Cardiff, Wales, UK, CF24 – 1DL.
Theosophy and the Great War
By
Annie
Besant
Four Lectures
delivered in
June and July
1921
In the
aftermath of the Great War many turned to Theosophy for answers which would make
sense of the conflict. Annie Besant sees the War as a significant event in the
evolution of mankind and offers hope for the future providing that the lessons
of history can be learned. Annie Besant believed that
CONTENTS
I.THE INNER
GOVERNMENT OF THE WORLD, OR THE POWER THAT MAKES FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS
II.THE OUTER
METHODS - THE WORLD'S
III.THE
CONFLICT OF EAST AND WEST
IV.THE IDEAL
OF THE FUTURE
Lecture I
The Inner
Government of the World,
or the Power
that makes for Righteousness
FRIENDS: In
trying to place before you in the four lectures, of which this evening's is the
first, a complicated question, largely practical in its outcome, but based on a
theory of life and action which underlies and governs the whole of what I have
to say, in thinking over that subject, in thinking how I might best present it;
since in many of its aspects it is probably unfamiliar to many of you, I
thought that I would use the first and second of the lectures more for speaking
on the theory than on the practice. Then, having erected a basis from which we
might act, I propose to pass on to that question of questions for the World of
today: Is it possible to reconstruct - in order that mankind may live more
nobly and more happily than it does today - is it possible to construct a
higher, a greater, a more enduring civilisation,
because based in accord with the laws amid which we live, so that they shall sustain and
support it instead of breaking it into pieces? For, looking back on the many civilisations, ruined one after another, we must, if we
think at all of human happiness, we must enquire what was there in those civilisations
which brought them to uttermost ruin, and which caused them to disappear? And
those of us who believe that Nature is a realm of inviolable law, those of us
who believe that all that is against law must perish, and only that which is in
accord with it can survive, we naturally seek to find out whether there was
something in the past which destroyed those mighty civilisations,
whether we can discern any principles for the future which will enable us to
erect a civilisation that shall endure; and that is
evidently a matter that requires thought and study - study of the past; study
of the laws of human society; search after the causes which have brought so
many civilisations to their wrecking. And thus
thinking, it seems as though we must find some theory of human civilisation, some theory of society, which shall have in
it greater elements of permanence than those of the past have shown. That if it
be true that evolution is working out, stage after stage, then there may be
hope for the future out of the blunders of the past, that we may be able to
avoid the rocks on which they were
wrecked; for it is, I think, true - a phrase that I have often used - that the
map of the past is really the chart of the future; by understanding the
mistakes of the past we may avoid them; and so if indeed it be true, as I
believe it is, nay, I would dare to say, as I know it is, that there is a Power
that makes for Righteousness, that there is an Inner Government of our World - if that be true, the future, despite
the clouds of the present, shines with a glory that promises a dawning day. And
so in the last two lectures I shall hope to deal more directly with those
possibilities of reconstruction than I propose to do in the two first.
For it is of
no use to talk about Britain's Place in the Great Plan unless we have some
conception, however imperfect, of that Plan; and I presume that the question of
many who saw the title has been: What is the Great Plan? Is there a Plan at
all? For, looking around the world in its present welter, in its present
confusion, in its conflicts, its upheavals, its mental and moral earthquakes,
can we trace amid that confusion any outline of a Plan which in the future
shall be carried out, as the earlier parts of it have to some extent been
carried out in the past? For unless we believe that there is a Plan, unless we
have caught glimpses of the outline of such a Plan, then we cannot speak about
Britain's place in that or any other possible
reconstruction; and I want, if I can, to lead you to what is really a
great hope for the world - that out of all the
sorrow and the blundering, and the misery, and the helplessness
apparently of the present, there is a certainty of a greater life extending into
an ordered human society, where men
shall love instead of hate, where they shall serve each other instead of
struggling against each other, where they shall co-operate for a common good,
for a common end, and where there shall be a recognition that the duty to the
larger self overbears the claims that the
smaller selves sometimes make. It is at that that I shall aim.
