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 had 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 judgment, 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 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.
—The Human Cycle —The Age of Individualism and Reason, pg. 15-16
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 anthill; he is something in himself, a
soul, a being, who has to fulfill 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 suppress 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 molding
of the future.
—The Human Cycle —The Age of Individualism and Reason, pg. 20
For in his study of himself and the world he cannot but come face to face with
the soul in himself and the soul in the world and find it to be an entity
so profound, so complex, so full of hidden secrets and powers that his intellectual
reason betrays itself as an insufficient light and a fumbling seeker: it
is successfully analytical only of superficialities and of what lies just
behind the superficies. The need of a deeper knowledge must then turn him
to the discovery of new powers and means within himself. He finds that he
can only know himself entirely by becoming actively self-conscious and not
merely self-critical, by more and more living in his soul and acting out
of it rather than floundering on surfaces, by putting himself into conscious
harmony with that which lies behind his superficial mentality and psychology
and by enlightening his reason and making dynamic his action through this
deeper light and power to which he thus opens. In this process the rationalistic
ideal begins to subject itself to the ideal of intuitional knowledge and
a deeper self-awareness; the utilitarian standard gives way to the aspiration
towards self-consciousness and self-realisation; the rule of living according
to the manifest laws of physical Nature is replaced by the effort towards
living according to the veiled Law and Will and Power active in the life
of the world and in the inner and outer life of humanity.
—The Human Cycle —The Coming of the Subjective Age, pg. 24
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 all human life if it would find and live according
to the hidden Truth and deepest law of its own being. That was this knowledge
which the ancients sought to express through religious and social symbolism,
and subjectivism is a road of return to the lost knowledge. First deepening
man's inner experience, restoring perhaps on an unprecedented scale insight
and self-knowledge to the race, it must end by revolutionising his social
and collective self-expression.
—The Human Cycle —The Coming of the Subjective Age, pg. 28
The individual seeking for the law of his being can only find it safely if
he regards clearly two great psychological truths and lives in that clear
vision. First, the ego is not the self; there is one self of all and the
soul is a portion of that universal Divinity. The fulfillment of the individual
is not the utmost development of his egoistic intellect, vital force, physical
well-being and the utmost satisfaction of his mental, emotional, physical
cravings, but the flowering of the divine in him to its utmost capacity of
wisdom, power, love and universality and through this flowering his utmost
realisation of all the possible beauty and delight of existence.
The will to be, the will to power, the will to know are perfectly legitimate, their satisfaction the true law of our existence and to discourage and repress them improperly is to mutilate our being and dry up or diminish the sources of life and growth. But their satisfaction must not be egoistic, —not for any other reason moral or religious, but, simply because they cannot so be satisfied. The attempt always leads to an eternal struggle with other egoisms, a mutual wounding and hampering, even a natural destruction in which if we are conquerors today, we are the conquered or the slain tomorrow; for we exhaust ourselves and corrupt ourselves in the dangerous attempt to live by the destruction and exploitation of others. Only that which lives in its own self-existence can endure. And generally, to devour others is to register oneself also as a subject and predestined victim of Death.
—The Human Cycle —True and False Subjectivism, pg. 39
Subjectivism and objectivism start from the same data, the individual and the
collectivity, the complex nature of each with its various powers of the mind,
life and body and the search for the law of their self-fulfilment and harmony.
But objectivism proceeding by the analytical reason takes an external and
mechanical view of the whole problem. It looks at the world as a thing, an
object, a process to be studied by an observing reason which places itself
abstractly outside the elements and the sum of what it has to consider and
observes it thus from outside as one would an intricate mechanism. The laws
of this process are considered as so many mechanical rules or settled forces
acting upon the individual or the group which, when they have been observed
and distinguished by the reason, have by one's will or by some will to be
organised and applied fully much as Science applies the laws it discovers.
These laws or rules have to be imposed on the individual by his own abstract
reason and will isolated as a ruling authority from his other parts or by
the reason and will of other individuals or of the group, and they have to
be imposed on the group itself either by its own collective reason and will
embodied in some machinery of control which the mind considers as something
apart from the life of the group or by the reason and will of some other
group external to it or of which it is in some way a part. So the State is
viewed in modern political thought as an entity in itself, as if it were
something apart from the community and its individuals, something which has
the right to impose itself on them and control them in the fulfilment of
some idea of right, good or interest which is inflicted on them by a restraining
and fashioning power rather than developed in them and by them as a thing
towards which their self and nature are impelled to grow. Life is to be managed,
harmonised, perfected by an adjustment, a manipulation, a machinery through which
it is passed and by which it is shaped. A law outside oneself, —outside
even when it is discovered or determined by the individual reason and accepted
or enforced by the individual will,— this is the governing idea of objectivism;
a mechanical process of management, ordering, perfection, this is its conception
of practice.
Subjectivism proceeds from within and regards everything from the point of view of a containing and developing self-consciousness. The law here is within ourselves; life is a self creating process, a growth and development at first subconscious, then half-conscious and at last more and more fully conscious of that which we are potentially and hold within ourselves; the principle of its progress is an increasing self-recognition, self-realisation and a resultant self-shaping. Reason and will are only effective movements of the self, reason a process in self-recognition, will a force for self-affirmation and self-shaping. Moreover, reason and intellectual will are only a part of the means by which we recognise and realise ourselves. Subjectivism tends to take a large and complex view of our nature and being and to recognise many powers of knowledge, many forces of effectuation. Even, we see it in its first movement away from the external and objective method discount and belittle the importance of the work of the reason and assert the supremacy of the life-impulse or the essential Will-to-be in opposition to the claims of the intellect or else affirm some deeper power of knowledge, called nowadays the intuition, which sees things in the whole, in their truth, in their profundities and harmonies while intellectual reason breaks up, falsifies, affirms superficial appearances and harmonises only by a mechanical adjustment. But substantially we can see that what is meant by this intuition is the self-consciousness, feeling, perceiving, grasping in its substance and aspects rather than analysing in its mechanism its own truth and nature and powers. The whole impulse of subjectivism is to get at the self, to live in the self, to see by the self, to live out the truth of the self internally and externally but always from an internal initiation and centre.
— The Human Cycle —The Objective and Subjective Views of Life, pg. 50-52
The true law of our development and the entire object of our social existence
can only become clear to us when we have discovered not only, like modern
Science, what man has been in his past physical and vital evolution, but
his future mental and spiritual destiny and his place in the cycles of Nature.
This is the reason why the subjective periods of human development must always
be immeasurably the most fruitful and creative. In the others he either seizes
on some face, image, type of the inner reality Nature in him is labouring
to manifest or else he follows a mechanical impulse or shapes himself in
the mould of her external influences; but here in his subjective return inward
he gets back to himself, back to the root of his living and infinite possibilities,
and the potentiality of a new and perfect self-creation begins to widen before
him. He discovers his real place in Nature and opens his eyes to the greatness
of his destiny.
