Chapter XVIII   The Infrarational Age of the Cycle   IN SPIRITUALITY then would lie our ultimate, our only hope for the perfection whether of the individual or of the communal man; not the spirit which for its separate satisfaction turns away from the earth and her works, but that greater spirit which surpasses and yet accepts and fulfils them. A spirituality that would take up into itself man's rationalism, aestheticism, ethicism, vitalism, corporeality, his aspiration towards knowledge, his attraction towards beauty, his need of love, his urge towards perfection, his demand for power and fullness of life and being, a spirituality that

Chapter XV   The Suprarational Good   WE BEGIN to see, through the principle and law of our religious being, through the principle and law of our aesthetic being, the universality of a principle and law which is that of all being and which we must therefore hold steadily in view in regard to all human activities. It rests on a truth on which the sages have always agreed, though by the intellectual thinker it may be constantly disputed. It is the truth that all active being is a seeking for God, a seeking for some highest self and deepest Reality secret within, behind and above ourselves and things, a seeking for the hidden Divinity: the truth

Chapter XIV   The Suprarational Beauty   RELIGION is the seeking after the spiritual, the suprarational and therefore in this sphere the intellectual reason may well be an insufficient help and find itself, not only at the end but from the beginning, out of its province and condemned to tread either diffidently or else with a stumbling presumptuousness in the realm of a power and a light higher than its own. But in the other spheres of human consciousness and human activity it may be thought that it has the right to the sovereign place, since these move on the lower plane of the rational and the finite or belong to that border-land where the

Chapter XXXIV   The Religion of Humanity   A RELIGION of humanity may be either an intellectual and sentimental ideal, a living dogma with intellectual, psychological and practical effects, or else a spiritual aspiration and rule of living, partly the sign, partly the cause of a change of soul in humanity. The intellectual religion of humanity already to a certain extent exists, partly as a conscious creed in the minds of a few, partly as a potent shadow in the consciousness of the race. It is the shadow of a spirit that is yet unborn, but is preparing for its birth. This material world of ours, besides its fully embodied things of the present,

'The Human Cycle„The Ideal of Human Unity„War and Self-Determination' by Sri Aurobindo - Page 1 of 50 A League of Nations   ANCIENT tradition believed in a golden age of mankind which lay in the splendid infancy of a primeval past; it looked back to some type or symbol of original perfection, Saturnian epoch, Satya Yuga, an age of sincere being and free unity when the sons of heaven were leaders of the human life and mind and the law of God was written, not in ineffective books, but on the tablets of man's heart. Then he needed no violence of outer law or government to restrain him from evil or to cut and force his free being into the machine-made Procrustean mould of

Chapter VIII   The Problem of a Federated Heterogeneous Empire   IF THE building up of a composite nation in the British Isles was from the beginning a foregone conclusion, a geographical and economic necessity only prevented in its entire completion by the most violent and perverse errors of statesmanship, the same cannot be said of the swifter, but still gradual and almost unconscious process by which the colonial empire of Great Britain has been evolving to a point at which it can become a real unity. It was not so long ago that the eventual separation of the colonies carrying with it the evolution of Australia and Canada

Chapter V   True and False Subjectivism   THE SUBJECTIVE stage of human development is that critical juncture in which, having gone forward from symbols, types, conventions, having turned its gaze superficially on the individual being to discover his truth and right law of action and its relation to the superficial and external truth and law of the universe, our race begins to gaze deeper, to see and feel what is behind the outside and below the surface and therefore to live from within. It is a step towards self-knowledge and towards living in and from the self, away from knowledge of things as the not-self and from the living according

Comments on Some Examples of W   Comments on Some Examples of Western Poetry (up to 1900) Catullus   Quaenam te mala mens, miselle Ravide, agit praecipitem in meos iambos? quis deus tibi non bene advocatus vecordem parat excitare rixam? an ut pervenias in ora vulgi? quid vis? qualubet esse notus optas? eris, quandoquidem meos amores cum longa voluisti amare poena.   Unless meos amores is purposely vague, at least two objects of Catullus's affections must be in question? Would you say that this piece is in a vein of good-humoured banter?   I do not think meos amores ne

English Metres   Octosyllabic Metre   The regular octosyllabic metre is at once the easiest to write and the most difficult to justify by a strong and original rhythmic treatment; it may be that it is only by filling it with very original thought-substance and image and the deeper tones and sound significances which these would bring that it could be saved from its besetting obviousness. On the other hand, the melody to which it lends itself, if raised to a certain intensity, can be fraught with a rescuing charm that makes us forget the obviousness of the metre.     4 February 1932   Iambic Pentameter   An inspirat

Examples of Grades of Perfectio Examples of Grades of Perfection in Poetic Style   Examples from Classical and Mediaeval Writers   Would you please tell me where in Homer the "descent of Apollo" occurs?1   It is in the first fifty or a hundred lines of the first book of the Iliad.2   I don't suppose Chapman or Pope have rendered it adequately.   Of course not ―nobody could translate that ―they have surely made a mess of it. Homer's passage translated into English would sound perfectly ordinary. He gets the best part of his effect from his rhythm. Translated it would run merely like this, "And he descended from the peaks of