But I shall
be obliged this evening, in the opening
up of the subject, to ask you to travel with me into a region which to
some of you may seem cloudy and obscure; and yet it is only by some glimpse of
that that we can really hope to solve the problems of our present time. Only by
some recognition of the laws around us, some understanding of the forces that
play about us, may we hope to do what Science has done in the lower physical
world; to find out that to live in a realm of law is not a bondage, but a
freedom; that it is not a limitation of power, but an increase of power; that
as we know the laws, as we understand their working, as we realise
the directions in which they tend, they become our servants and not our
masters; so that Nature, as has been nobly said, "is conquered by
obedience". But while there has been
much research into the laws of the physical world, whilst Science has gone
far, and sought splendidly, and thought deeply and highly, and so has brought
us knowledge of the conditions of the material universe, there has been little
recognition of a similar realm of law in the region of the emotions, in the
region of the mind; little recognition that society has laws as well as have
bodies; that the social union is a thing of law, as well as unions in chemistry
or any other science that you may study; and that the same is true there as
everywhere - that the more you know of law the more you can use it to bring
about the results that you desire. The more you understand its working, the
better can you balance one law against another, can neutralise
laws which are opposing the working out of your will, laws which prevent your
reaching your goal; that so, by such a
balancing of laws that are apparently hostile, you may utilise
laws that are with you, which will carry you swiftly to your desired object.
For it is knowledge that is the master of Nature, whether in the society of
human beings or in the lower realms of life, and it is to that idea that I want
to lead you.
For that
purpose we have to try to find out something of the general outline of our
universe, something of those deeper things with which philosophers and
metaphysicians deal, the most real of all things because they are nearest to
the Life; the most instructive of all things, because they dive most deeply and
soar moat highly. For men walking about amid the events that are happening in
our world are very much like people who wander about the streets of a city not
knowing their way, who find themselves in a road, a circus, an alley, and do
not know of any plan on which that city
is built. And yet if you go up above, up in an aeroplane,
you are able to look down and recognise the plan of a
well-planned city. You can see from above how to avoid all the obstructions
that limited you when you were on a level with them; and so we must be able to
take to some extent a mental aeroplane, if we would catch
some glimpse of the world as an ordered whole, part of a larger system, and
that in turn part of larger and larger
systems ever, and yet One Fife pervading all, one great Thought working itself
out, to be studied in the small in our own world, but to be recognised
as having its roots in a vaster world than ours. Otherwise problems will arise
that we must put aside as entirely
insoluble. How often is it that the astronomer in his study of the vast fields
of space finds some motion he does not understand, finds some deviation that he
is unable to explain, and then speaks of some force embodied outside the realm
of his observation, which may yet be presumed by the intellect to exist because
of the results which it shows in the narrower field of his working? And so it
is that our astronomers have done much to widen out our field of thought, have
corrected many an error which we should have made in the study of our own world
alone. They taught us how our sun to us is stationary, and yet is itself moving
in a mightier oval in what to us is illimitable space, and how this solar
system of ours is but as a sand on the seashore of other systems, and how many
of these move round a larger sun, which
in its turn again moves round yet a mightier monarch in space, and so on
and on and on until none can limit the thinking; facts have to be presumed,
where the senses, aided however they may be by apparatus, fail to pierce. And
it seems to me that that has done us, that unchallengeable astronomical idea
has done us, a great service in studying our own smaller world and our own
humanity. For it has helped us to understand that many of those climbing
thoughts of spiritual geniuses who have given us the scriptures and the
religions of the world, that they have not fallen behind the astronomers in
their realisation of the vastness of all that is. And
so when we begin to wonder and to speculate, a great idea dawns on the mind of
the thinker that Tithe and Space are really localised,
and that the truth lies in what is
called, and rightly called, "THE ETERNAL Now ". That there is a
region of life in which all exists at every moment of what we call
"Time". That there is the One Great Life, full of all possibilities,
all actualities, of all that we say has been, is, and shall be; all a mighty
fullness; all existing simultaneously; no past, no present, and no future, but
the "Now" of an Eternal Life. We confuse our thought when we use that
great word "Eternal" as though it were equivalent with
"everlasting". Everlasting is of time, but Eternity is outside Time.
You in your innermost being are Eternal, part of that Eternal Life out of which
are manifested from time to time a universe, a thousand universes, what you
will! And that which is simultaneous in the Eternal is successive in the
manifestation in which all is limited. And so in the greatest philosophies of
the world, whether you take the great Vedanta of the Hindu or whether you take
the equally wonderful philosophy of the Mussulman
Doctors of the Middle Ages in Europe, you find identity of thought, identity of
expression, no possibility of dispute among those whose intellect is able to
grasp the problem to some extent, but the bodying out in words, however
imperfect, of the same immense thought of the All-pervading and Eternal Life.