—The Human Cycle —The Ideal Law of Social Development, pg. 56
Mankind upon earth is one foremost self-expression of the universal Being in
His cosmic self-unfolding; he expresses, under the conditions of the terrestrial
world he inhabits, the mental power of the universal existence. All mankind
is one in its nature, physical, vital, emotional, mental and ever has been
in spite of all differences of intellectual development ranging from the
poverty of the Bushman and negroid to the rich cultures of Asia and Europe,
and the whole race has, as the human totality, one destiny which it seeks
and increasingly approaches in the cycles of progression and retrogression
it describes through the countless millenniums of its history. Nothing which
any individual race or nation can triumphantly realise, no victory of their
self-aggrandisement, illumination, intellectual achievement or mastery over
the environment has any permanent meaning or value except in so far as it
adds something or recovers something or preserves something for this human
march. The purpose which the ancient Indian scripture offers to us as the
true object of all human action, lokasarhgraha, the holding together
of the race in its cyclic evolution, is the constant sense, whether we know
or know it not, of the sum of our activities.
—The Human Cycle —The Ideal Law of Social Development, pg. 59
But if science has thus prepared us for an age of wider and deeper culture
and if in spite of and even partly by its materialism it has rendered impossible
the return of the true materialism, that of 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 in 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 is 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 responsibility, his idea of politics the
encouragement of industry, the opening of markets, exploitation and trade
following 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 comforts, 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 the pursuit of vital success, satisfaction, productiveness, accumulation, possession, enjoyment, comfort, convenience for their own sake. The vital part of the being is an element in the integral human existence as much as the physical part; it has a 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 nor the body exist for their own sake, but as a 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 ruit sua.
—The Human Cycle —Civilisation and Barbarism, pg. 72
The idea of culture begins to define itself for us a little more clearly, or
at least it has put away from it in a clear contrast its natural opposites.
The unmental, the purely physical life is very obviously its opposite, it
is barbarism; the unintellectualised vital, the crude economic or the grossly
domestic life which looks only to money-getting, the procreation of a family
and its maintenance, are equally its opposites; they are another and even
uglier barbarism. We agree to regard the individual who is dominated by them
and has no thought of higher things as an uncultured and undeveloped human
being, a prolongation of the savage, essentially a barbarian even if he lives
in a civilised nation and in a society which has arrived at the general idea
and at some ordered practice of culture and refinement. The societies or
nations which bear this stamp we agree to call barbarous or semi-barbarous.
Even when a nation or an age has developed within itself knowledge and science
and arts, but still in its general outlook, its habits of life and thought
is content to be governed not by knowledge and truth and beauty and high
ideals of living, but by the gross vital, commercial, economic view of existence,
we say that that nation or age may be civilised in a sense, but for all its
abundant or even redundant appliances and apparatus of civilisation it is
not the realisation or the promise of a cultured humanity. Therefore upon
even the European civilisation of the nineteenth century with all its triumphant
and teeming production, its great developments of science, its achievement
in the works of the intellect we pass a certain condemnation, because it
has turned all these things to commercialism and to gross uses of vitalistic
success. We say of it that this was not the perfection to which humanity
ought to aspire and that this trend travels away from and not towards the
higher curve of human evolution.
—The Human Cycle —Aesthetic and Ethical Culture,
pg. 84
Here there has been the work of a reason that seeks always after knowledge
and strives patiently to find out truth for itself, without bias, without
the interference of distorting interests, to study everything, to analyse
everything, to know the principle and process of everything. Philosophy,
Science, learning, the reasoned arts, all the agelong labour of the critical
reason in man have been the result of this effort. In the modern era under
the impulsion of Science this effort assumed enormous proportions and claimed
for a time to examine successfully and lay down finally the true principle
and the sufficient rule of process not only for all the activities of Nature,
but for all the activities of man. It has done great things, but it has not
been in the end a success. The human mind is beginning to perceive that it
has left the heart of almost every problem untouched and illumined only outsides
and a certain range of processes. There has been a great and ordered classification
and mechanisation, a great discovery and practical result of increasing knowledge,
but only on the physical surface of things. Vast abysses of Truth lie below
in which are concealed the real springs, the mysterious powers and secretly
decisive influences of existence. It is a question whether the intellectual
reason will ever be able to give us an adequate account of these deeper and
greater things or subject them to the intelligent will as it has succeeded
in explaining and canallising, though still imperfectly, yet with much show
of triumphant result, the forces of physical nature. But these other powers
are much larger, subtler, deeper down, more hidden, elusive and variable
than those of physical nature.
—The Human Cycle —The Reason as Governor of Life, pg. 101
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 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 the 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 in constant communication with his supreme will and knowledge.
—The Human Cycle —The Reason as Governor of Life, pg. 103
The truth is that upon which we are now insisting, that reason is 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 earthly 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 competitive individualism
and equally 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 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 set up
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 the veiled and secret sovereign.
This truth is hidden from the rationalist because he is supported by two constant articles of faith, first that his own reason is right and the reason of others who differ from him is wrong, and secondly that whatever may be the present deficiencies of the 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 the 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 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 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 experiences 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 human life would 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 in his self-concealing and gradual self-unfolding. His minister I have been, slowly to unseal your eyes, remove the thick integument 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 the 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".
—The Human Cycle —The Office and Limitations of the Reason, pg. 111-114
The limitations of the reason become very strikingly, very characteristically,
very nakedly apparent when it is confronted with that great order of psychological
truths and experiences which we have hitherto kept in the background —the
religious being of man and his religious life. 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 Human Cycle —Reason and Religion, pg. 120
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 a 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 judgment, 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 limitations 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 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.
—The Human Cycle —Reason and Religion, pg. 122
It is well-known to the experience of the spiritual seeker that even the highest
philosophising cannot give a true inner knowledge, is not the spiritual light,
does not open the gates of experience. All it can do is address the consciousness
of man through his intellect and, when it has done, to say, "I have
tried to give you the truth in a form and system which will make it intelligible
and possible to you; if you are intellectually convinced or attracted, you
can now seek the real knowledge, but you must seek it by other means which
are beyond my province."
—The Human Cycle —Reason and Religion, pg. 123-124
It is in our ethical being that this truest truth of practical life, its real
and highest practicality becomes most readily apparent. It is true that the
rational man has tried to reduce the ethical life like all the rest to a
matter of reason, to determine its nature, its law, its practical action
by some principle of reason, by some law of reason. He has never really succeeded
and he never can really succeed; his appearances of success are mere pretences
of the intellect building elegant and empty constructions with words and
ideas, mere conventions of logic and vamped-up syntheses, in sum, pretentious
failures which break down at the first strenuous touch of reality. Such was
that extraordinary system of utilitarian ethics discovered in the nineteenth
century —the great century of science and reason and utility— by
one of its most positive and systematic minds and now deservedly discredited.
