II

The Conception of Progress and

the Present World Crisis

There was a time when society was almost static in its vision. Children followed the occupation of their parents and transmitted their knowledge and skill to their own children. There was little change from one generation to another. Civilizations and empires grew, bloomed and decayed, without affecting the ways of living and the outlook of the masses. What men perceived in the contemporary events which they witnessed was their intensity, their violence, not their evolutionary trend, which was invisible to them.

One can really say that the life horizons of the majority of men in fifteenth-century Europe were almost unchanged from what they had been in Greece in the fifth century B.C. It cannot be denied that the Indian peasant of the beginning of this century was working under the same immediate aims of life, almost the same environment, as his ancestors three thousand years ago.

The hard facts of nature, the pressing necessities of human life were accepted as they were and the idea that a concerted effort and will could bring about a gradual improvement of economic and social conditions was almost inexistent. Refuge was taken in the hope of a distant heaven after death, or of a future rebirth upon earth or of a final liberation from this apparently aimless chain of lives.

There is no doubt however that the ancient civilizations of India, China, Egypt, Greece, Rome, still shining in the memories of men, produced people of the highest character and ability. In the field of pure reasoning, the works of Greek mathematicians indicate a level not below that of the modern mind. Also the monuments of the past bear witness to the ingenuity and skill of the craftsmen, as for instance in stone-cutting, carpentry, smelting, spinning and weaving, dyeing. Some achievements in architecture and engineering

are of the first order and have withstood the ravages of time.

Kings, princes and ministers tried no doubt at times to improve the conditions of their peoples, but these efforts were sporadic and localized in space and time; they never formed a common heritage which could be used for the betterment of the lot of the ordinary man. In fact, one is surprised to note what little attention was given to alleviating the conditions of life and work of the toiler of the soil and the common labourer. The plough and the means a carrying loads are, in the country-side of most of the under developed nations, still much the same as they were in Egypt at the time of the Pyramids.

As a result of this stagnancy the productivity of the labourer remained almost constant for hundreds and even thousands of years. The only source of wealth was human labour and accumulation of riches could only be achieved by plundering, squeezing or exploiting others. It is then easy to understand that a general enrichment could not be visualized. What was missing was the application of the mind to the mastery of physical nature and the deliberate an concerted effort to apply knowledge to the economic and social uplift of the whole society.

It is with the seventeenth century that the notion of progress dawned upon the human mind,² and within two centuries Europe had become the scene of a great intellectual activity in the cause of general education and culture in an effort at emancipation from tradition, convention and prejudice, and with a keen interest in the theoretical an applied sciences..

This was the period of the "Enlightenment". An immense optimism swept over Europe. Says Condorcet (1743-1794) the French mathematician-philosopher:

There is no limit set to the perfecting of the powers of man The progress of this perfectibility, henceforth independent of

any power that might wish to stop it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us.³

Then, with the effervescence of the Age of Reason, and through the upheavals of the English and next of the American and French revolutions, the notion of political equality was brought to the future with anew hopefulness.

At the same time, accelerated by the wars of the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic wars, there began and spread what is known as the Industrial Revolution.

What gave it a truly revolutionary character, says Heilbronner,

... was not alone the fecundity of ideas and the newness of the machinery it produced, but their large-scale economic applicability. Inventions such as the power loom and the steam engine could no longer be said merely to decorate the surface of life, they penetrated to a hitherto ignored substratum of existence -its foundation of common labour. For the first time in history, the productivity of common toil was itself made the focus of systematic investigation. The consequences, in terms of man's conception of his environment, were of incalculable magnitude. Nature, which had hitherto been the master of man, now became his great slave.4

We find from the pen of Marx and Engels the following appreciation of this great transformation:

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarcely one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjugation of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground - what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?5

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But mankind had to pay a heavy price for these achievements. What made them possible was the power of money - its accumulation by the bourgeoisie and its investment in machinery and equipment, what is known as capitalism - and this money was literally squeezed out of the labouring class. The nineteenth century was a terrible age for the industrial countries of the West, beginning with England and followed by the Continent and America. The conditions in the factories were dreadful, no consideration was given to the most elementary needs of a human being. Cheap labour had to be got, and cheap labour was got.

