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Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/Other Editions/The Human Cycle_1950 Edn/The age of Individualism and Reason.htm
CHAPTER II
THE AGE OF INDIVIDUALISM AND REASON
AN INDIVIDUALISTIC age of human society comes as a
result of the corruption and failure of the conventional, as a
revolt against the reign of the petrified typal figure. Before it can
be born it is necessary that the old truths shall have been lost
in the soul and practice of the race and that even the conventions which ape and replace them shall have become devoid of
real sense and intelligence: stripped of all practical justification,
they exist only mechanically by fixed idea, by the force of custom, by attachment to the form. It is then that men in spite of
the natural conservatism of the social mind are compelled at las
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/Other Editions/The Human Cycle_1950 Edn/The Objective and Subjective views of life.htm
CHAPTER VI
THE OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE
VIEWS OF LIFE
THE principle of individualism is the liberty of the human being regarded as a separate existence to develop himself
and fulfil his life, satisfy his mental tendencies, emotional and
vital needs and physical being according to his own desire governed by his reason; it admits no other limit to this right and this
liberty except the obligation to respect the same individual liberty and right in others. The balance of this liberty and this obligation is the principle which the individualistic age adopted in
its remodeling of society; it adopted in effect a harmony of compromises between rights and duties, liberty and la
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/Other Editions/The Human Cycle_1950 Edn/Index.htm
INDEX
Absolute, the
as contributing value to all things, 162
as the end of religious seeking, 144
behind every movement of life, 122
in German subjectivism, 52
of beauty, 160.—(also see God)
Abyssinia, 57 f
Aesthetics, 132
Africans, 55, 57
America, Latins of, 55
American poet, 243
Anabaptist, 17
Ananda, the essential principle of delight, no, 152-153,
l66
Anarchism:
as a rational principle of society, 216, 226
as opposed to communism, 243-244
ignores the infrarational in man, 244
its realisation in spiritualised society, 288
philosophical, 23
spiritual, as nearer
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/Other Editions/The Human Cycle_1950 Edn/True and False Subjectivism.htm
CHAPTER V
TRUE AND FALSE SUBJECTIVISM
THE subjective stage of human development is that
critical juncture in which, having gone forward from symbols,
types, conventions, having turned its gaze superficially on the
individual being to discover his truth and right law of action and
its relation to the superficial and external truth and law of the
universe, our race begins to gaze deeper, to see and feel what is
behind the outside and below the surface and therefore to
live from within. It is a step towards self-knowledge and towards
living in and from the self, away from knowledge of things as the
not-self and from the living according to this objective idea of
life and th
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/Other Editions/The Human Cycle_1950 Edn/Civilisations and Culture.htm
CHAPTER IX
CIVILISATION AND CULTURE
NATURE starts from Matter, develops out of it its hidden Life, releases out of involution in life all the crude material of Mind and, when she is ready, turns Mind upon itself and upon Life and Matter in a great mental effort to understand all three in their phenomena, their obvious action, their secret laws, their normal and abnormal possibilities and powers so that they may be turned to the richest account, used in the best and most harmonious way, elevated to their highest as well as extended to their widest potential aims by the action of that faculty which man alone of terrestrial creatures clearly possesses, the intelligent wil
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/Other Editions/The Human Cycle_1950 Edn/The Advent and Progress of the Spiritual Age.htm
CHAPTER XXIV
THE ADVENT AND PROGRESS OF THE
SPIRITUAL AGE
IF A SUBJECTIVE age, the last sector of a social cycle, is to
find its outlet and fruition in a spiritualised society and the emergence of mankind on a higher evolutionary level, it is not enough
that certain ideas favourable to that turn of human life should
take hold of the general mind of the race, permeate the ordinary
motives of its thought, art, ethics, political ideals, social effort,
or even get well into its inner way of thinking and feeling. It is
not enough even that the idea of the kingdom of God on earth,
a reign of spirituality, freedom and unity, a real and inner equality and harmony—and not merel
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/Other Editions/The Human Cycle_1950 Edn/Religion as the Law of Life.htm
CHAPTER XVII
RELIGION AS THE LAW OF LIFE
SINCE the infinite, the absolute and transcendent, the
universal, the one is the secret summit of existence and to reach
the spiritual consciousness and the Divine the ultimate goal and
aim of our being and therefore of the whole development of the
individual and the collectivity in all its parts and all its activities, reason
cannot be the last and highest guide; culture, as it is understood ordinarily, cannot be the directing light or find out the
regulating and harmonising principle of all our life and action.
For reason stops short of the Divine and only compromises with the problems of
life, and culture in order to attain the Tra
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/Other Editions/The Human Cycle_1950 Edn/The Spiritual Aim and Life.htm
CHAPTER XXI
THE SPIRITUAL AIM AND LIFE
A SOCIETY founded upon spirituality will differ in two
essential points from the normal human society which begins from and ends with
the lower nature. The normal human society starts from the gregarious instinct modified by a diversity
and possible antagonism of interests, from an association and clash of egos,
from a meeting, combination, conflict of ideas, tendencies and principles; it tries first to patch up an accommodation
of converging interests and a treaty of peace between discords, founded on a
series of implied contracts, natural or necessary adjustments which become customs of the aggregate life, and to
these contracts as
Resource name: /E-Library/Works of Sri Aurobindo/English/Other Editions/The Human Cycle_1950 Edn/The Cycle of Society.htm
CHAPTER I
THE CYCLE OF SOCIETY
MODERN SCIENCE, obsessed with the greatness of its
physical discoveries and the idea of the sole existence of Matter,
has long attempted to base upon physical data even its study of
Soul and Mind and of those workings of Nature in man and
animal in which a knowledge of psychology is as important as
any of the physical sciences. Its very psychology founded itself
upon physiology and the scrutiny of the brain and nervous system. It is not
surprising therefore that in history and sociology attention should have been concentrated on the external data, laws,
institutions, rites, customs, economic factors and developments,
while the deeper psy