SECTION FOURTEEN   AVATARHOOD AND EVOLUTION Connection of Avatarhood with Evolution (1)   AVATARHOOD would have little meaning if it were not connected with the evolution. The Hindu procession of the ten Avatars is itself, as it were, a parable of evolution. First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibious animal between land and water, then the land animal, then the Man-Lion Avatar, bridging man and animal, then man as dwarf, small and undeveloped and physical but containing in himself the godhead and taking possession of existence, then the rajasic, sattwic, n

SECTION EIGHT   LOVE AND BHAKTI ˗ RELATIONSHIPS IN YOGA   1. LOVE AND BHAKTI IN YOGA II. THE TRUE MOVEMENT OF DEVOTION III. HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS IN YOGA I. LOVE AND BHAKTI IN YOGA   Importance of Bhakti in Yoga   IT is a misunderstanding to suppose that I am against Bhakti or against emotional Bhakti —which comes to the same thing, since without emotion there can be no Bhakti. It is rather the fact that in my writings on Yoga I have given Bhakti the highest place. All that I have said at any time which could account for this misunderstanding was

SECTION ELEVEN   DIFFICULTIES OF TRANSFORMATION   I. NECESSITY OF TRANSFORMATION II. THE TRUE WAY OUT OF DIFFICULTIES III. TRANSFORMATION OF THE VITAL  NATURE IV. VAIRAGYA V. REMOVAL OF EGO VI. CONVERSION OF SEX, FOOD AND SLEEP VII. MADNESS IN YOGA I. NECESSITY OF TRANSFORMATION   Insufficiency of Human Life and Need of Transformation—Yogic Tradit

Chapter XXVII   THE PERIL OF THE WORLD-STATE         This then is the extreme possible form of a World-State, the form dreamed of by the socialistic, scientific, humanitarian thinkers who represent the modern mind at its highest point of self-consciousness and are therefore able to detect the trend of its tendencies, though to the half-rationalised mind of the ordinary man whose view does not go beyond the day and its immediate morrow, their speculations may seem to be chimerical and Utopian. In reality they are nothing of the kind; in their essence, not necessarily in their form, they are, as we have seen, not only the logical outcome, but the inevitable practical last end of t

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 an extreme party which represented the ideas of the Revolution in their most uncompromising and violent  fo

Chapter VI   ANCIENT AND MODERN METHODS OF EMPIRE         A clear distinction must be made between two political aggregates which go equally in current language by the name of empire. For there is the homogeneous national and there is the heterogeneous composite empire. In a sense, all empires are composites, at any rate, if we go back to their origins; but in practice there is a difference between the imperial aggregate in which the component elements are not divided from each other by a strong sense of their separate existence in the whole and the imperial aggregate in which this psychological basis of separation is still in vigour. Japan before the absorption of Formosa and Kore

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 protected in that community with each other and in their diversity from o

Chapter III   THE GROUP AND THE INDIVIDUAL         It is a constant method of Nature, when she has two elements of a harmony to reconcile, to proceed at first by a long continued balancing in which she sometimes seems to lean entirely on one side, sometimes entirely to the other, at others to correct both excesses by a more or less successful temporary adjustment and moderating compromise. The two elements appear then as opponents necessary to each other who therefore labour to arrive at some conclusion of their strife. But as each has its egoism and that innate tendency of all things which drives them not only towards self-preservation but towards self-assertion in proportion

Chapter XVI   THE PROBLEM OF UNIFORMITY AND LIBERTY         The question with which we started has reached some kind of answer. After sounding as thoroughly as our lights permit the possibility of a political and administrative unification of mankind by political and economic motives and through purely political and administrative means, it has been concluded that it is not only possible, but that the thoughts and tendencies of mankind and the result of current events and existing forces and necessities have turned decisively in this direction. This is one of the dominant drifts which the World-Nature has thrown up in the flow of human development and it is the logical consequence

Chapter XXII   WORLD-UNION OR WORLD-STATE         This, then, in principle is the history of the growth of the State. It is a history of strict unification by the development of a central authority and of a growing uniformity in administration, legislation, social and economic life and culture and the chief means of culture, education and language. In all, the central authority becomes more and more the determining and regulating power. The process culminates by the transformation of this governing sole authority or sovereign power from the rule of the central executive man or the capable class into that of a body whose proposed function is to represent the thought and will of th