CHAPTER IV Discovery of the Nation-Soul THE primal law and purpose of the individual life is to seek its own self-development. Consciously or half consciously or with an obscure unconscious groping it strives s and rightly strives at self-formulation, - to find itself, to discover within itself the law and power of its own being and to fulfil it. This aim in it is fundamental, right, inevitable because, even after all qualifications have been made and caveats entered, the individual is not merely the ephemeral physical creature, a 'mind and body that aggregates and dissolves, but a being, power of the eternal Truth, a self-manifesting spirit. In th

CHAPTER XXV War and the Need of Economic Unity THE military necessity, the pressure of war between nations and the need for prevention of war by the assumption of force and authority in the hands of an inter- national body, World-State or Federation or League of Peace, is that which will most directly drive humanity in the end towards some sort of international union. But there is behind it another necessity which is much more powerful in its action on the modern mind, the commercial and industrial, the necessity born of economic interdependence. Commercialism is a modern sociological phenomenon; one might almost say, that is the whole phenomenon

-39_The Formation of the Nation-Unit–The Three Stages .htm CHAPTER XII The Ancient Cycle of Prenational Empire- Building – The Modern Cycle of Nation-Building                                  WE HAVE seen that the building of the true national unit was a problem of human aggregation left over by the ancient world to. the mediaeval. The ancient world started from the tribe, the city-state, the clan, the small regional state - all of them minor units living in the midst of other like units which were similar to them in general type, kin usually in language and most often or very largely in race, marked off at least from other divisions of humanity by a tendency towards a common civilisation an

CHAPTER XXIII Forms of Government                 THE idea of a world-union of free nations and empires, loose at first, but growing closer-knit with time and experience, seems at first sight the most practicable form of political unity; it is the only form indeed which would be immediately practicable, supposing the will to unity to become rapidly effective in the mind of the race. On the other hand, it is the State idea which is now dominant. The State has been the most successful and efficient means of unification and has been best able to meet the various needs which the progressive aggregate life of societies has created for itself and is still creating. It

Self- Determination A NEW phrase has recently been cast out from the bloodstained yeast of war into the shifty language of politics, - that strange language full of Maya and falsities of self-illusion and deliberate delusion of others, which almost immediately turns all true and vivid phrases into a jargon, so that men may fight in a cloud of words without any clear sense of the thing they are battling for, - it is the luminous description of liberty as the just power, the freely exercised right of self-determination. The word is in itself a happy discovery, a thought-sign of real usefulness. For it helps to make definite and manageable what was apt till now to be sp

CHAPTER XXX The Principle of Free Confederation THE issues of the original Russian idea of a confederation of free self-determining nationalities were greatly complicated by the transitory phenomenon of a revolution which has sought, like the French Revolution before it, to transform immediately and without easy intermediate stages the whole basis not only of government, but of society, and has, moreover, been carried out under pressure of a disastrous war. This double situation led inevitably to an unexampled anarchy and, incidentally, to the forceful domination of art extreme party which represented the ideas of the Revolution in their most unco

The Passing of War? THE progress of humanity proceeds by a series of imaginations which the Will in the race turns into accomplished facts and a train of illusions which contain each of them an inevitable truth. The truth is there in the secret Will and Knowledge that are conducting our affairs for us and it reflects itself in the soul of mankind; the illusion is in the shape we give to that reflection, the veil of arbitrary fixations of time, place and circumstance which that deceptive organ of knowledge, the human intellect, weaves over the face of the Truth. Human imaginations are often fulfilled to the letter; our illusions on the contrary find the truth behind them

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 remodelling of society; it adopted in effect a harmony of

CHAPTER XII The Ancient Cycle of Prenational Empire- Building – The Modern Cycle of Nation-Building                                  WE HAVE seen that the building of the true national unit was a problem of human aggregation left over by the ancient world to. the mediaeval. The ancient world started from the tribe, the city-state, the clan, the small regional state - all of them minor units living in the midst of other like units which were similar to them in general type, kin usually in language and most often or very largely in race, marked off at least from other divisions of humanity by a tendency towards a common civilisation and

CHAPTER X The United States of Europe WE HAVE had to dwell so long upon the possibilities of the Empire-group because the evolution of the imperial State is a dominating phenomenon of the modern world; it governs the political tendencies of the later part of the nineteenth and earlier part of the twentieth century very much as the evolution of the free democratised nation governed the age which preceded ours. The dominant idea of the French Revolution was the formula of the free and sovereign people and, in spite of the cosmopolitan element introduced into the revolutionary formula by the ideal of fraternity, this idea became in fact the assertion