Happily we need now only smile at its shallow pretentious errors, its substitution
of a practical, outward and occasional test for the inner, subjective and
absolute motive of ethics, its reduction of ethical action to an impossibly
scientific and quite impracticable jugglery of moral mathematics, attractive
enough to the reasoning and logical mind, quite false and alien to the whole
instinct and intuition of the ethical being. Equally false and impracticable
are other attempts of the reason to account for and regulate its principle
and phenomena, —the hedonistic theory which refers all virtue to the
pleasure and satisfaction of the mind in good or the sociological which supposes
ethics to be no more than a system of formulas, of conduct generated from
the social sense and a ruled direction of the social impulses and would regulate
its action by that insufficient standard. The ethical being escapes from
all these formulas; it is a law to itself and finds its principle in its
own eternal nature which is not in its essential character a growth of evolving
mind, even though it may seem to be that in its earthly history, but a light
from the ideal, a reflection in man of the Divine.
Not that all these errors have not each of them a truth behind their false constructions; for all errors of the human reason are false representations, a wrong building, effective misconstructions of the truth or of a side or a part of the truth. Utility is a fundamental principle of existence and all fundamental principles of existence are in the end one; therefore it is true that the highest good is also the highest utility. It is true also that, not any balance of the greatest good of the greatest number, but simply the good of others and most widely the good of all is the one ideal aim of our outgoing ethical practice; it is that which the ethical man would like to effect, if he could only find the way and be always sure what is the real good of all. But this does not help to regulate our ethical practice, nor does it supply us with its inner principle whether of being or of action, but only produces one of the many considerations by which we can feel our way along the road which is so difficult to travel. Good, not utility, must be the principle and standard of good; otherwise we fall into the hands of that dangerous pretender expediency, whose whole method is alien to the ethical. Moreover, the standard of utility, the judgment of utility, its spirit, its form, its application must vary with the individual nature, the habit of mind, the outlook on the world. Here there can be no reliable general law to which all can subscribe, no set of large governing principles such as it is sought to supply to our conduct by a true ethics. Nor can ethics at all or ever be a matter of calculation. There is only one safe rule for the ethical man, to stick to his principle of good, his instinct for good, his vision of good, his intuition of good and to govern by that his conduct. He may err, but he will be on his right road in spite of all stumblings, because he will be faithful to the law of his nature. The saying of the Gita is always true: better is the law of one's own nature though ill-performed, dangerous is an alien law however speciously superior it may seem to our reason. But the law of nature of the ethical being is the pursuit of good; it can never be the pursuit of utility.
—The Human Cycle —The Suprarational Good, pg. 138-139
In all the higher powers of his life man may be said to be seeking, blindly
enough, for God. To get at the Divine and Eternal in himself and the world
and to harmonise them, to put his being and his life in tune with the Infinite
reveals itself in these parts of his nature as his concealed aim and his
destiny. He sets out to arrive at his highest and largest and most perfect
self, and the moment he at all touches upon it, this self in him appears
to be one with some great Soul and Self of Truth and Good and Beauty in the
world to which we give the name of God. To get at this as a spiritual presence
is the aim of religion, to grow into harmony with its eternal nature of light,
love, strength and purity is the aim of ethics, to enjoy and mould ourselves
into the harmony of its eternal beauty and delight is the aim and consummation
of our aesthetic need and nature, to know and to be according to its eternal
principles of truth is the end of science and philosophy and of all our insistent
drive towards knowledge.
—The Human Cycle —The Suprarational Ultimate of Life, pg. 145
The reason is that here we get to another power of our being which is different
from the ethical, aesthetic, rational and religious, —one which, even
if we recognise it as lower, in the scale, still insists on its own reality
and has not only the right to exist but the right to satisfy itself and be
fulfilled. It is indeed the primary power, it is the base of our existence
upon earth, it is that which the others take as their starting-point and
their foundation. This is the life-power in us, the vitalistic, the dynamic
nature. Its whole principle and aim is to be, to assert its existence, to
increase, to expand, to possess and to enjoy: its native terms are growth
of being, pleasure and power. Life itself here is Being at labour in Matter
to express itself in terms of conscious force; human life is the human being
at labour to impress himself on the material world with the greatest possible
force and intensity and extension. His primary insistent aim must be to live
and make for himself a place in the world, for himself and his species, secondly,
having made it to possess, produce and enjoy with an ever-widening scope,
and finally to spread himself over all the earth-life and dominate it; this
is and must be his first practical business. That is what the Darwinians
have tried to express by their notion of the struggle for life. But the struggle
is not merely to last and live, but to increase, enjoy and possess: its method
includes and uses not only a principle and instinct of egoism, but a concomitant
principle and instinct of association. Human life is moved by two equally
powerful impulses, one of individualistic self-assertion, the other of collective
self-assertion; it works by strife, but also by mutual assistance and united
effort; it uses two diverse convergent forms of action, two motives which
seem to be contradictory but are in fact always coexistent, competitive endeavour
and cooperative endeavour. It is from this character of the dynamism of life
that the whole structure of human society has come into being, and it is
upon the sustained and vigourous action of this dynamism that the continuance,
energy and growth of all human societies depends. If this life-force in them
fails and these motive-powers lose in vigour, then all begins to languish,
stagnate and finally move towards disintegration.
—The Human Cycle —The Suprarational Ultimate of Life, pg. 147
On this a great deal hangs; for if the practical and vitalistic view of life
and society is the right one, if society merely or principally exists for
the maintenance, comfort, vital happiness and political and economic efficiency
of the species, then our idea that life is a seeking for God and for the
highest self and that society too must one day make that its principle, cannot
stand. Modern society, at any rate in its self-conscious aim, is far enough
from any such endeavour; whatever may be the splendour of its achievement,
it acknowledges only two gods, life and practical reason organised under
the name of science. Therefore on this great primary thing, this life-power
and its manifestations, we must look with special care to see what it is
in its reality as well as what it is in its appearance. Its appearance is
familiar enough; for of that is made the very stuff and present form of our
everyday life. Its main ideals are the physical good and vitalistic well-being
of the individual and the community, the entire satisfaction of the desire
for bodily health, long life, comfort, luxury, wealth, amusement, recreation,
a constant and tireless expenditure of the mind and the dynamic life-force
in remunerative work and production and, as the higher flame spires of the
restless and devouring energy, creations and conquests of various kinds,
wars, invasions, colonisation, discovery, commercial victory, travel, adventure,
the full possession and utilisation of the earth. All this life still takes
as its cadre the old existing forms, the family, the society, the nation;
and it has two impulses, individualistic and collective.
—The Human Cycle —The Suprarational Ultimate of Life, pg. 149
What account are the higher parts of man's being, those finer powers in him
that more openly tend to the growth of his divine nature, to make with this
vital instinct or with its gigantic modern developments? Obviously, their
first impulse must be to take hold of them and dominate and transform all
this crude life into their own image; but when they discover that here is
a power apart, as persistent as themselves, that it seeks a satisfaction
per se and accepts their impress to a certain extent, but not altogether
and, as it were, unwillingly, partially, unsatisfactorily, —what then?