This exploitation of man was a first cause of disillusionment. The relations between workmen and employers were marked by bitterness and hostility; revolt - veiled or open - grew in the hearts of the industrial slaves. The workmen united and sought to fight capitalism and its tyranny by association. Here we find the origin of syndicalism, and a fertile ground for class hatred whose seeds have been deliberately sown by Marxism and so actively propagated by modern Communism.

This first disillusion was to be followed by others. The philosophers who initiated the Age of Reason claimed that science had as object the pursuit of truth and that progress towards truth would by itself ensure moral progress. Men, knowing more, would become more wise and, wiser, they would be better, more impartial and just. Well, this has certainly been belied by the subsequent course of events.

The great catchwords of the French Revolution - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - which had aroused so much enthusiasm, have lost most of their content and become mere shadows of themselves. The democratic institutions, for whose establishment men fought and gave their lives, seem now so imperfect and so void, especially in time of emergency, that many nations have turned to more authoritarian forms of government. Political equality has been reduced to the right to vote, and voting has been deprived of much significance by demagogy and propaganda. We have seen

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the most blatant autocracies acclaimed by the very people whom they were to ruin.

Moreover, science has abandoned its ideal of "truth". Limiting itself to the knowledge reached through the senses, and consistently refusing to admit any higher source of knowledge, science has found that it can truly know nothing. It declared henceforth truth unknowable and decided to confine itself to efficiency and convenience, i.e., it has taken utility and not truth as its criterion. No scientist would today claim that his theory is true, but only that it is compatible with the facts and permits prediction.

This stand was probably unavoidable, given the necessity of ridding the human mind of superstitions and idle accretions. Nevertheless by this fall from its dharma, science has lost the power to help man to discover and fulfil the aim of his life.

True, progress has been tremendous in the scientific and technological fields, resulting in a marked advance in the economic sphere and a raising of the standard of living. With the improvement in the conditions of life and labour, there was no doubt an amelioration in the social relations. But human nature has not changed to any appreciable extent. What has happened in the world in the last fifty years is sufficient proof of this obduracy.

It is this apparent unchangeableness of human nature which is the radical obstacle to a wholesome and harmonious progress. Egoism and greed have always tried to divert any new discovery or improvement for the benefit of a few individuals or for a group - class or nation. Even the goodwill of men and their spirit of sacrifice have been exploited in this way.

No doubt there is something to write on the credit side: suppression of slavery and child-labour, improvements in the working conditions and the social status of labourers, general education, emancipation of women, improvement in health, elimination of famines, increase in longevity, etc. These are definite gains and I have no intention to minimize

them. But one must underline the vast gap between the hopes and the realization - the dreams, one might say, and the reality.

The economists of the last century (Adam Smith, Riccardo, Malthus, Marx) were all very pessimistic about the improvement of social conditions. For them there was no betterment in prospect. The situation at the end of the century seemed to confirm this outlook. This had led some thinkers to question the notion of an all-embracing progress of society. It was in Western Europe, at the beginning of our century, that strong criticism began to be levelled at modern civilization, taken as a whole. Books like Spengler's The Decline of the West, Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses brought this pessimism more visibly in front. They tried to prove either that civilization had reached its peak and was thence- forth on the downgrade or that it had missed the mark and betrayed its high ideals. They denied that the private morality, the level of social ethics and the general nobility of public ideals were now in any sense superior to those of the best of ancient civilizations. In fact, all the benefits of the material advance seemed to have been captured by the bourgeoisie, and the labourer was left to his misery. There was no sign that people in our age were really "happier" than in the past.

Although these pessimistic views were signs of uneasiness and misgiving, they were too contrary to the inner faith of man in himself to affect in any way the trend of evolution. Visible improvements in the social conditions soon became sufficient to warrant the belief that this betterment could be carried further and further till the differences between the classes of society were reduced or abolished. One had only to prevent the advantages of the technological progress from being monopolized by the ruling or propertied classes. These ideas are the foundations of the socialistic pattern of society with the realization of a welfare society as an ideal. We may observe that no definite mention is made of a moral

or spiritual progress, but the hope is expressed that co- operation will willy-nilly replace competition in the relations between man and man.

