Vansittartism GERMANY is considered now, and naturally with great reason, as the arch criminal among nations. Such megalomania, such lust for wanton cruelty, such wild sadism, such abnormal velleities no people, it is said, have ever evinced anywhere on the face of the earth: the manner and the extent of it all are appalling. Hitler is not the malady; removal of the Fuehrer will not cure Germany. The man is only a sign and a symbol. The whole nation is corrupt to the core: it has been inoculated with a virus that cannot be eradicated. The peculiar German character that confronts and bewilders us now, is not a thing of today or even of yesterday; it has been there since Tacitus remark

The Sanctity of the Individual THE sanctity of the individual, the value of the human person is one of the cardinal articles of faith of the modern consciousness. Only it has very many avatars. One such has been the characteristic mark of the group of philosophers (and mystics) who are nowadays making a great noise under the name of Existentialists. The individual personality exists, they say, and its nature is freedom. In other words, it chooses, as it likes, its course of life, at every step, and Creates its destiny. This freedom, however, may. lead man and will inevitably lead him, according to one section of the group, to the perception and realisation of God, an infinite in which

Evolution of the Spiritual Consciousness EVEN the Vedic Rishis used to refer to the ancients, more ancient than they themselves. "The ancients", they said, "worshipped Agni, we too the moderns in our turn worship the same godhead". Or again, "Thus spoke our forefathers"; or, "So have we heard from those who have gone before us" and so on. Indeed, the tradition in the domain of spiritual discipline seems to have been always to realise once again what has already been realised by others, to rediscover what has already been discovered, to re-establish ancient truths. Others have gone before on the Path, we have only to follow. The teaching, the realisation is handed down uninterrupted

The Ideals of Human Unity THE unification of humanity is also a thing decreed. For it is the goal towards which Nature is proceeding slowly but inevitably, bringing into play factors and forces that work out that consummation. Man is a gregarious animal, a social being. He forms groups and collectivities and lives as a member among others with whom he is related and connected in various ways. These groupings are the units round which man's life crystallises and develops, the nuclei of a growing, an increasingly com­plex and unified organism.   The earliest and the most persistent unit is the family: it may be called the atomic unit of the social body, ultimate and unbr

Independence and its Sanction INDEPENDENCE is not a gift which one can receive from another, it is a prize that has to be won. In the words of the poet Bhasa, used in respect of empire, we can say also of liberty:   Talloke na tu yacyate na tu punardinaya diyate it is not a thing to be got for the mere asking, nor is it a thing to be made over to a weakling.   The lead Sri Aurobindo gave in this connection has not, sad to say, sufficiently attracted the attention of our people. Indeed what he suggested was exactly, (under the circumstances, the best way to acquire the necessary fitness, organised strength, capacity, the might and consequently the right just

The Revealer and the Revelation How the horizontal view limits and maims one's spiritual perception is further illustrated in the case of the famous Gloomy Dean. Dean Inge is a divine and as spiritual a person as one can hope to be in the modern world. He has, however, voluntarily clipped his wings and in the name of a surer rational knowledge and saner spirituality prefers a lower flight among known, familiar and nameable ranges to a transcendent soaring in mystic regions beyond. He has made a somewhat trenchant distinction between the Revelation and the Revealer. He says we can know God only by his qualities: what he is, if anything, besides his qualities none can define. In the

There's a Divinity There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will. * That is what man can do at his best, and even at his worst, rough-hew. Ignorant as he is, crude as his instruments are, he can do no better (and happily, no worse either). The ideals he has do not go very far, not much beyond his nose – they are limited by his senses, by his notions, by his immediate reactions to the circumstances of the moment. Even when the ends are commendable, the purposes decent, even when he is happily inspired, the materials and means at his disposal are crude and he uses them in a rough and ready manner. What he can achieve in this direction is not even a n

Man to be Surpassed "MAN is a thing that shall be surpassed". This burning phrase of Nietzsche has unsealed many eyes: it has also scalded and frightened others. It has been hailed by many as the motto, the mantra of the age to come; it has been denounced equally as a false light, a lead of arrogance and egoism. Erich Kahler (a Czech now become an American citizen) in his book Man the Measure seeks to strike a balance, but as the title indicates, evidently leans more to the second, the reactionary, than to the original ideal. He posits that man's humanity is to be preserved and fostered, that is to say, his true humanity, that which distinguishes him from mere animality. The Greek

The Immortal Nation GIBBON'S Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire must have been the original source of the inspiration that moved later on Spengler and Toynbee and others to posit a life-line for nations and races and mark its various stages of growth and evolution. The general theory put in a nutshell would be like this: mankind is composed of groups or aggregates of individuals and each has a life-history of its own even like an individual human being, in other words, an inescapable cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decline and disintegration. All groups – peoples; races, nations – have to pass through these destined stages, although, naturally, at different times and with a varyi

The Message of the Atomic Bomb   THE moralist – the Christian moralist particularly – has dubbed the atomic bomb as the Devil's engine; while the practical politician retorts that the accursed machine has cut short the war, saved more lives on the whole and reduced the extent and duration of suffering and agony. In any case the new weapon is so radical and devastating in its effectiveness that even politicians do not seem to be without a qualm and heartburning, not in the moral but in the physical and nervous sense. The atom bomb is a bombshell not upon your enemies alone, but it is a boomerang likely to turn back upon yourself, upon the whole of humanity and human civilisation. Archi