We often find that ethics and religion especially, when they find themselves
in a constant conflict with the vital instincts, the dynamic life-power in
man, proceed to an attitude of almost complete hostility and seek to damn
them in idea and repress them in fact. To the vital instinct for wealth and
well-being they oppose the ideal of a chill and austere poverty; to the vital
instinct for pleasure the ideal not only of self-denial, but of absolute
mortification; to the vital instinct for health and ease the ascetic's contempt,
disgust and neglect of the body; to the vital instinct for incessant action
and creation the ideal of calm and inaction, passivity, contemplation; to
the vital instinct for power, expansion, domination, rule, conquest the ideal
of humility, self-abasement, submission, meek harmlessness, docility in suffering;
to the vital instinct of sex on which depends the continuance of the species,
the ideal of an unreproductive chastity and celibacy; to the social and family
instinct the anti-social ideal of the ascetic, the monk, the solitary, the
world-shunning saint. Commencing with discipline and subordination they proceed
to complete mortification, which means when translated the putting to death
of the vital instincts, and declare that life itself is an illusion to be
shed from the soul or a kingdom of the flesh, the world and the devil, —accepting
thus the claim of the unenlightened and undisciplined life itself that it
is not, was never meant to be, can never become the kingdom of God, a high
manifestation of the Spirit.
—The Human Cycle —The Suprarational Ultimate of Life, pg. 152-153
For life organises itself at first round the ego motive and the instinct of
ego-expansion is the earliest means by which men have come into contact with
each other; the struggle for possession has been the first crude means towards
union, the aggressive assertion of the smaller self the first step towards
a growth into the larger self. All has been therefore a half-ordered confusion
of the struggle for life corrected by the need and instinct of association,
a struggle of individuals, clans, tribes, parties, nations, ideas, civilisations,
cultures, ideals, religions, each affirming itself, each compelled into contact,
association, struggle with the others. For while Nature imposes the ego as
a veil behind which she labours out the individual manifestation of the spirit,
she also puts a compulsion on it to grow in being until it can at last expand
or merge into the larger self in which it meets, harmonises with itself,
comprehends in its own consciousness, becomes one with the rest of existence.
To assist in this growth Life-Nature throws up in itself ego-enlarging, ego-exceeding,
even ego-destroying instincts and movements which combat and correct the
smaller self-affirming instincts and movements, —she enforces on her
human instrument impulses of love, sympathy, self-denial, self-effacement,
self-sacrifice, altruism, the drive towards universality in mind and heart
and life, glimmerings of an obscure unanimism that has not yet found thoroughly
its own true light and motive-power. Because of this obscurity these powers,
unable to affirm their own absolute, to take the lead or dominate, obliged
to compromise with the demands of the ego, even to become themselves a form
of egoism, are impotent also to bring harmony and transformation to life.
Instead of peace they seem to bring rather a sword; for they increase the
number and tension of conflict of the unreconciled forces, ideas, impulses
of which the individual human consciousness and the life of the collectivity
are the arena. The ideal and practical reason of man labours to find amidst
all this the right law of life and action; it strives by a rule of moderation
and accommodation or selection and rejection or by the dominance of some
chosen ideas or powers to reduce things to harmony, to do consciously what
Nature through natural selection and instinct has achieved in her animal
kinds, an automatically ordered and settled form and norm of their existence.
But the order, the structure arrived at by the reason is always partial,
precarious and temporary. It is disturbed by a pull from below and a pull
from above. For these powers that life throws up to help towards the growth
into a larger self, a wider being, are already reflections of something that
is beyond reason, seeds of the spiritual, the absolute. There is the pressure
on human life of an Infinite which will not allow it to rest too long in
any formulation, —not at least until it has delivered out of itself
that which shall be its own self-exceeding and self-fulfilment.
—The Human Cycle —The Suprarational Ultimate of Life, pg. 157-158
It is this little ego, this fragmented consciousness, this concealed soul-spark
on which is imposed the task of meeting and striving with the forces of the
universe, entering into contact with all that seems to it not itself, increasing
under the pressure of inner and outer Nature till it can become one with
all existence. It has to grow into self-knowledge and world-knowledge, to
get within itself and discover that it is a spiritual being, to get outside
of itself and discover its larger truth as the cosmic Individual, to get
beyond itself and know and live in some supreme Being, Consciousness and
Bliss of existence. For this immense task it is equipped only with the instruments
of its original Ignorance. Its limited being is the cause of all the difficulty,
discord, struggle, division that mars life. The limitation of its consciousness,
unable to dominate or assimilate the contacts of the universal Energy, is
the cause of all its suffering, pain and sorrow. Its limited power of consciousness
formulated in an ignorant will unable to grasp or follow the right law of
its life and action is the cause of all its error, wrong-doing and evil.
There is no other true cause; for all apparent causes are themselves circumstance
and result of this original sin of the being. Only when it rises and widens
out of this limited separative consciousness into the oneness of the liberated
spirit, can it escape from these results of its growth out of the Inconscience.
—The Human Cycle —The Suprarational Ultimate of Life, pg. 159-160
The ultimates of life are spiritual and only in the full light of the liberated
self and spirit can it achieve them. That full light is not intellect or
reason, but a knowledge by inner unity and identity which is the native self-light
of the fully developed spiritual consciousness —and, preparing that,
on the way to it, a knowledge by intimate inner contact with the truth of
things and beings which is intuitive and born of a secret oneness. Life seeks
for self-knowledge; it is only by the light of the spirit that it can find
it. It seeks for a luminous guidance and mastery of its own movements; it
is only when it finds within itself this inner self and spirit and, by it
or in obedience to it governs its own steps that it can have the illumined
will it needs and the unerring leadership. For it is so only that the blind
certitudes of the instincts and the speculative hypotheses and theories and
the experimental and inferential certitudes of reason can be replaced by
the seeing spiritual certitudes. Life seeks the fulfillment of its instincts
of love and sympathy, its yearnings after accord and union; but these are
crossed by opposing instincts and it is only the spiritual consciousness
with its realised abiding oneness that can abolish these oppositions. Life
seeks for full growth of being, but it can attain to it only when the limited
being has found in itself its own inmost soul of existence and around it
its own wider self of cosmic consciousness which can feel the world and all
being in itself and as itself. Life seeks for power; it is only the power
of the spirit and the power of this conscious oneness that can give it mastery
of itself and its world. It seeks for pleasure, happiness, bliss; but the
infrarational forms of these things are stricken with imperfection, fragmentariness,
impermanence and the impact of their opposites. Moreover infrarational life
still bears some stamp of the Inconscient in an underlying insensitiveness,
a dullness of fiber, a weakness of vibratory response, —it cannot attain
to true happiness or bliss and what it can obtain of pleasure it cannot support
for long or bear or keep any extreme intensity of these things. Only the
spirit has the secret of an unmixed and abiding happiness or ecstasy, is
capable of a firm tenseness of vibrant response to it, can attain and justify
a spiritual pleasure or joy of life as one form of the infinite and universal
delight of being. Life seeks a harmonious fulfillment of all its powers,
now divided and in conflict, all its possibilities, parts, members; it is
only in the consciousness of the one Self and Spirit that that is found,
for there they arrive at their full truth and their perfect agreement in
the light of the integral self-existence.