With the passing years and the tremendous impetus given to scientific and technological progress by the two world wars, the fruits of patient investment began to manifest, the material and social improvements in the industrially developed nations could no longer be denied. The disparity between the common labourers and the white-collared staff and management has considerably diminished and a classless society is almost near at hand - although achieved by different methods in the capitalist U.S.A. and in the socialist U.S.S.R.

A new conception of wealth has thus emerged. As it has by now gained an implicit and general acceptance, it is difficult for us to realize its truly revolutionary character. It would certainly have startled the ancient philosophers and historians. As Bertrand de Jouvenel puts it:

The great modern idea is that it is possible to enrich

collectively and individually all members of a society through

continuous progress in the organization of work, in its

processes and instruments, that this enrichment provides by

itself the means of its further development, and that this

development can be rapid and indefinite.6

But new questions arise. Technological progress has many social and political implications, pleasant and unpleasant. Great dangers are looming in the future, and doubts are rising whether humanity will have the foresight, the wisdom and the strength to avoid them. The vision of the future that emerges is depicted in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four and by many minor writers in fiction. The whole picture is frightful; it is a nightmare. In the same line of thought, we may mention the appearance of philosophies which dwell almost with plea- sure on the absurdity of life. And truly, if this is what the

future has in store for us, life is an absurdity. We should not forget that this trend of thinking appears when the material advance in Western Europe has exceeded all past performance.

In the U.S.A., where capitalism found its most favourable conditions owing to political, geographical and psychological conditions - abundance of material resources, paucity of population, the adventurousness of the emigrant settlers - the general outlook has been for long more favourable. The American people are optimistic and self-reliant. They have confidence in themselves and in the social order they are creating. They also believe that historic and other forces (including God) are on their side. They have achieved the highest material well-being hitherto attained upon earth, what may justly be called a civilization of plenty, with an abundance of consumer goods of all descriptions, food, houses, motor cars and aeroplanes, gadgets of all kinds. But they are somewhat disconcerted by the fact that the social order does not follow the same ascending movement. Criminality is rather on the increase, especially juvenile delinquency; the same is true of mental cases and the use of narcotics is spreading.

America would probably have already what is needed for a beautiful, rich and harmonious life for all, if the competitive system of its industrial organization were not mortally afraid of a decline in the rate of production. Some economists have maintained that a very serious obstacle to total disarmament is the fear that an extensive cut-down in military production would cause an industrial recession of unprecedented magnitude. This is debatable: a planned reconversion of industry was achieved immediately after World War II and seems equally feasible today. But one thing is certain, that modern economy is based on an increased production and, with a view to increase the industrial output, an artificial stimulation of the needs is resorted to by publicity on a vast scale. A considerable amount of expenditure is directed to the acquisition of

superfluities, to such an extent that the expansion of well- being has been perverted into a civilization of gadgets. And with the gradual reduction in working hours and the prospect of a civilization of leisure, people are beginning to feel uneasy, as if they were baffled by the very abundance that is bestowed upon them.7

As an illustration, I shall quote an American writer in one of the recent issues of Life:

Many thoughtful Americans are disturbed because as a nation we seem bereft of a sense of purpose. We have the mood and stance of a people who have 'arrived' and have nowhere else to go.... We have tried to fill ourselves with science and education, with better living and pleasure, with the many other things we thought we wanted, but we are still empty and bored.... We are confused by the prejudice, hatred, greed and lust that are within us. We seem to be caught helpless in quicksand: we want out of our human dilemma but are powerless. The American genius has enabled us to change virtually everything but ourselves .... It is absolutely impossible to change society and reverse the moral trend unless we ourselves are changed from the inside out."8

The ideal of a welfare society, which has taken possession of the mind and heart of man, was indeed a great historic force in shaping the modern world.9 But as it is drawing close to its realization, it is losing its inspiring power. It is no longer generating the old enthusiasm, as is evidenced by the decline of the socialist parties in Western Europe. This ideal has to give way to a higher or deeper ideal. Otherwise a dangerous vacuum may be created leading to disruption and chaos.