And in the smaller things around us you will never be able to grasp that great
law, called the law of causation, which has become familiar now as Karma; you
will never be able to grasp the workings of that law - how it affects the
individual, how it affects the nation, how it affects humanity - until you realise that in the Eternal everything is inter-related,
and that in manifestation all that comes forth is linked together, but in
succession, and we speak of past and future. Does it seem an absurdity? I think
not, for I saw it the other day in an English publication, the record of a
scientific society, an idea that I had not before come across in the West - it
is more familiar in the East, and may have been long in the West, simply my own
lack of knowledge making me not recognise it as
western - I saw the suggestion thrown out that the future influences the past.
I know it sounds upside down at first sight, and yet it is not so difficult to realise if you think it out. You are all willing to admit
that the present is the result of the past. Does it seem a dream, the empty
dream of a dreamer, that the future also influences the present, and that the
shaping of the present is largely moulded by that
which in the future will occur? Think for a moment and you will realise - it is a somewhat coarse illustration from
physical nature - that if you have an acorn dropped in the soil, you recognise it as the fruit of the oak tree, but you know
that that acorn can develop into nothing save an oak. It cannot develop into a
fish, a bird, or even any other kind of vegetable growth. That which it is to
be in the future influences and shapes and guides the growth of that acorn into
the tree, because in truth it is not the form that creates the thought, it is
the thought that creates the form. Thinking is the one great creative force in
our universe; whether it be divine thinking or human thinking, all creations
come out of the thought. The sculptor's ideal governs every touch of his
fingers on the plastic clay. He has thought the ideal statue before the clay can be moulded
or the marble can be carved, and it is this ideal of the sculptor, the thought
in his mind, that controls every touch, whether it be of finger or of chisel,
and shapes or chips away the super-incumbent material so that the ideal may
come out of the marble perfect in all its beauty. And do you realise that that which is here below as to the relation
of thought and creation, that that is
also so in loftier realms, that everyone of you manifests your Eternal Self,
that everyone of you is a fragment of divinity, as each of you is? Do you realise that, in that "far-off " region of
spiritual life, where there is no separation but the fragment is inseparate from the whole of which it is a part, that in
that mighty world of Spirit you made your own ideal as to your own perfection,
you shaped your own thought as to what in your perfection hereafter you would
be, and that all through your long incarnation, all down the long string of
lives through which you, the Eternal Fragment, are travelling in space and
time, and in body after body, it is that Fragment of Divinity that created his
ideal, who is striving to shape you, striving to influence you, striving to
move you to the nobler and hold you back from the baser, striving for greater
power over the lower worlds? He is gaining more and more power, more and more
capacity, to guide and rule the matter that he has appropriated for his own
purposes, in order that matter may become spiritualised
and be a perfect instrument of the unfolded Spirit. Do you realise
the possibility that that glory of the future is as real a force as your
inheritance of the past, and that the Power in yourself that makes for
Righteousness, the hidden God within
you, is ever endeavouring to bring about the realisation of his ideal, the ideal which exists in the
Eternal, and is still in what we call the future, which is ever reacting upon
you in what you call the present, in order that your path may be rightly
trodden, may be pursued rightly to its splendid end? At least it is an
inspiring thought, a thought that helps us in moments of depression. Did I say
depression? There is no depression for him who strives to live in the Eternal,
but an abiding peace amid all the storms of time; for there is nothing that can
shake the Spirit that knows whence he came and whither he goes. Once realise, once reach Self-realisation,
and although you may have many more struggles to meet, you know that the end is
sure. And looking thus on this large outline, we then try to see - coming down
and down and down through many rungs of this mighty ladder which is the manifested Life of the universe, we come down
to our own solar system - whether there may be some chance of our finding
traces of a Plan. We cannot reach the others, they are far beyond us. But in
our own solar system there are certain sources of knowledge available. One, the scriptures of the great religions of
the world. They give us broad outlines of the past, the present, and the
future. I do not know how far you are aware that in some of the sacred books of
the East you find sketches of the future, recognisable
sketches of the present that you are able to examine and test. And so it may be
worth while sometimes to realise that men have climbed so far, that they have reached a
light in which they can see further than
we are seeing, and forecast with the
sure spiritual vision many of the changes
through which our world and our civilisations have
passed, or will pass. And after that you come to the traditions of the nations;
and these traditions have been very largely confirmed in our own time by
archaeological research, which has enormously widened the ordinary educated
man's view of the past of the world and the past of humanity, and the various
phases through which the races of mankind have gone. And then you can verify
some of the smaller of the things and work on a rational hypothesis, even if
you feel you cannot take it as anything more. And there is one term upon which
for a moment I will pause.
