Conservation and Progress
Mankind thinks naturally in extremes or else reconciles by a patchwork and compromise. It feels at ease in pursuing a single idea to its logical consequences and in viewing things from a single standpoint; but to harmonise different ideas in action and to view the facts from different stand- points is contrary to its native impulse. Oftenest it makes an incongruous patchwork rather than a harmony. The human mind is strong and swift in analysis; it synthesises with labour and imperfectly and does not feel at home in its synthesis. It divides, opposes and, placed between the oppositions it creates, becomes an eager partisan of one side or another; but to think wisely and impartially and with a certain totality is irksome and disgusting to the normal human being.
This characteristic of human mentality shows itself in the opposition we create between conservation and progress. Nothing in the universe can really stand still because everything there is a mould of Time and the very essence of Time is change by a movement forward. It is true that the world's movement is not in a straight line; there are cycles, there are spirals; but still it circles, not round the same point always, but round an ever advancing centre, and therefore it never returns exactly upon its old path and never goes really backward. As for standing still, it is an impossibility, a delusion, a fiction. Only the
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spirit is stable, the soul and body of things are in eternal motion. And in this motion there are the three determining powers of the past, future and present,-the present a horizontal and constantly shifting line without breadth between a vast realised infinity that both holds back and impels and a vast unrealised infinity that both repels and attracts.
The past is both a drag and a force for progress. It is all that has created the present and a great part of the force that is creating the future. For the past is not dead; its forms are gone and had to go, otherwise the present would not have come into being; but its soul, its power, its essence lives veiled in the present and ever-accumulating, growing, deepening will live on in the future. Every human being holds in and behind him all the past of his own race, of humanity and of himself, these three things determine his starting point and pursue him through his life's progress.
The future repels us even while it irresistibly attracts. The repulsion lies partly in our own natural recoil from the unknown, because every step into this unknown is a wager between life and death; every decision we make may mean either the destruction or the greater fulfillment of what we now are, of the name and form to which we are attached. But also it lies in the future itself; for there, governing that future, there are not only powers which call us to fulfil them and attract us with an irresistible force but other powers which have to be conquered and do not desire to yield themselves. But the conquest has
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The greatest spirits are therefore
those who have no fear of the future, who accept its
challenge and its wager; they have that sublime trust in the God or
Power that guides the world, that high audacity of
the human soul to wrestle with the infinite and
realise the impossible, I that wise and warrior confidence in
its ultimate destiny which marks the Avatars and prophets
and great innovators and renovators.
If we consider carefully we shall see
that the past is indeed a huge force of conservation,
but of conservation that is not immobile, that on the
contrary offers itself as material for change and new
realisation; that the present is the constant change and new actual
realisation which the past desires and compels; and that
the future is that force of new realisation not yet actual
towards which the
past was moving and for the sake of
which it lived.
Yet the human mind in its mania of
division and opposition seeks to set them at strife and ranges
humanity into various camps, the partisans of
the past, the partisans of the present, the partisans of the
future, the partisans
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The partisans of the
future call
themselves the party of progress, the children of light and
denounce the past as ignorant, evil, a mass of errors and
abuses; their View alone has the monopoly of the light,
the truth, the good-a light, good and truth which will
equally be denounced as error and evil by succeeding
generations. The partisans of the present look with horror upon
all progress as an impious and abominable plunge into
error and evil and degeneration and ruin; for them the
present is the culmination of humanity;-as previous "present"
times were for all the preceding generations and
as the future which they abhor will be for these
unprogressive souls if the should then reincarnate; they will then
defend it with the same passion and asperity against
another future as they now attack it in the interests of the
present. The partisans of the past are of two kinds. The first
admit the defects of the present but support it in so far
as it still cherishes the principles of the high, perfect,
faultless, adorable past, that golden age of the race or
community, and because even if somewhat degenerate, its forms
are a bulwark against the impiety of progress; if
they admit any change, it is in the direction of the past that
they seek it. A second kind condemn the present root and
branch as degenerate, hateful, horrible, vicious, accursed;
they erect a past form as the hope of a humanity
returning to the wisdom of its forefathers. And to such
quarrels of children the intellectuals and the leaders of
thought and faith lend the power of the specious or moving word
and the striking
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idea and the emotional fervour or religious ardour which they conceive to be the very voice and light and force of Truth itself in its utter self-revelation.
The true thinker can dispense with the eclat which attaches to the leader of partisans. He will strive to see this great divine movement as a whole, to know in its large lines the divine intention and goal in it without seeking to fix arbitrarily its details; he will strive to understand the greatness and profound meaning of the past without attaching himself to its forms, for he knows that forms must change and only the formless endures and that the past can never be repeated, but only its essence preserved, its power, its soul of good and its massed impulse towards a greater self-fulfillment; he will accept the actual realisations of the present as a stage and nothing more, keenly appreciating its defects, self-satisfied errors, presumptuous pretentious because these are the chief enemies of progress, but not ignoring the truth and good that it has gained; and he will sound the future to understand what the Divine in it is seeking to realise, not only at the present moment, not only in the next generation, but beyond, and for that he will speak, strive, if need be battle, since battle is the method still used by Nature in humanity, even when all the while he knows that there is more yet beyond beside which, when it comes to light, the truth he has seized will seem erroneous and limited.
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