From all this, two facts emerge almost with a certitude:

1. Humanity has definitely turned its face towards the future. Man knows that he can change his lot. He knows that more and more he will have the power to influence his

destiny. An elimination of poverty and disease, a life of abundance and leisure are almost within the reach of the most advanced nations. The latest discoveries of science have put in our hands an immense, almost limitless power which can be turned for the ultimate material liberation of man from the curse of labour'" or for his own destruction. 2. But we know also that all the material achievements, however needed, will not satisfy us in the end, if they come alone. They will leave us weary and empty.

What then is missing?

There is in man an aspiration to master his own nature, to outgrow and surpass himself, to give himself, to create beauty, to know more, to love more. The Spirit, the Divine within, presses for emergence and mastery. When the spiritual element in man comes forward and gains ground, even a little, then true joy reveals itself. Here only can we find plenitude and happiness, a satisfaction which does not leave any bitter taste. There is in man the search for the Absolute.

In former times, man turned to religion to satisfy aspirations which seemed to be denied by his surroundings. But religion is gradually losing its hold, and the young especially are turning away from it.

One reason is that all religions take their inspiration from the past. Their founders or heroes were mighty figures who lived centuries ago, in a world far different from the one we know. The problems they had to solve have little in common with the situations in which we now move. We may admire their fortitude, their unflinching devotion, their sovereign detachment, but it is difficult for our young people to believe that their example is applicable to the present-day life.

Another reason is that religions have always laid emphasis on a world beyond, giving to this one only a passing importance. For some religions this world is an illusion from which we have to awaken. For some it is a cosmic snare from which man has painfully to disentangle himself. For others it

is a place of trial, in which a divine decree has placed us so that we may gain immortal life elsewhere when our term is finished. All religions have more or less shunned the world and life, and declared them impure, debased and incapable of regeneration. What our young men and women are truly looking for is to know the aims of their life - of human life in general, of their own life in particular - to find an ideal that can give a meaning to their daily work, to their joys and sorrows, to life in the society in which they are going to enter, and at the same time help them in growing towards the mastery and perfection which vaguely but intimately they feel waiting in the depths of themselves.

In short they aspire to Heaven, but they cannot repudiate the Earth.

The advent of Progress has really cut the course of history in two: one epoch in which men were looking to the Past, another in which they turn their look to the Future. As Heilbronner notes:

Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, the past Asiatic civilizations, even the Renaissance, did not look ahead for the ideals and inspirations of their existence, but sought them in their origins, in their ancient glories, their fabled heroes, their pristine virtues real or fancied. Unlike modern man, who dreams of the world he will make, pre-modern man dreamed of the world he had left.11

This is a remark of profound significance for the under- standing of the modern crisis.

It is the urge of the Spirit towards mastery and perfection that is the motive power behind the modern conception of Progress. Perfection was certainly a living ideal in many religions and self-mastery an aim of all spiritual disciplines, but their ultimate end was self-transcendence and they were also almost exclusively concerned with the individuals. They had little bearing on the social and physical life of the collectivity. The world was not an object of interest for the

yogins and spiritual seekers of old.

There has now been an awakening to the possibility of an advance, through a concerted effort of mankind, towards some perfection and mastery in the material and social life. This very possibility has inspired the mind and inflamed the heart of man with a stupendous fervour and energy.

When we see to what sacrifices people have been moved by this ideal of a New World to come, what sufferings - humiliation, exile, torture, prison, death - have been endured by rebels and revolutionaries so that future generations may see "The Day", we realize how powerful the appeal is.

It is from this ideal that the communist faith has drawn its motive force. But, as the communists visualize only an economic and social progress, not a spiritual change for which they have at present no place, they are bound to meet with the same disillusionment as the capitalist system. The disillusionment can be avoided only if, having satisfied the immediate material needs of the masses and being con- fronted with a growing uneasiness and sense of emptiness in the lives of people, they awaken to the necessity of a deeper life and give to Progress a wider meaning.

The so-called under-developed countries will follow the same path. They have to catch up in material development - that is, in the scientific, technological and economic fields - and for that there is only one process: industrialization. The forces that work for the unification of the world demand it, and they are too strong to be resisted. No country can for long remain isolated, culturally and economically. The means of transportation and communication have made our planet so small that what is happening in a country has immediate and widespread repercussions the world over. Nations have become interdependent. The need of catching up on the economically rich is being felt by all the economically poor; and if they did not feel it themselves, the facts of geography and history would sooner or later impose it.

