐𝟗. 𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐋𝐢𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐲
"Democracy is by no means a sure preservative of liberty;
on the contrary, we see today the democratic system of government march steadily towards such an organised annihilation of Individual liberty as could not have been dreamed of in the old aristocratic and monarchial systems.
It may be that from the more violent and brutal forms of despotic oppression which were associated with those systems, democracy has indeed delivered those nations which have been fortunate enough to achieve liberal forms of government, and that is no doubt a great gain.
It revives now only in periods of revolution and excitement, often in the form of mob tyranny or a savage revolutionary or reactionary repression.
But there is a deprivation of liberty which is more respectable in appearance, more subtle and systematised, more mild in its method because it has a greater force at its back, but for that very reason more effective and pervading.
The tyranny of the majority has become a familiar phrase and its deadening effects have been depicted with a great force of resentment by certain of the modern intellectuals;
but what the future promises us is something more formidable still, the tyranny of the whole, of the self-hypnotised mass over its constituent groups and units."
𝟑𝟎. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐬𝐞𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐢𝐟𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐏𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞
"Diversity of language serves two important ends of the human spirit, a use of unification and a use of variation. A language helps to bring those who speak it into a certain large unity of growing thought, formed temperament, ripening spirit.
It is an intellectual, aesthetic and expressive bond which tempers division where division exists and strengthens unity where unity has been achieved.
Especially it gives self-consciousness to national or racial unity and creates the bond of a common self-expression and a common record of achievement.
On the other hand, it is a means of national differentiation and perhaps the most powerful of all, not a barren principle of division merely, but a fruitful and helpful differentiation.
For each language is the sign and power of the soul of the people which naturally speaks it. Each develops therefore its own peculiar spirit, thought-temperanent, way of dealing with life and knowledge and experience.
If it recieves and welcomes the thought, the life-experience, the spiritual impact of other nations, still it transforms them into something new of its own
and by that power of transmutation it enriches the life of humanity with its fruitful borrowings and does not merely repeat what had been gained elsewhere.
Therefore it is of the utmost value to a nation, human group-soul, to preserve its language and to make of it a strong and living cultural instrument.
A nation, race or people which loses its language cannot live its whole life or real life.
And this advantage to the national life is at the same time an advantage to the general life of the human race."
"Nothing has stood more in the way of the rapid progress India, nothing has more successfully prevented her self-finding and development under modern conditions than the long overshadowing of the Indian tongues as cultural instruments by the English language.
It is significant that the one sub-nation in India which from the first refused to undergo this yoke, devoted itself to the development of its language, made that for long its principal preoccupation, gave to it its most original minds and most living energies,
getting through everything else perfunctorily, neglecting commerce, doing politics as an intellectual and oratorical pastime,
- that it is Bengal which first recovered its soul, re-spiritualised itself, forced the whole world to hear of its great spiritual personalities, gave it the first modern Indian poet and Indian scientist of world-wide fame and achievement,
restored the moribund art of India to life and power, first made her count again in the culture of the world, first, as a reward in the outer life,
arrived at a vital political consciousness and a living political movement not imitative and derivative in its spirit and its central ideal.
For so much does language count in the life of a nation; for so much does it count to the advantage of humanity at large that its group-souls should preserve and develop and use with a vigorous group-individuality their natural instrument of expression."
"Diversity of language is worth keeping because diversity of cultures and differentiation of soul-groups are worth keeping and because without that diversity life cannot have full play; for in its absence there is a danger, almost an envitability of decline and stagnation.
The disappearance of national variation into a single uniform human unity, of which the systematic thinker dreams an an ideal
and which we have seen to be a substantial possibility and even a likelihood if a certain tendency becomes dominant, might lead to political peace, economic well-being, perfect administration,
the solution of a hundred material problems, as did on a lesser scale the Roman unity in old times;
but to what eventual good if it leads also to an uncreative sterilisation of mind and the stagnation of the soul of the race?
In laying this stress on culture, on the things of the mind and the spirit there need be no intention of undervaluing the outward material side of life;
it is not at all my purpose to belittle that to which Nature always attaches so insistent an importance. On the contrary, the inner and the outer depend upon each other.
For we see that in the life of a nation a great period of national culture and vigorous mental and soul life is always part of a general stirring and movement which has its counterpart in the outward political, economic and practical life of the nation.
The cultural brings about or increases the material progress but also it needs it that it may itself flourish with an entirely full and healthy vigour.
The peace, well-being and settled order of the human world is a thing eminently to be desired as a basis for a great world-culture in which all humanity must be united;
but neither of these unities, the outward or inward, ought to be devoid of an element even more important than peace, order and well-being, - freedom and vigour of life, which can only be assured by variation and by the freedom of the group and of the individual.
Not then a uniform unity, not a logically simple, a scientifically rigid, a beautifully neat and mechanical sameness, but a living oneness full of healthy freedom and variation is the ideal which we should keep in view and strive to get realised in man's future."
𝟑𝟏. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐑𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲
"A religion of humanity may be either an intellectual and sentimental ideal, a living dogma with intellectual, psychological and practical effects, or else a spiritual aspiration and rule of living, partly the sign, partly the cause of a change of soul in humanity.
