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. Ja

The Human Cycle The Ideal of Human Unity War and Self-Determination Publisher's Note   The Human Cycle was first published in monthly instalments in the review Arya between August 1916 and July 1918 under the title The Psychology of Social Development. Each chapter was written immediately before its publication. The text was revised during the late 1930s and again, more lightly, in 1949. That year it was published as a book under the title The Human Cycle.The Publishe

Chapter XV   Some Lines of Fulfilment   WHAT FAVOURED form, force, system among the many that are possible now or likely to emerge hereafter will be entrusted by the secret Will in things with the external unification of mankind, is an interesting and to those who can look beyond the narrow horizon of passing events, a fascinating subject of speculation; but unfortunately it can at present be nothing more. The very multitude of the possibilities in a period of humanity so rife with the most varied and potent forces, so fruitful of new subjective developments and objective mutations creates an impenetrable mist in which only vague forms of giants can

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 WorldNature has thrown up in the flow of human development and it

Chapter XX   The End of the Curve of Reason   THE RATIONAL collectivist idea of society has at first sight a powerful attraction. There is behind it a great truth, that every society represents a collective being and in it and by it the individual lives and he owes to it all that he can give it. More, it is only by a certain relation to the society, a certain harmony with this greater collective self that he can find the complete use for his many developed or developing powers and activities. Since it is a collective being, it must, one would naturally suppose, have a discoverable collective reason and will which should find more and mo

The Ideal of Human Unity   Part II Chapter XVII   Nature's Law in Our Progress — Unity in Diversity, Law and Liberty   FOR MAN alone of terrestrial creatures to live rightly involves the necessity of knowing rightly, whether, as rationalism pretends, by the sole or dominant instrumentation of his reason or, more largely and complexly, by the sum of his faculties; and what he has to know is the true nature of being and its constant self-effectuation in the values of life, in l

Chapter XIII   Reason and Religion   IT WOULD seem then that reason is an insufficient, often an inefficient, even a stumbling and at its best a very partially enlightened guide for humanity in that great endeavour which is the real heart of human progress and the inner justification of our existence as souls, minds and bodies upon the earth. For that endeavour is not only the effort to survive and make a place for ourselves on the earth as the animals do, not only having made to keep it and develop its best vital and egoistic or communal use for the efficiency and enjoyment of the individual, the family or the collective ego, substantiall

Chapter IV   The Inadequacy of the State Idea   WHAT, after all, is this State idea, this idea of the organised community to which the individual has to be immolated? Theoretically, it is the subordination of the individual to the good of all that is demanded; practically, it is his subordination to a collective egoism, political, military, economic, which seeks to satisfy certain collective aims and ambitions shaped and imposed on the great mass of the individuals by a smaller or larger number of ruling persons who are supposed in some way to represent the community. It is immaterial whether these belong to a governing class or emerge a

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 longevit

Chapter XXII   The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation   OUR NORMAL conduct of life, whether the individual or the social, is actually governed by the balance between two complementary powers, — first, an implicit will central to the life and inherent in the main power of its action and, secondly, whatever modifying will can come in from the Idea in mind — for man is a mental being — and operate through our as yet imperfect mental instruments to give this life force a conscious orientation and a conscious method. Life normally finds its own centre in our vital and physical being, in its cravings and its needs, in its deman