Industrialization has several aspects, the most important

of which are the formation of technicians and the industrial equipment of a country. The building up of power stations, irrigation projects, heavy industry plants requires an enormous amount of capital investment, which has to be poured into the country within a short time. Outside financial contribution, even if it is forthcoming on a large scale, can only minimize the difficulty, it cannot eliminate it. What is certain is that any country undergoing the process of industrialization must find at home most of the needed capital through the mobilization of savings and taxation. Production and import of consumer goods will be restricted so that all available resources will be directed to the production and import of equipment goods. One of the effects will be to keep at a low level the purchasing power, and this will impede the rise of the standard of living in the country. A great sacrifice will be demanded from the people, and from all classes of society.

It means that for a considerable length of time, several decades at least, and in spite of very hard work, the standard of life will rise very slowly, if at all. Such is the price to be paid for industrialization.

The process can be achieved only if there is a great unity of purpose in the country. This unity of purpose may be created in two ways, by persuasion or by compulsion - in a democratic or in a totalitarian way. Persuasion is a difficult task - habits, prejudices, vested interests, misunderstandings - stand in the way. Compulsion may appear the easier way, but it is a painful one as it proceeds by elimination of the dissenting voices and by intense propaganda. Many of the things highly valued in democracies will be encroached upon, at least for a time: individual freedom, private property, freedom of the press, etc. Compulsion may achieve quick results, which for many will justify the price. The persuasion methods will probably be slower, as the pace of investment cannot be set so high. If the standard of life is not allowed to rise at all, the situation will become intolerable. An increase there must be, but even then the progress

will appear so slow that people may get tired, disgruntled and impatient. They will criticize what will appear to be the incapacity of the government and some elements of the population will agitate for quicker, or slower, methods. Indeed, for persuasion to succeed, there must be a strong and living ideal which has to be created if it does not already exist. It will be the aim of the next chapter to present such an ideal appropriate to our time.

Up to now we have not spoken of the quantitative aspect of the material progress. Statisticians have found that the economic growth - industrial output, yearly income, etc. - evidences an increasing rate of advance. It means that economic progress is accelerated. The graph which the economists draw to represent it is not a straight line, however steep, but a curve much more rapidly ascending, an exponential curve. And many come to the conclusion that the gap between the highly developed and the under- developed countries is bound to increase and not decrease, unless some unforeseen event changes the course of history. But this is a controversial question and we need not enter into it.

However one thing is certain. Those of us who are 60 or 70 years old have witnessed many changes since childhood, and we know that the changes are pressing on more and more, whether in science, technology, social evolution, political affairs at home or abroad. The whole world seems to be moving faster and faster. It is likely that this tempo will still accelerate, so that it will become increasingly difficult to keep abreast of the time. Already signs of stress are visible in many domains of human life.

Serious thinking about the future of mankind can now be found outside the field of social philosophers and historians. A very interesting example is the "Prospective" movement, about which I shall give a few indications as it is only of a few years' existence and is still little known outside France, its country of origin.

A number of men in positions of authority, mostly in

industry, finance and education, accustomed to decision and planning, decided to form an association with the aim of studying and defining the attitude we should have towards the future. Several symposia were held under the auspices of that association and the results of the exchange of views were published in a magazine with the title Prospective.

Owing to the accelerated rate of change of the modern world, planning in the public as well as the private sector has become imperative. But planning requires some knowledge of the future. Not only do we know little about the future, but we know hardly anything about the conditions that would facilitate an access to the future. Up to now the future has generally been considered as a "continuation of the past", because, it was thought, the future is created by the very forces which created the past. Well, this is an entirely unfounded assumption. It supposes that the same forces will continue to act and that no new force will intervene. This may have been approximately true when society was static and change small. But nowadays it does not hold at all. The future will depend, not only on the forces which created the past, but on our action.