Let us think
of Him who is spoken of by the Greeks as the LOGOS, the manifested Word,
remembering that in saying "Word" we presuppose that which the Word
expresses. And I think there is no better word than that of LOGOS for the Lord
of a Universe, since each universe is a fresh expression of divine thought. And
so we who are Theosophists use that word in connection with our solar system,
and we speak of the SOLAR LOGOS, meaning by that the Lord of our solar
universe, our solar system - a universe to us.
There is a
verse you may recall out of the old Hebrew writings, where it is said, alluding
to what was then called the creation of the world: "When the Morning Stars
sang together and all the Sons of God shouted for joy". For a new
emanation from the LIFE is a matter of joy, of delight, to those greater Beings
who know the outcome of that which then is brought to birth. So that the coming
of a universe is rejoiced over by those elder Sons of God; and many a one in reading that verse
must have felt startled and wondered who they were, these Sons of God shouting
for joy over a world, a system, which, in our world as we know, has passed
through so much of sorrow, so much of pain, so much of anxiety, that sometimes
people dream that the pain of our creation outweighs its joy. Their larger
knowledge made the appearance of our world a matter for rejoicing through the
spheres, and those Sons of God of the Hebrew are spoken of in Indian scriptures
as the mighty Builders of worlds. And they tell us that whenever there is a new
emanation of a system, that then the creative WORD, whom they call BRAHMA,
brings with Him the fruitage of a previous universe; those who in a previous
universe have grown into superhuman perfection, they tell us, are gathered up
into the Life of the Great Builder, and carried on with Him to His next
creative task. And They are the first who are embodied forth, They the first
who are sent out into partially separated life, and They are the results of the
past made perfect to a certain limit of perfection, the thought of the LOGOS
of that time; and They come to help.
Now the word
"Building" will be familiar to many of you, for what is a well-known
term used by Masons as regards the Supreme? They call Him the Great Architect
of the Universe. But what do they mean by that famous phrase? They use it
constantly, and speak of it as a fact they recognise
and know. But what does the "Architect" mean? Where is an architect
worthy of the name who does not plan before he begins the building? The
architect is the maker of the plan, and
what right have men to use that term at all of the Supreme unless they recognise that the wisdom of past ages gave a proper title
to the Supreme Emanator of Worlds? These words ought
not to be mere empty phrases in the mouths of any of you. Why should you use a
term like that and mean nothing by it, and think nothing about it? And why
should those who worship the Great Architect of the Universe call themselves
Masons at all, unless they in their measure are also builders in varied grades
of knowledge and of power? For those
ancient things that have come down to us out of the past and that are worked in
ceremonies and symbols, every great name in them has a meaning; every great
ceremony indicates a process in Nature; and what use for us to take the ancient
drapings unless we have within the garments those
mighty verities hidden from the minds of the thoughtless and the ignorant,
hidden from the outer world but known to the student of the Mysteries? And it
might be well, perchance, if some of you would think over it from the inner
standpoint, and see whether you, at least, who call on the name of the Great
Architect may not learn something of His Plan for our world - for that is big
enough for us.
Thinking then
on that, what would naturally come after the Great Architect Himself? Those
Sons of God who are to build the new universe, the new world. And then we begin
looking at the many Scriptures again, passing from one source of thought to
another, as we gain something from each. And we learn from the Christian book
of the Revelation that ever around the throne of the LOGOS there are Those who
are called the Seven Spirits. And those
are recognised by all the great religions; go back as
far as you will to the most ancient faith you can study, and you will find
there are ever seven of those subsidiary great Builders, each with his own
share of the Plan made by the Architect for His whole system.
And so, as
you go on, you begin to realise that there are great
grades of superhuman Beings, and that They all co-operate in the working out of
the Plan, and according to Their grade, Their work, and according to Their
powers, Their duty, and Their responsibility. You can get the sketch of your
building and see how you go from the Architect to His chief Overseers, and then
to Those who look after smaller portions of the work; and you know that you may
go down and down until you come not only to the bricklayers who lay on the
foundation traced in the part of the Architect's Plan which is their special
work, but even to the labourers who bring the bricks and the labourers
who mix the mortar that may be wanted, and the workmen who cut and carve the
stones. And very often the stones may seem incongruous and without a place to
fit in, and yet they are ever wanted when the Plan has reached the point at
which the stone which seemed to be unfit becomes necessary for the completion
of a portion of the work.
