CHAPTER-II The Age of Individualism and Reason AN INDIVIDUALISTIC age of human society comes as a result of the corruption and failure of the conventional, as a revolt against the reign of the petrified typal figure: Before it can be born it is necessary that the old truths shall have been lost in the soul and practice of the race and that even the conventions which ape and replace them shall have become devoid of real sense and intelligence; stripped of all practical justification, they exist only mechanically by fixed idea, by the force of custom, by attachment to the form. It is then that men in spite of the natural conservatism of the social m

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

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 l

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES THE HUMAN CYCLE The Author's Note in the 1949 Edition      "The chapters constituting this book were written under the title THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT from month to month in the philosophical monthly, Arya, from August 15, 1916 to July 15, 1918 and used recent and contemporary events as well as illustrations from the history of the past in its explanation of the theory of social evolution put forward in these pages. The reader has there- fore to go back in mind to the events of that period in order to follow the line of thought and the atmosphere in which it developed and at one time there suggested itself the necessity of brin

CHAPTER XXIV The Need of Military Unification IN THE process of centralisation by which all the powers of an organised community come to be centred in one sovereign governing body, - the process which has been the most prominent characteristic of national formations, - military necessity has played at the beginning the largest overt part. This necessity was both external and internal, - external for the defence of the nation against disruption or subjection from without, internal for its defence against civil disruption and disorder. If a common administrative authority is essential in order to bind together the constituent parts of a nation in the for

CHAPTER XI The Reason as Governor of Life REASON using the intelligent will for the ordering of the inner and the outer life is undoubtedly the highest developed faculty of man at his present point of evolution; it is the sovereign, because the governing and self-governing faculty in the complexities of our human existence. Man is distinguished from other terrestrial creatures by his capacity for seeking after a rule of life, a rule of his being and his works, a principle of order and self-development, which is not the first instinctive, original, mechanically self-operative rule of his natural existence. The principle he looks to is neither the unchan

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 successfu

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 world-union, 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 whether

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