Tomorrow's problems do not exist today. Some of them will rise out of fortuitous occurrences, but the larger part will spring up from our own action, by which the present structure and balance of forces will be changed.12

It is therefore wrong to try to understand the future by simply studying the past. Paul Valéry had already written vividly: "We are entering the future moving backwards", i.e., the eyes fixed on the past.

Future is not [only] what comes 'after' the present, but what is different from it and especially what is 'open'. Future is not 'closed', it is 'open'.13

Moreover, a correct understanding of the present requires

a certain insight into the future; knowledge of the past is insufficient. Would one grasp the meaning of the chrysalis from the knowledge of the caterpillar alone? But the meaning becomes clear when the butterfly is known.

Again, we are living not in an old world, tired and exhausted, but in a world in constant rejuvenation, as it displays more and more new possibilities. There is every- where a strong urge to try for new solutions for both old and new problems.

It has become imperative to penetrate into the innumerable possibilities that the future contains, and analyze them. The reasoning mind alone is not a suitable instrument for the purpose; it must be supported by imagination - not an imagination which is a loose play of images, but

...a disponibility [i.e., openness] of the mind, which refuses to be imprisoned within rigid frames, and for which nothing is ever decisively settled and everything may at any time come back into question (J. de Bourbon-Busset).14

The disposition of the mind which tries to seize the newness of a situation, what makes it different from the past, has been called the "prospective" attitude.

One is therefore led to distinguish two kinds of prevision: one which considers what will be as a prolongation of what has been, a simple projection of the past, the other which explores the future as an unknown land. To these two extremes of prevision, it is proposed to give the names respectively, "projection" and "prospective".

The characteristics of prospective, as distinguished from¦ projection (or ordinary prevision), have been defined; t0j give an instance:

. . . prospective is not interested in events, but in situations; it does not supply dates, or in case it gives dates, it is with a wide approximation. It can thus reach a high degree of certitude, for previsions are more likely to be correct when they cover a long period than a short one.15

Place, does not allow me to say more about the "Prospective" movement. I shall only give some of its first conclusions about our future itself:

During prehistoric times, species underwent sometimes slow evolutions, sometimes swift mutations. But they were un- conscious of either. Mankind today has the privilege - and the responsibility - to transform itself knowingly. It rests with man to choose his destiny (Gaston Berger).16

It seems certain that man cannot proceed for long while keeping the same ways of thinking, the same discrepancy between thought and life. Adaptation to changing conditions will become increasingly difficult. Shall we find a way of becoming more adaptable? This new adaptability would not be the taking of new forms or a new attitude, more adequate than the old ones; it would mean

... not to set in any attitude, but to become open, plastic, flexible, to remain quiet in the midst of agitation and to learn how to be happy in mobility (Gaston Berger).17

To show how much the question of adaptation to a moving world is among the pressing preoccupations of responsible leaders, I may quote the words of Prime Minister Nehru when leaving Palam Airport for New York on the 26th September 1960 to attend the United Nations session. Asked if the handling of the situation in the Congo was one of the causes of the present world crisis, Mr. Nehru said:

The reason is basically that the normal human mind is lagging behind the great technological achievement of the age and it is functioning in an almost pre-technological age, trying to catch up with it. World movements and world problems are also governed by the technological changes, but the human mind which produces the technological

changes still sticks to the old ruts. So there is a gap. What value has a national frontier when one flies in a jet plane? That brings or ought to bring in a new sense of responsibility on human beings, including the moral responsibility of adapting themselves to it. The average human being is constantly finding it difficult to adapt himself to it. Most of us live in the past age, mentally and physically.'18

This remark has not lost its actual interest, as can be seen from a recent statement by U Thant at the United Nations, which has been reported under the caption:

U Thant Thinks It Is High Time to Change Human Nature

United Nations, 10.4.67 - The fact that a fraction of the money the world is going to spend for armaments in 1967 could suffice to finance in a hitherto unimaginable measure economic and social programmes, both national and international, is a notion well within the grasp of the man in the street.

Now men are henceforth in a position, if united, to foresee and to a certain extent determine the future of human development. This is however possible only if we stop being afraid of one another, harrying one another and if, together, we accept, welcome and prepare the changes that have inevitably to take place.

