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 international 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 of modern society. The econ

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 of the free, independent,

Chapter V   NATION AND EMPIRE : REAL AND POLITICAL UNITIES         The problem of the unification of mankind resolves itself into two distinct difficulties. There is the doubt whether the collective egoisms already created in the natural evolution of humanity can at this time be sufficiently modified or abolished and whether even an external unity in some effective form can be securely established. And there is the doubt whether, even if any such external unity can be established, it will not be at the price of crushing both the free life of the individual and the free play of the various collective units already created in which there is a real and active life and substituting a St

Chapter IX   THE POSSIBILITY OF A WORLD-EMPIRE         The progress of the imperial idea from the artificial and constructive stage to the position of a realised psychological truth controlling the human mind with the same force and vitality which now distinguish the national idea above all other group motives, is only a possibility, not a certainty of the future. It is even no more than a vaguely nascent possibility and so long as it has not emerged from this inchoate condition in which it is at the mercy of the much folly of statesmen, the formidable passions of great human masses, the obstinate self-interest of established egoisms, we can have no surety that it will not even now

A POSTSCRIPT CHAPTER         At the time when this book was being brought to its close, the first attempt at the foundation of some initial hesitating beginning of the new world-order, which both governments and peoples had begun to envisage as a permanent necessity if there was to be any order in the world at all, was under debate and consideration but had not yet been given a concrete and practical form; but this had to come and eventually a momentous beginning was made. It took the name and appearance of what was called a League of Nations. It was not happy in its conception, well-inspired in its formation or destined to any considerable longevity or a supremely successful ca

Chapter XXXI   THE CONDITIONS OF A FREE WORLD-UNION         A free world-union must in its very nature be a complex unity based on a diversity and that diversity must be based on free self-determination. A mechanical unitarian system would regard in its idea the geographical groupings of men as so many conveniences for provincial division, for the convenience of administration, much in the same spirit as the French Revolution reconstituted France with an entire disregard of old natural and historic divisions. It would regard mankind as one single nation and it would try to efface the old separative national spirit altogether; it would arrange its system probably by continents and

Chapter XXXV   SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION         In other words,—and this is the conclusion at which we arrive,—while it is possible to construct a precarious and quite mechanical unity by political and administrative means, the unity of the human race, even if achieved, can only be secured and can only be made real if the religion of humanity, which is at present the highest active ideal of mankind, spiritualises itself and becomes the general inner law of human life.         The outward unity may well achieve itself,—possibly, though by no means certainly, in a measurable time,-because that is the inevitable final trend of the working of Nature in human society which makes

Chapter XVII   NATURE'S LAW IN OUR PROGRESS-UNITY IN DIVERSITY, LAW AND LIBERTY         For man alone of terrestrial creatures to live rightly involves the necessity of knowing rightly, whether, as rationalism pretends, by the sole or dominant instrumentation of his reason or, more largely and complexly, by the sum of his faculties; and what he has to know is the true nature of being and its constant self-effectuation in the values of life, in less abstract language the law of Nature and especially of his own nature, the forces within him and around him and their right utilisation for his own greater perfection and happiness or for that and the greater perfection and happiness of

Publishers' Note         The three books — The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity and War and Self-Determination—printed and published originally as separate volumes and at different times, are put together here in one volume : they form in fact a unit, a trilogy as it were, depicting the historical process that the Time-Spirit deploys in the elaboration of the divine plan in the evolution of human life.         The Human Cycle in its first edition (1949) was prefaced with the following explanatory note:       "The Chapters constituting this book were written under the title 'The Psychology of Social Development' from month to month in the philosophical monthly, '

Chapter XXXIII   INTERNATIONALISM AND HUMAN UNITY         The great necessity, then, and the great difficulty is to help this idea of humanity which is already at work upon our minds and has even begun in a very slight degree to influence from above our actions, and turn it into something more than an idea, however strong, to make it a central motive and a fixed part of our nature. Its satisfaction must become a necessity of our psychological being, just as the family idea or the national idea has become each a psychological motive with its own need of satisfaction. But how is this to be done ? The family idea had the advantage of grow-ing out of a primary vital need in our bein