5. THE TREND TOWARDS HUMAN UNITY

    The social evolution of the human race is necessarily a development of the relations between three constant factors, individuals, communities of various sorts and mankind. Each seeks its own fulfilment and satisfaction, but each is compelled to develop them not independently but in relation to the others. The first natural aim of the individual must be his own inner growth and fullness and its expression in his outer life ; but this he can only accomplish through his relations with other individuals, to the various kinds of community—religious, social, cultural and political—to which he belongs and to the idea and need of humanity at large. The community must seek its own fulfilment,but whatever its strength of mass consciousness and collective

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organisation, can accomplish its growth only through its individuals under the stress of the circumstances set forth by its environment and subject to the conditions imposed by its relations to other communities and individuals and to humanity at large. Mankind d as a whole has at Present no consciously organised common life; it has only an inchoate. Organisation determined much more by circumstances than by human intelligence and will. And yet the idea and the fact of our common human existence, nature, destiny has always exercised its strong influence on human thought and action. One of the chief Preoccupations of ethics and religion has been the obligations of man to mankind. The pressure of the large movements and fluctuations of the race has always affected the destinies of its separate communities and there has been a constant return Pressure of separate communuties—social, cultural, political, religious to expand and include,if it might be, the totality of the race. And if or when the whole of humanity arrives at an organised common life and seeks a common fulfilment and satisfaction, it can only do it by means of the relation of this whole to its parts and by the aid of the expanding life of individual human beings and of the communities whose progress constitutes re larger terms of the life of the race.

    Nature works always through these three terms and none of them can be abolished. She starts from the visible manifestation of the one and the many, from the totality and its constituent units and creates intermediary unities between the two without which there can be no full development either of the totality or of the units. In the life-type itself she creates always thee three terms of genus, species and indivitual. But while in the animal life she is satisfied to separate rigidly and group summarily, in the human she

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strives, on the contrary to override the divisions she has made and lead the whole kind to the sense of unity arid the realisation of oneness. Man's communities are formed not so much by the instinctive herding together of a number .of individuals of the same genus or species as by local association, community of interests and community of ideas;. and these limits tend always to be overcome in the widening of human thoughts and sympathies brought about by the closer intermingling of races, nations, interests, ideas, cultures. Still, if overcome in their separatism, they are not abolished in their fact, because they repose on an essential principle of Nature,—diversity in unity. Therefore it would seem that the ideal or ultimate aim of Nature must be to develop the individual and all individuals to their full capacity, to develop the community and all communities to the full expression of that many-sided existence and potentiality which their differences were created m express, and to evolve the united life of mankind to its full common capacity and satisfaction, not by suppression of the fullness of life of the individual or the smaller commonalty, but by full advantage taken of the diversity which they develop. This would seem the soundest way to increase the total riches of mankind and throw them into a fund of common possession and enjoyment.