— The Human Cycle —The Suprarational Ultimate of Life, pg. 160-161
This process has to continue until the reason can find a principle of society
or else a combination and adjustment of several principles which will satisfy
it. The question is whether it will ever be satisfied or can ever rest from
questioning the foundation of established things, —unless indeed it
sinks back into a sleep of tradition and convention or else goes forward
by a great awakening to the reign of a higher spirit than its own and opens
into a suprarational or spiritual age of mankind. If we may judge from the
modern movement, the progress of the reason as a social renovator and creator,
if not interrupted in its course, would be destined to pass through three
successive stages which are the very logic of its growth, the first individualistic
and increasingly democratic with liberty for its principle, the second socialistic,
in the end perhaps a governmental communism with equality and the State for
its principle, the third —if that ever gets beyond the stage of theory— anarchistic
in the higher sense of that much-abused word, either a loose voluntary cooperation
or a free communalism with brotherhood or comradeship and not government
for its principle. It is in the transition to its third and consummating
stage, if or whenever that comes, that the power and sufficiency of the reason
will be tested; it will then be seen whether the reason can really be the
master of our nature, solve the problems of our interrelated and conflicting
egoisms and bring about within itself a perfect principle of society or must
give way to a higher guide. For till this third stage has its trial, it is
Force that in the last resort really governs. Reason only gives to Force
the plan of its action and a system to administer.
—The Human Cycle —The Curve of the Rational Age, pg. 181-182
The individualistic democratic ideal brings us at first in actual practice
to the more and more precarious rule of a dominant class in the name of democracy
over the ignorant, numerous and less fortunate mass. Secondly, since the
ideal of freedom and equality is abroad and cannot any longer be stifled,
it must lead to the increasing effort of the exploited masses to assert their
down-trodden right and to turn, if they can, this pseudo-democratic falsehood
into the real democratic truth; therefore, to a war of classes. Thirdly,
it develops inevitably as part of its process a perpetual strife of parties,
at first few and simple in composition, but afterwards as at the present
time an impotent and sterilising chaos of names, labels, programmes, war-cries.
All lift the banner of conflicting ideas or ideals, but all are really fighting
out under that flag a battle of conflicting interests. Finally, individualistic
democratic freedom results fatally in an increasing stress of competition
which replaces the ordered tyrannies of the infrarational periods of humanity
by a sort of ordered conflict. And this conflict ends in the survival not
of the spiritually, rationally or physically fittest, but of the most fortunate
and vitally successful. It is evident enough that whatever else it may be,
this is not a rational order of society; it is not at all the perfection
which the individualistic reason of man had contemplated as its ideal or
set out to accomplish.
Man, the half infrarational being, demands three things for his satisfaction, power, if he can have it, but at any rate the use and reward of his faculties and the enjoyment of his desires. In the old societies the possibility of these could be secured by him to a certain extent according to his birth, his fixed status and the use of his capacity within the limits of his hereditary status. That basis once removed and no proper substitute provided, the same ends can only be secured by success in a scramble for the one power left, the power of wealth. Accordingly, instead of a harmoniously ordered society there has been developed a huge organised competitive system, a frantically rapid and one-sided development of industrialism and, under the garb of democracy, an increasing plutocratic tendency that shocks by its ostentatious grossness and the magnitudes of its gulfs and distances. These have been the last results of the individualistic ideal and its democratic machinery, the initial bankruptcies of the rational age.
—The Human Cycle —The Curve of the Rational Age, pg. 185-187
Actually, our existence is closely knit with the existences around us and there
is a common life, a common work, a common effort and aspiration without which
humanity cannot grow to its full height and wideness. To ensure co-ordination
and prevent clash and conflict in this constant contact another power is
needed than the enlightened intellect. Anarchistic thought finds this power
in a natural human sympathy which, if it is given free play under the right
conditions, can be relied upon to ensure natural co-operation: the appeal
is to what the American poet calls the love of comrades, to the principle
of fraternity, the third and most neglected term of the famous revolutionary
formula. A free equality founded upon spontaneous co-operation, not on governmental
force and social compulsion, is the highest anarchistic ideal.
This would seem to lead us either towards a free co-operative communism, a unified life where the labour and property of all is there for the benefit of all, or else to what may better be called communalism, the free consent of the individual to live in a society where the just freedom of his individuality will be recognised, but the surplus of his labour and acquisitions will be used or given by him without demur for the common good under a natural co-operative impulse. The severest school of anarchism rejects all compromise with communism. It is difficult to see how a Stateless Communism which is supposed to be the final goal of the Russian ideal can operate on the large and complex scale necessitated by modern life. And indeed it is not clear how even a free communalism could be established or maintained without some kind of governmental force and social compulsion or how it could fail to fall away in the end either on one side into a rigorous collectivism or on the other to struggle, anarchy and disruption. For the logical mind in building its social idea takes no sufficient account of the infrarational element in man, the vital egoism to which the most active and effective part of his nature is bound: that is his most constant motive and it defeats in the end all the calculations of the idealising reason, undoes its elaborate systems or accepts only the little that it can assimilate to its own need and purpose. If that strong element, that ego-force in him, is too much overshadowed, cowed and depressed, too much rationalised, too much denied an outlet, then the life of man becomes artificial, top-heavy, poor in the sap of vitality, mechanical, uncreative. And on the other hand, if it is not suppressed, it tends in the end to assert itself and derange the plans of the rational side of man, because it contains in itself powers whose right satisfaction or whose final way of transformation reason cannot discover. If reason were the secret, highest law of the universe or if man the mental being were limited by mentality, it might be possible for him by the power of the reason to evolve out of the dominance of infrarational Nature which he inherits from the animal. He could then live securely in his best human self as a perfected rational and sympathetic being, balanced and well-ordered in all parts, the sattwic man of Indian philosophy; that would be his summit of possibility, his consummation. But his nature is rather transitional; the rational being is only a middle term of Nature's evolution.
—The Human Cycle —The End of the Curve of Reason, pg. 204-206
A deeper brotherhood, a yet unfound law of love is the only sure foundation
for a perfect social evolution, no other can replace it. But this brotherhood
and love will not proceed by the vital instincts or the reason where they
can be met, baffled or deflected by opposite reasonings and other discordant
instincts. Nor will it found itself in the natural heart of man where there
are plenty of other passions to combat it. It is in the soul that it must
find its roots; the love which is founded upon a deeper truth of our being,
the brotherhood or, let us say, —for this is another feeling than any
vital or mental sense of brotherhood, a calmer more durable motive-force,— the
spiritual comradeship which is the expression of an inner realisation of
oneness. For so only can egoism disappear and the true individualism of the
unique godhead in each man found itself on the true communism of the equal
godhead in the race; for the Spirit, the inmost Self, the universal Godhead
in every being is that whose very nature of diverse oneness it is to realise
the perfection of its individual life and nature in the existence of all,
in the universal life and nature.