The intellectual religion of humanity already to a certain extent exists, partly as a conscious creed in the minds of a few, partly as a potent shadow in the consciousness of the race. It is the shadow of the spirit that is yet unborn, but is preparing for its birth.
This material world of ours, besides its fully embodied things of the present, is peopled by such powerful shadows, ghosts of things dead, and the spirit of things yet unborn. The ghosts of things dead are very troublesome actualities and they now abound,ghosts of dead religions,
dead arts, dead moralities, dead political theories, which still claim either to keep their rotting bodies or to animate partly the existing body of things.
Repeating obstinately their sacred formulas of the past, they hypnotise backward-looking minds and daunt even the progressive portion of humanity.
But there are too those unborn spirits which are still unable to take a definite body, but are already mind-born and exist as influences of which the human mind is aware and to which it now responds in a desultory and confused fashion.
The religion of humanity was mind-born in the eighteenth century, the 𝑚𝑎̄𝑛𝑎𝑠𝑎 𝑝𝑢𝑡𝑟𝑎 of the rationalist thinkers who brought it forward as a substitute for the formal spiritualism of ecclesiastical Christianity.
It tried to give itself a body in Positivism, which was an attempt to formulate the dogmas of this religion, but on too heavily and severely rationalistic a basis for acceptance even by an Age of Reason.
Humanitarianism has been its most prominent emotional result.
Philanthropy, social service and other kindred activities have been its outward expression of good works.
Philanthropy, social service and other kindred activities have been its outward expression of good works.
Democracy, socialism, pacificism are to a great extent its by-products or at least owe much of their vigour to its inner presence.
The fundamental idea is that mankind is the godhead to be worshipped and served by man and that the respect, the service, the progress of the human being and human life are the chief duty and the chief aim of the human spirit.
No other idol, neither the nation, the State, the family nor anything else ought to take its place; they are only worthy of respect so far as they are images of the human spirit and enshrine its presence and aid its self-manifestation.
But where the cult of these idols seeks to usurp the place of the spirit and makes demands inconsistent with its service, they should be put aside. No injunctions of old creeds, religious, political, social or cultural, are valid when they go against its claims.
Science even, though it is one of the chief modern idols, must not be allowed to make claims contrary to its ethical temperament and aim, for science is only valuable in so far as it helps and serves by knowledge and progress the religion of humanity.
War, capital punishment, the taking of human life, cruelty of all kinds whether committed by the individual, the State or society, not only physical cruelty, but moral cruelty, the degradation of any human being or any class of human beings under whatever specious plea
or in whatever interest, the oppression and exploitation of man by man, of class by class, of nation by nation and all those habits of life and institutions of society of a similar kind which religion and ethics formerly tolerated or even favoured in practice,
whatever they might do in their ideal rule or creed, are crimes against the religion of humanity, abominable to its ethical mind, forbidden by its primary tenets, to be fought against always, in no degree to be tolerated.
Man must be sacred to man regardless of all distinctions of race, creed, colour, nationality, status, political or social advancement.
The body of man is to be respected, made immune from violence and outrage, fortified by science against disease and preventable death.
The life of man is to be held sacred, preserved, strengthened, ennobled, uplifted.
The heart of man is to be held sacred also, given scope, protected from violation, from suppression, from mechanisation, freed from belittling influences.
The mind of man is to be released from all bonds, allowed freedom and range and opportunity, given all its means of self-training and self-development and organised in the play of its powers for the service of humanity.
And all this too is not to be held as an abstract or pious sentiment, but given full and practical recognition in the persons of men and nations and mankind. This, speaking largely, is the idea and spirit of the intellectual religion of humanity.
One has only to compare human life and thought and feeling a century or two ago with human life, thought and feeling in the pre-war period to see how great an influence this religion of humanity has exercised and how fruitful a work it has done.
It accomplished rapidly many things which orthodox religion failed to do effectively, largely because it acted as a constant intellectual and critical solvent,an unsparing assailant of the thing that is and an unflinching champion of the thing to be,faithful always to the future,
While orthodox religion allied itself with the powers of the present, even of the past, bound itself by its pact with them and could act only at best as a moderating but not as a reforming force.
Moreover, this religion has faith in humanity and its earthly future and can therefore aid its earthly progress, while the orthodox religions looked with eyes of pious sorrow and gloom on the earthly life of man and were very ready to bid him bear peacefully and contentedly,
even to welcome its crudities, cruelties, oppressions, tribulations as a means for learning to appreciate and for earning the better life which will be given us hereafter.
Faith, even an intellectual faith, must always be a worker of miracles,
and this religion of humanity, even without taking bodily shape or a compelling form or a visible means of self-effectuation, was yet able to effect comparatively much of what it set out to do.
It to some degree humanised society, humanised law and punishment, humanised the outlook of man on man, abolished legalised torture and the cruder forms of slavery, raised those who were depressed and fallen, gave large hopes to humanity,
stimulated philanthropy and charity and the service of mankind, encouraged everywhere the desire of freedom, put a curb on oppression and greatly minimised its more brutal expressions.
