SRI AUROBINDO INTERNATIONAL CENTRE OF EDUCATION COLLECTION   VOL. IX   THE HUMAN CYCLE THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY WAR AND SELF-DETERMINATION   Sri Aurobindo       SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM PONDICHERRY 1962 Publishers: © Sri Aurobindo International Centre Of Education, Pondicherry 1962     All rights reserved     Printed at: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press Pondicherry-2 PRINTED IN INDIA

THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY     PART ONE   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 super-ficial life from day to day, but they do not solve the great problems of existence. On the other hand, the knowledge of life's profundities, its potent secrets, its great, hidden, all-determining laws is exceedingly difficult to us. We have fou

Chapter VI   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, econo-ic, 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 as in modern States from the mass partly

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 economical 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 Britan 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 at least into young independent nations was cons

Chapter XXIX   THE IDEA OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS         The only means that readily suggests itself by which a necessary group-freedom can be preserved and yet the unification of the human race achieved, is to strive not towards a closely organised World-State, but towards a free, elastic and progressive world-union. If this is to be done, we shall have to discourage the almost inevitable tendency which must lead any unification by political, economic and administrative means, in a word, by the force of machinery, to follow the analogy of the evolution of the nation-State. And we shall have to encourage and revive that force of idealistic nationalism which, before the war, seemed

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 be half glimpsed. Certain