This is a solution to which it may be objected that it puts off the consummation of a better human society to a far-off date in the future evolution of the race. For it means that no machinery invented by the reason can perfect either the individual or the collective man; an inner change is needed in human nature, a change too difficult to be ever effected except by the few. This is not certain; but in any case, if this is not the solution, then there is no solution; if this is not the way, then there is no way for the human kind. Then the terrestrial evolution must pass beyond man as it has passed beyond the animal and a greater race must come that will be capable of the spiritual change, a form of life must be born that is nearer to the divine. After all there is no logical necessity for the conclusion that the change cannot begin at all because its perfection is not immediately possible. A decisive turn of mankind to the spiritual ideal, the beginning of a constant ascent and guidance towards the heights may not be altogether impossible, even if the summits are attainable at first only by the pioneer few and far-off to the tread of the race. And that beginning may mean the descent of an influence that will alter at once the whole life of mankind in its orientation and enlarge for ever, as did the development of his reason and more than any development of the reason, its potentialities and all its structure.
—The Human Cycle —The End of the Curve of Reason, pg. 206-207
There is then a radical defect somewhere in the process of human civilisation;
but where is its seat and by what issue shall we come out of the perpetual
cycle of failure? Our civilised development of life ends in an exhaustion
of vitality and a refusal of Nature to lend her support any further to a
continued advance upon these lines; our civilised mentality, after disturbing
the balance of the human system to its own greater profit, finally discovers
that it has exhausted and destroyed that which fed it and loses its power
of healthy action and productiveness. It is found that civilisation has created
many more problems than 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 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 action 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, some 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 skeptical impotence, the pieties of Asia in stagnation and decline. Modern society has discovered a new principle of survival, progress, but the aim of that progress it has never discovered, —unless the aim is always 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. Only in its new turn inwards, towards a greater subjectivity now only beginning, is there a better hope; for by that turning it may discover that the real truth of man is to be found in his soul. It is not indeed certain that a subjective age will lead us there, but it gives us the possibility, can turn in that direction, if used rightly, the more inward movement.
It will be said that this is an old discovery and that it governed the old societies under the name of religion. But that was only an appearance. The discovery was there, but it was made for the life of the individual only, and even for him it looked beyond the earth for its fulfilment and at earth only as the place of his preparation for a solitary salvation or release from the burden of life. Human society itself never seized on the discovery of the soul as a means for the discovery of the law of its own being or on a knowledge of the soul's true nature and need and its fulfilment as the right way of terrestrial perfection. If we look at the old religions in their social as apart from their individual aspect, we see that the use society made of them was only of their most unspiritual or at any rate of their less spiritual parts. It made use of them to give an august, awful and would-be eternal sanction to its mass of customs and institutions; it made of them a veil of mystery against human questioning and a shield of darkness against the innovator. So far as it saw in religion a means of human salvation and perfection, it laid hands upon it at once to mechanise it, to catch the human soul and bind it on the wheels of a socio-religious machinery, to impose on it in the place of spiritual freedom an imperious yoke and an iron prison. It saddled upon the religious life of man a Church, a priesthood and a mass of ceremonies and set over it a pack of watchdogs under the name of creeds and dogmas, dogmas which one had to accept and obey under pain of condemnation to eternal hell by an eternal judge beyond, just as one had to accept and to obey the laws of society on pain of condemnation to temporal imprisonment or death by a mortal judge below. This false socialisation of religion has been always the chief cause of its failure to regenerate mankind.
—The Human Cycle —The Spiritual Aim and Life, pg. 209-211
The Dharma of science, thought and philosophy is to seek for truth by the intellect
dispassionately, without prepossession and prejudgement, with no other first
propositions than the law of thought and observation itself imposes. Science
and philosophy are not bound to square their observations and conclusions
with any current ideas of religious dogma or ethical rule or aesthetic prejudice.
In the end, if left free in their action, they will find the unity of Truth
with Good and Beauty and God and give these a greater meaning than any dogmatic
religion or any formal ethics or any narrower aesthetic idea can give us.
But meanwhile they must be left free even to deny God and Good and Beauty
if they will, if their sincere observation of things so points them. For
all these rejections must come round in the end of their circling and return
to a larger truth of the things they refuse. Often we find atheism both in
individual and society a necessary passage to deeper religious and spiritual
truth; one has sometimes to deny God in order to find him; the finding is
inevitable at the end of all earnest scepticism and denial.
—The Human Cycle —The Spiritual Aim and Life, pg. 214
When we speak of the superman, we speak evidently of something abnormal or
supernormal to our present nature, so much so that the very idea of it becomes
easily alarming and repugnant to our normal humanity. The normal human does
not desire to be called out from its constant mechanical round to scale what
may seem to it impossible heights and it loves still less the prospect of
being exceeded, left behind and dominated, —although the object of a
true supermanhood is not exceeding and domination for its own sake but precisely
the opening of our normal humanity to something now beyond itself that is
yet its own destined perfection. But mark that this thing which we have called
normal humanity, is itself something abnormal in Nature, something the like
and parity of which we look around in vain to discover; it is a rapid freak,
a sudden miracle. Abnormality in Nature is no objection, no necessary sign
of imperfection, but may well be an effort at a much greater perfection.
But this perfection is not found until the abnormal can find its own secure
normality, the right organisation of its life in its own kind and power and
on its own level. Man is an abnormal who has not found his own normality, —he
may imagine he has, he may appear to be normal in his own kind, but that
normality is only a sort of provisional order; therefore, though man is infinitely
greater than the plant or the animal, he is not perfect in his own nature
like the plant and the animal. This imperfection is not a thing to be at
all deplored, but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to us
an immense vista of self-development and self-exceeding. Man at his highest
is a half-god who has risen up out of the animal Nature and is splendidly
abnormal in it, but the thing which he has started out to be, the whole god,
is something so much greater than what he is that it seems to him as abnormal
to himself as he is to the animal. This means a great and arduous labour
of growth before him, but also a splendid crown of his race and his victory.
A kingdom is offered to him beside which his present triumphs in the realms
of mind or over external Nature will appear only as a rough hint and a poor
beginning.
—The Human Cycle —The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation, pg. 219
A change of this kind, the change from the mental and vital to the spiritual
order of life, must necessarily be accomplished in the individual and in
a great number of individuals before it can lay any effective hold upon the
community. The Spirit in humanity discovers, develops, builds into form in
the individual man: it is through the progressive and formative individual
that it offers the discovery and the chance of a new self-creation to the
mind of the race. For the communal mind holds things subconsciently at first
or, if consciously, then in a confused chaotic manner: it is only through
the individual mind that the mass can arrive at a clear knowledge and creation
of the thing it held in its subconscient self. Thinkers, historians, sociologists
who belittle the individual and would like to lose him in the mass or think
of him chiefly as a cell, an atom, have got hold only of the obscurer side
of the truth of Nature's workings in humanity. It is because man is not like
the material formations of Nature or like the animal, because she intends
in him a more and more conscious evolution, that individuality is so much
developed in him and so absolutely important and indispensable. No doubt
what comes out in the individual and afterwards moves the mass, must have
been there already in the universal Mind and the individual is only an instrument
for its manifestation, discovery, development; but he is an indispensable
instrument and an instrument not merely of subconscient Nature, not merely
of an instinctive urge that moves the mass, but more directly of the Spirit
of whom that Nature is itself the instrument and the matrix of his creations.