It had almost succeeded in humanising war and would perhaps have succeeded entirely but for the contrary trend of modern Science. It made it possible for man to conceive of a world free from war as imaginable even without waiting for the Christian millennium.
At any rate, this much change came about that, while peace was formerly a rare interlude, if a much too frequent interlude of peace, though as yet only of an armed peace. That may not be a great step, but still it was a step forward.
It gave new conceptions of the dignity of the human being and opened new ideas and new vistas of his education, self-development and potentiality. It spread enlightenment; it made man feel more his responsibility for the progress and happiness of the race;
it raised the average self-respect and capacity of mankind; it gave hope to the serf, self-assertion to the downtrodden and made the labourer in his manhood the potential equal of the rich and powerful.
True, if we compare what is with what should be, the actual achievement with the ideal, all this will seem only a scanty work of preparation.
But it was a remarkable record for a century and a half or little more and for an unembodied spirit which had to work through what instruments it could find and had as yet no form, habitation or visible engine of its own concentrated workings.
But perhaps it was in this that lay its power and advantage, since that saved it from crystallising into a form and getting petrified or at least losing its more free and subtle action."
"The weakness of the intellectual idea, even when it supports itself by an appeal to the sentiments and emotions, is that it does not get at the centre of man's being.
The intellect and the feelings are only instruments of the being and they may be the instruments of either its lower and external form or of the inner and higher man, servants of the ego or channels of the soul.
The aim of the religion of humanity was formulated in the eighteenth century by a sort of primal intuition; that aim was and it is still to re-create human society in the image of three kindred ideas, liberty, equality and fraternity.
None of these has really been won in spite of all the progress that has been achieved.
The liberty that has been so loudly proclaimed as an essential of modern progress is an outward, mechanical and unreal liberty.
The liberty that has been so loudly proclaimed as an essential of modern progress is an outward, mechanical and unreal liberty.
The equality that has been so much sought after and battled for is equally an outward and mechanical and will turn out to be an unreal equality.
Fraternity is not even claimed to be a practicable principle of the ordering of life and what is put forward as its substitute is the outward and mechanical principle of equal association or at the best a comradeship of labour...
Yet is brotherhood the real key to the triple gospel of the idea of humanity. The union of liberty and equality can only be achieved by the power of human brotherhood and it cannot be founded on anything else.
But brotherhood exists only in the soul and by the soul; it can exist by nothing else. For this brotherhood is not a matter either of physical kinship or of vital association or of intellectual agreement.
When the soul claims freedom, it is the freedom of its self-development, the self-development of the divine in man in all his being.
When it claims equality, what it is claiming is that freedom equally for all and the recognition of the same soul, the same godhead in all human beings.
When it strives for brotherhood, it is founding that equal freedom of self-development on a common aim, a common life, a unity of mind and feeling founded upon the recognition of this inner spiritual unity.
These three things are in fact the nature of the soul; for freedom, equality, unity are the eternal attributes of the Spirit.
It is the practical recognition of this truth, it is the awakening of the soul in man and the attempt to get him to live from his soul and not from his ego which is the inner meaning of religion,
and it is that to which the religion of humanity also must strive before it can fulfil itself in the life of the race."
𝟑𝟐. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐑𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲
"A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future.
"A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future.
By this is not meant what is ordinarily called a universal religion, a system, a thing of creed and intellectual belief and dogma and outward rite.
Mankind has tried unity by that means; it has failed and deserved to fail, because there can be no universal religious system, one in mental creed and vital form.
The inner spirit is indeed one, but more than any other the spiritual life insists on freedom and variation in its self-expression and means of development.
A religion of humanity means the growing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one,
that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth.
By its growth within us oneness with our fellow-men will become the leading principle of all our life, not merely a principle of cooperation but a deeper brotherhood, a real and an inner sense of unity and equality and a common life.
There must be the realisation by the individual that only in the life of his fellow-men is his own life complete. There must be the realisation by the race that only the free and full life of the individual can its own perfection and permanent happiness be founded.
There must be too a discipline and a way of salvation in accordance with the religion, that is to say, a means by which it can be developed by each man within himself, so that it may be developed in the life of the race."
𝟑𝟑. 𝐒𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐊𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝-𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 - 𝐚𝐧 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐍𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐮𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐑𝐚𝐜𝐞
"Mankind has a habit of surviving the worst catastrophes created by its own errors or by the violent turns of Nature and it must be so if there is any meaning in its existence,
if it's long history and continuous survival is not the accident of a fortuitously self-organising Chance, which it must be in a purely materialistic view of the nature of the world.
If man is intended to survive and carry forward the evolution of which he is at present the head and, to some extent, a half-conscious leader of its march, he must come out of his present chaotic international life and arrive at a beginning of organised united action;
some kind of World-State, unitary of federal, or a confederacy or a coalition he must arrive at in the end; no smaller or looser expedient would adequately serve the purpose."
#SriAurobindo
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𝐒𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞:
Selections from The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo II
Edited by Chandra Prakash Khetan
Thread End
──────────────
𝐒𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞:
Selections from The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo II
Edited by Chandra Prakash Khetan
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