Chapter XIX   The Drive towards Centralisation and Uniformity — Administration and Control of Foreign Affairs   SUPPOSING the free grouping of the nations according to their natural affinities, sentiments, sense of economic and other convenience to be the final basis of a stable worldunion, the next question that arises is what precisely would be the status of these nation-units in the larger and more complex unity of mankind. Would they possess only a nominal separateness and become parts of a machine or retain a real and living individuality and an effective freedom and organic life? Practically, this comes to the question whet

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 selfinterest of establ

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 centuries 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 f

1919   THE YEAR 1919 comes to us with the appearance of one of the most pregnant and historic dates of the modern world. It has ended the greatest war in history, begotten a new thing in the history of mankind, a League of Nations which claims to be the foundation-stone for the future united life of the human race, and cleared the stage for fresh and momentous other constructions or destructions, which will bring us into another structure of society and of the framework of human life than has yet been known in the recorded memory of the earth's peoples. This is record enough for a single year and it looks as if there were already suffici

Chapter XXI   The Drive towards Legislative and Social Centralisation and Uniformity   THE GATHERING of the essential powers of administration into the hands of the sovereign is completed when there is unity and uniformity of judicial administration, — especially of the criminal side; for this is intimately connected with the maintenance of order and internal peace. And it is, besides, necessary for the ruler to have the criminal judicial authority in his hands so that he may use it to crush all rebellion against himself as treason and even, so far as may be possible, to stifle criticism and opposition and penalise that free thought and

Note on the Texts   The chapters that make up the principal contents of  The Ideal of Human Unity and War and Self-Determination were first published in the monthly review Arya between 1915 and 1920. The three works subsequently were revised by the author and published as books.   The Human Cycle. The twenty-four chapters making up this work appeared in the Arya under the title The Psychology of Social Development between August 1916 and July 1918. Sri Aurobindo began with a discussion of the psychological theory of social and political development put forward by the German historian Karl Lamprecht (1856 ­ 1915), about which he had read i

APPENDIX   II APPENDIX   II   The war is over, though peace still lingers, her way sadly embarrassed by blockades, armistices, secret negotiations, conferences where armed and victorious national egoisms dispute the bloodstained spoils of the conflict, political and other advantages, captured navies, indemnities, colonies, protectorates, torn fragments of dismembered States and nations, embarrassed most of all perhaps by the endeavour of the world's rulers and wise men to found upon the ephemeral basis of the results of war an eternal peace for humanity. But still the cannon at least is silent except where the embers of war still smoke and

Chapter X   Aesthetic and Ethical Culture   THE IDEA of culture begins to define itself for us a little more clearly, or at least it has put away from it in a clear contrast its natural opposites. The unmental, the purely physical life is very obviously its opposite, it is barbarism; the unintellectualised vital, the crude economic or the grossly domestic life which looks only to money-getting, the procreation of a family and its maintenance, are equally its opposites; they are another and even uglier barbarism. We agree to regard the individual who is dominated by them and has no thought of higher things as an uncultured and undeveloped human

Chapter XVI   The Suprarational Ultimate of Life   IN ALL the higher powers of his life man may be said to be seeking, blindly enough, for God. To get at the Divine and Eternal in himself and the world and to harmonise them, to put his being and his life in tune with the Infinite reveals itself in these parts of his nature as his concealed aim and his destiny. He sets out to arrive at his highest and largest and most perfect self, and the moment he at all touches upon it, this self in him appears to be one with some great Soul and Self of Truth and Good and Beauty in the world to which we give the name of God. To get at this as a spiritua

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 p