All great changes therefore find their first clear and effective power and
their direct shaping force in the mind and spirit of an individual or of
a limited number of individuals.
—The Human Cycle —Conditions for the Coming of the Spiritual Age, pg. 231
A spiritualised society would live like its spiritual individuals, not in the
ego, but in the spirit, not as the collective ego but as the collective soul.
This freedom from the egoistic standpoint would be its first and most prominent
characteristic. But the elimination of egoism would not be brought about,
as it is now proposed to bring it about, by persuading or forcing the individual
to immolate his personal will and aspirations and his precious and hard-won
individuality to the collective will, aims and egoism of the society, driving
him like a victim of ancient sacrifice to slay his soul on the altar of that
huge and shapeless idol. For that would be only the sacrifice of the smaller
to the larger egoism, larger only in bulk, not necessarily greater in quality
or wider or nobler, since a collective egoism, result of the united egoisms
of all, is as little a god to be worshipped, as flawed and often an uglier
and more barbarous fetish than the egoism of the individual. What the spiritual
man seeks is to find by the loss of the ego the Self which is one in all
and perfect and complete in each and by living in that to grow into the image
of its perfection, —individually, be it noted, though with an all-embracing
universality of his nature and its conscious circumference. It is said in
the old Indian writings that while in the second age, the age of Power, Vishnu
descends in the King, and in the third, the age of balance, as the legislator
or codifier, in the age of the Truth he descends as Yajna, that is to say,
as the Master of works manifest in the heart of his creatures. It is this
kingdom of God within, the result of the finding of God not in a distant
heaven but within ourselves, of which the state of society in an age of the
Truth, spiritual age, would be the result and the external figure.
—The Human Cycle —Conditions for the Coming of the Spiritual Age, pg. 239
A spiritual age of mankind will perceive the truth. It will not try to make
man perfect by machinery or keep him straight by tying up all his limbs.
It will not present to the member of the society 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 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 compulsions
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 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.
— The Human Cycle —Conditions for the Coming of the Spiritual Age, pg. 243
The one thing essential must take precedence, the conversion of the whole life
of the human being to the lead of the Spirit. The ascent of man into heaven
is not the key, but rather his ascent here into the Spirit and the descent
also of the Spirit into his normal humanity and the transformation of this
earthly nature. For that and not some post mortem salvation is the real new
birth for which humanity waits as the crowning movement of its long obscure
and painful course.
Therefore the individuals who will most help the future of humanity in the new age will 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 earthbound 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 failures. 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 ambulando1 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.
[1The answer of Stephenson to those who argued by strict scientific logic that his engine on rails could not and should not move, "Your difficulty is solved by its moving"]
—The Human Cycle —The Advent and Progress of the Spiritual Age, pg. 250-251
In either case there is no guarantee that this ruling class or ruling body
represent the best mind of the nation or its noblest aims or its highest
instincts. Nothing of the kind can be asserted of the modern politician in
any part of the world; he does not represent the soul of a people or its
aspirations. What he does represent is all the average pettiness, selfishness,
egoism, self-deception that is about him and these he represents well enough
as well as a great deal of mental incompetence and moral conventionality,
timidity and pretence. Great issues often come to him for decision, but he
does not deal with them greatly; high words and noble ideas are on his lips,
but they become rapidly the claptrap of a party. The disease and falsehood
of modern political life is patent in every country of the world and only
the hypnotised acquiescence of all, even the intellectual classes, in the
great organised sham, cloaks and prolongs the malady, the acquiescence that
men yield to everything that is habitual and makes the present atmosphere
of their lives. Yet it is by such minds that the good of all has to be decided,
to such hands that it has to be entrusted, to such an agency calling itself
the State that the individual is being more and more called upon to give
up the government of his activities. As a matter of fact, it is in no way
the largest good of all that is thus secured, but a great deal of organised
blundering and evil with a certain amount of good which makes for real progress,
because Nature moves forward always in the midst of all stumblings and secures
her aims in the end more often in spite of man's imperfect mentality than
by its means.
—The Human Cycle; The Ideal of Human Unity —The Inadequacy of the State Idea, pg. 278
Man within the community is now at least a half-civilised creature, but his
international existence is still primitive. Until recently the organised
nation in its relations with other nations was only a huge beast of prey
with appetites which sometimes slept when gorged or discouraged by events,
but were always its chief reason for existence. Self-protection and self-expansion
by the devouring of others were its dharma. At the present day there is no
essential improvement; there is only a greater difficulty in devouring. A "sacred
egoism" is still the ideal of nations, and therefore there is neither
any true and enlightened consciousness of human opinion to restrain the predatory
State nor any effective international law. There is only the fear of defeat
and the fear, recently, of a disastrous economic disorganisation; but experience
after experience has shown that these checks are ineffective.
—The Human Cycle; The Ideal of Human Unity —The Inadequacy of the State Idea, pg. 280-281
Perhaps liberty and equality, liberty and authority, liberty and organised
efficiency can never be quite satisfactorily reconciled so long as man individual
and aggregate lives by egoism, so long as he cannot undergo a great spiritual
and psychological change and rise beyond mere communal association to that
third ideal which some vague inner sense made the revolutionary thinkers
of France add to their watchwords of liberty and equality, —the greatest
of all the three, though till now only an empty word on man's lips, the ideal
of fraternity or, less sentimentally and more truly expressed, an inner oneness.
That no mechanism social, political, religious has ever created or can create;
it must take birth in the soul and rise from hidden and divine depths within.
—The Human Cycle; The Ideal of Human Unity —The Formation of the Nation Unit, pg. 360
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, and 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 a 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 manasa putra1 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. 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 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.
1Mind-born child, an idea and expression of Indian Puranic cosmology.
—The Human Cycle; The Ideal of Human Unity —The Religion of Humanity, pg. 541-543
But still in order to accomplish all its future, this idea and religion of
humanity has to make itself more explicit, insistent and categorically imperative.
For otherwise it can only work with clarity in the minds of the few and with
the mass it will be only a modifying influence, but will not be the rule
of human life. And so long as that is so, it cannot entirely prevail over
its own principal enemy. That enemy, the enemy of all real religion, is human
egoism, the egoism of the individual, the egoism of class and nation. These
it could for a time soften, modify, force to curb their more arrogant, open
and brutal expressions, oblige to adopt better institutions, but not to give
place to the love of mankind, not to recognise a real unity between man and
man. For that essentially must be the aim of the religion of humanity, as
it must be the earthly aim of all human religion, love, mutual recognition
of human brotherhood, a living sense of human oneness and practice of human
oneness in thought, feeling and life, the ideal which was expressed first
some thousands of years ago in the ancient Vedic hymns and must always remain
the highest injunction of the Spirit within us to human life upon earth.
Till that is brought about, the religion of humanity remains unaccomplished.
