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

War and Self-Determination Foreword to the First Edition   THE FOUR essays published in this volume1 were not written at one time or conceived with any intentional connection between them in idea or purpose. The first was written in the early months of the war, two others when it was closing, the last recently during the formation and first operations of that remarkably ill-jointed, stumbling and hesitating machine, the League of Nations. But still they happen to be bound to

Chapter XXIII   Conditions for the Coming of a Spiritual Age   A CHANGE of this kind, the change from the mental and vital to the spiritual order of life, must necessarily be accomplished in the individual and in a great number of individuals before it can lay any effective hold upon the community. The Spirit in humanity discovers, develops, builds its formations first in the individual man: it is through the progressive and formative individual that it offers the discovery and the chance of a new self-creation to the mind of the race. For the communal mind holds things subconsciently at first or, if consciously, then in a confused chaoti

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 w

Chapter IX   Civilisation and Culture   NATURE starts from Matter, develops out of it its hidden Life, releases out of involution in life all the crude material of Mind and, when she is ready, turns Mind upon itself and upon Life and Matter in a great mental effort to understand all three in their phenomena, their obvious action, their secret laws, their normal and abnormal possibilities and powers so that they may be turned to the richest account, used in the best and most harmonious way, elevated to their highest as well as extended to their widest potential aims by the action of that faculty which m

The Ideal of Human Unity   Part I     Chapter I   The Turn towards Unity: Its Necessity and Dangers   THE SURFACES of life are easy to understand; their laws, characteristic movements, practical utilities are ready to our hand and we can seize on them and turn them to account with a sufficient facility and rapidity. But they do not carry us very far. They suffice for an active superficial life from day to day, but th