If that means a change of human nature, well, it is high time to work at it; what has certainly to change is certain political attitudes and habits of man.19

According to some writers of the "Prospective" movement,20 there is bound to come a "kind of mutation of the1 ideas which govern the world" (Jacques Havet). Others foresee a more profound transformation: .

Obviously, the principal method of 'prospective' is the extrapolation, the extension of observed curves, of trends and

orientation, and their projection into the dimension of the future. This method would not of course admit of application without a great many precautions, correctives and reservations, on the one hand arising from the almost infinite number of factors liable to intervene, on the other hand because of the distortion of the very systems of reference.

Nevertheless, when we notice that a number of curves drawn from widely different fields of data and having therefore a certain amount of mutual independence, tend in the same direction, we may reasonably think that at their point of convergence there is 'something that occurs' that we may try to encompass. And this in the same way as the radio- telescopes signal to us the existence, somewhere in inter- stellar space, of 'something' that we cannot see but none-the- less try to specify.

We are inclined to think that the phenomena or the group of phenomena whose existence is heralded by such curves (of which instances can be multiplied) is of an amplitude that transcends the present capacities of our imagination, and that this is of the same order of magnitude as a biological mutation. We stand before an imminent explosion (in the biological sense) of humanity.

This foreseeable, may be calculable, phenomenon, seems to carry with it the appearance of a new human type. Undoubtedly, we have to abandon the old cradle-song of humanism, "the eternal common fund of man", shake up our routine-bound imaginations, put away in a drawer the antiquated pieces of the old chess-board, and get ready for something altogether different.

This something - one can, and one should, try to reckon its site, draw its obvious outline, prepare and promote its advent; for it is sprung from our line, and it is we who have its charge.21

India with her unique spiritual tradition has a problem of her own. She is at present torn by two tendencies. On one hand, she feels the need of eradicating material backward-

poverty. Facing resolutely the future, she has entered full- heartedly into a vast programme of industrialization. She had to; the unity of the world demands it and would impose it by force if necessary. Only it may be questioned whether India will have to follow the same long road that the industrial nations of the West have trodden, pass through the same experiences and the same disappointments. The defects and dangers of a conception of progress restricted to material well-being and to social adjustments are now sufficiently evident to urge us to aim farther and higher. One may reasonably doubt whether the ideal of a welfare society will carry India a long way through the economic, social and cultural crisis which she is now facing.

On the other hand India is still drawn powerfully by her past, a past in which she had lived until very recently and in which are found the sources of her spiritual tradition.

There lies a painful dilemma. A price will have to be paid for this industrialization, and not a light price either. Investment has to be resorted to on a large scale and, as we have explained, this means that the standard of life cannot be allowed to rise as hopefully expected. The endurance of the nation will be taxed to the utmost. The severity of the effort will be difficult to bear. And this at a time when the old ideals are collapsing. The moral standards are deteriorating, the elite is baffled and submits to the new gospel coming from the West, youth is searching for its way in the darkness and does not find it. It appears that the price India will have to pay for catching up with the technologically advanced countries is the loss of her spiritual greatness.

And still there is a hope. For there is nothing which prevents India from looking into the future for her fulfilment. Hinduism is not a "closed" religion, i.e., a religion which is centred exclusively on a single great personality of the past, its founder. Great sages have throughout the ages rewritten the Eternal Dharma to fit the need of the age. This is a point of immeasurable importance which makes India's position unique.

As late as yesterday it was Sri Ramakrishna who came to enrich the spiritual inheritance of India by including in it all religions, showing by his experience that God - the same God - can be found and reached through all religions. The unity of all religions is truly the message that Sri Ramakrishna brought to India and to the world.

It was left to another son of India, Sri Aurobindo, to show that India has in her soul the power to link in one great movement the past and the future. He shows us that the highest aspirations of the race can and will be fulfilled here upon earth, that we are at the dawning of a new Age, and that an unimaginably wonderful future lies ahead of humanity.

With Sri Aurobindo, the past is luminously linked with the future.

If we can understand and accept this ideal and make it a living and dynamic reality, it will give us the meaning of the present world crisis, and illumine our way. To youth it will give a purpose in life and the strength to achieve this great destiny.

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