With that done, the one necessary psychological change will have been effected
without which no formal and mechanical, no political and administrative unity
can be real and secure. If it is done, that outward unification may not even
be indispensable or, if indispensable, it will come about naturally, not
as now it seems likely to be, by catastrophic means, but by the demand of
the human mind, and will be held secure by an essential need of our perfected
and developed human nature.
But this is the question whether a purely intellectual and sentimental religion of humanity will be sufficient to bring about so great a change in our psychology. 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 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 recreate 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 and 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. This is because the idea of humanity has been obliged in an intellectual age to mask its true character of a religion and a thing of the soul and the spirit and to appeal to the vital and physical mind of man rather than his inner being. It has limited his effort to the attempt to revolutionise political and social institutions and to bring about such a modification of the ideas and sentiments of the common mind of mankind as would make these institutions practicable; it has worked at the machinery of human life and on the outer mind much more than upon the soul of the race. It has laboured to establish a political, social and legal liberty, equality and mutual help in an equal association.
But though these aims are of great importance in their own field, they are not the central thing; they can only be secure when founded upon a change of the inner human nature and inner way of living; they are themselves of importance only as means for giving a greater scope and a better field for man's development towards that change and, when it is once achieved, as an outward expression of the larger inward life. Freedom, equality, brotherhood are three godheads of the soul; they cannot be really achieved through the external machinery of society or by man so long as he lives only in the individual and the communal ego. When the ego claims liberty, it arrives at competitive individualism. When it asserts equality, it arrives first at strife, then at an attempt to ignore the variations of Nature, and, as the sole way of doing that successfully, it constructs an artificial and machine-made society. A society that pursues liberty as its ideal is unable to achieve equality; a society that aims at equality will be obliged to sacrifice liberty. For the ego to speak of fraternity is for it to speak of something contrary to its nature. All that it knows is association for the pursuit of common egoistic ends and the utmost that it can arrive at is a closer organisation for the equal distribution of labour, production, consumption and enjoyment.
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 arrive before it can fulfill itself in the life of the race.
—The Human Cycle; The Ideal of Human Unity —The Religion of Humanity, pg. 544-547
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 fellowmen is his own life complete. There must be the
realisation by the race that only on 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 this 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.
A spiritual oneness which would create a psychological oneness not dependent upon any intellectual or outward uniformity and compel a oneness of life not bound up with its mechanical means of unification, but ready always to enrich its secure unity by a free inner variation and a freely varied outer self-expression, this would be the basis for a higher type of human existence.
—The Human Cycle; The Ideal of Human Unity —Summary and Conclusion, pg. 554-555
The one way out harped on by the modern mind which has been as much blinded
as enlightened by the victories of physical science, is the approved western
device of salvation by machinery; get the right kind of machine to work and
everything can be done, this seems to be the modern creed. But the destinies
of mankind cannot be turned out to order in an American factory. It is a
subtler thing than that which is now before us, and if the spirit of the
things we profess is absent or falsified, no method or machinery can turn
them out for us or deliver the promised goods. That is the one truth which
the scientific and industrialised modern mind forgets always, because it
looks at process and commodity and production and ignores the spirit in man
and the deeper inner law of his being.
The elimination of war is one of the cherished ideals and expectations of the age. But what lies at the root of this desire? A greater unity of heart, sympathy, understanding between men and nations, a settled will to get rid of national hatreds, greeds, ambitions, all the fertile seeds of strife and war? If so, it is well with us and success will surely crown our efforts. But of this deeper thing there may be something in sentiment, but there is still very little in action and dominant motive. For the masses of men the idea is rather to labour and produce and amass at ease and in security without the disturbance of war; for the statesmen and governing classes the idea is to have peace and security for the maintenance of past acquisitions and an untroubled domination and exploitation of the world by the great highly organised imperial and industrial nations without the perturbing appearance of new unsatisfied hungers and the peril of violent unrests, revolts, revolutions. War, it was hoped at one time, would eliminate itself by becoming impossible, but that delightfully easy solution no longer commands credit. But now it is hoped to conjure or engineer it out of existence by the machinery of a league of victorious nations admitting the rest, some if they will, others whether they like it or not, as subordinate partners or as proteges. In the magic of this just and beautiful arrangement the intelligence and goodwill of closeted statesmen and governments supported by the intelligence and goodwill of the peoples is to combine and accommodate interests, to settle or evade difficulties, to circumvent the natural results, the inevitable Karma of national selfishness and passions and to evolve out of the present chaos a fair and charmingly well-mechanised cosmos of international order, security, peace and welfare. Get the clockwork going, put your pennyworth of excellent professions or passably good intentions in the slot and all will go well, this seems to be the principle. But it is too often the floor of Hell that is paved with these excellent professions and passable intentions, and the cause is that while the better reason and will of man may be one hopeful factor in Nature, they are not the whole of nature and existence and not by any means the whole of our human nature. There are other and very formidable things in us and in the world and if we juggle with them or put on them, in order to get them admitted, these masks of reason and sentiment, —as unfortunately we have all the habit of doing and that is still the greater part of the game of politics,— the results are a foregone conclusion. War and violent revolution can be eliminated, if we will, though not without immense difficulty, but on the condition that we get rid of the inner causes of war and the constantly accumulating Karma of successful injustice of which violent revolutions are the natural reactions. Otherwise, there can be only at best a fallacious period of artificial peace: What was in the past will be sown still in the present and continue to return on us in the future.
—The Human Cycle; War and Self-determination —Foreword, pg. 576-577
So long as war does not become psychologically impossible, it will remain or,
if banished for a while, return. War itself, it is hoped, will end war; the
expense, the horror, the butchery, the disturbance of tranquil life, the
whole confused sanguinary madness of the thing has reached or will reach
such colossal proportions that the human race will fling the monstrosity
behind it in weariness and disgust. But weariness and disgust, horror and
pity, even the opening of the eyes to reason by the practical facts of the
waste of human life and energy and the harm and extravagance are not permanent
factors; they last only while the lesson is fresh. Afterwards, there is forgetfulness;
human nature recuperates itself and recovers the instincts that were temporarily
dominated. A long peace, even a certain organisation of peace, may conceivably
result, but so long as the heart of man remains what it is, the peace will
come to an end; the organisation will break under the stress of human passions.
War is no longer, perhaps a biological necessity, but it is still a psychological
necessity; what is within us, must manifest itself outside. Meanwhile it
is well that every false hope and confident prediction should be answered
as soon as may well be by the irony of the gods; for only so can we be driven
to the perception of the real remedy. Only when man has developed not merely
a fellow-felling with all men, but a dominant sense of unity and commonalty,
only when he is aware of them not merely as brothers —that is a fragile
bond,— but as parts of himself, only when he has learned to live, not
in his separate personal and communal ego-sense, but in a large universal
consciousness, can the phenomenon of war, with whatever weapons, pass out
of his life without the possibility of return. Meanwhile that he should struggle
even by illusions towards that end, is an excellent sign; for it shows that
the truth behind the illusion is pressing towards the hour when it may become
manifest as reality.
—The Human Cycle; War and Self Determination —The Passing of War?, pg. 586-587