And so the
sentence is thrown out, significant in its meaning, that the stone which the
builders rejected has become the headstone of the corner. And so as you go
along you realise that it is likely in a system so
orderly as ours, in a system which is a realm of law, that there is such a Plan, very likely some Plan, which,
if we could discover, then with it we might co-operate. That we need not
perhaps remain blind workers who know nothing of the Plan on which we are
employed, but open-eyed workers who have caught glimpses perhaps of their part
at least in the Plan, and so can work with a bright intelligence, and bring
their own thought as well as hands to the perfecting of the fragment of the
Plan which their Overseer has in hand. And then there dawns upon us along this
line of thought that where the Plan is so mighty as the one for our system, the
fragment that belongs to our world must be comparatively small - and because
smaller more within the grasp of our thought, more within the reach of our very
limited capacities. And then we begin to try to search in history for traces of
the Plan, for connected happenings, for similar events. And out of that
complexity of happenings there begins to shine, as it were underneath, certain
lines, and as we follow them, these lines we see are portions of a Plan; much
that is incomprehensible, because only a portion, much that may not have its
perfected purpose here; but in the joining with other portions it is vital that every part should
be true to the Plan, that every part should be carried through so that each
portion of the Plan is perfect, and, so far as completeness for a fragment is
possible, may show a certain perfection, a limited perfection in itself. And
then we begin to search and ponder and think, and we catch a gleam of at least
one purpose which is behind our world. Looking around us we see various kingdoms,
as we call them, of Nature - the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, and the human, and some stop there, and some
go on to the superhuman - not super-natural, but super-human.
We can realise it as a rational, reasonable thing that the will of
a part shall be in consonance with the will of the whole; that a smaller self
shall adapt himself to the helping and perfecting of the larger Self; and that
it is a very probable purpose of this universe to produce human beings who shall voluntarily
choose the best, voluntarily associate themselves with the Law, voluntarily not
only recognise the Supreme Will, but strive to become
a part of it, identical with it, and carrying it out within their limited
measure. And we say at length: What is a man? And looking over those kingdoms I
have just spoken of, we find that we may define a man by his relation to the
greater law. For, thinking of the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, we see
that law is imposed on them by a superior will. They have not yet evolved to
will, they are moved by desire; and the difference between desire and will, the
difference in us between desire and will, is that desire arises by promptings
of want from within, cravings of the material nature for sustenance, answered
by objects from without, the objects of desire surrounding us on every side to
draw out desires, and that those desires are determined by the result of the
impact, whether it causes pleasure or causes pain. Where it causes pleasure we
desire the impact to be repeated, and where it causes pain we seek to avoid
another impact of a similar nature. As long as a man's actions are determined
by the promptings of desire, so long he has not yet evolved the mighty power of Will. For Will is that
divine quality which is Self-determined - not determined by attractions or
repulsions which play upon the outer nature. Now in the animal desire rules. He
seeks what his nature craves for, and he shrinks from that which gives him
pain, and he is obedient to the law of his nature. He does not rebel; he does
not resist; he follows the law as imposed upon him, unknowingly, unconsciously;
thus the law works for his evolution. He struggles with other animals; he
fights for his own life; he destroys where a life seems to increase his own; he
is moved continually by the satisfying of his cravings, and unconsciously by
that he evolves. It is true, as has often been pointed out, and as Huxley
quoted from the East: "The law of the survival of the fittest is the law
of evolution for the brute". That law he follows, and he knows no better.
Why should he? The law impels him - compels him; and by obedience to that he
evolves.
Then we pass
on into what we call the human kingdom. And looking at that human kingdom we
find some qualities we call animal qualities and some that we recognise as of a higher scale, and we call them human. And
man disobeys the law; he resists the law; is a rebel against the law. He
desires that which serves him, that gives him pleasure. He grasps at all he
wants, careless at first what may be the effect upon others; and when he finds
he cannot always have what he wants, he is angry and discontented. The
beginning of Man lies in his rebellion against law. That is the first step. He
is understanding a little more of himself, and he realises
that he is able to disobey the law. He
does not realise that the law itself is inviolable,
and breaks those who disobey in the long run. He thinks he can get along
pleasing himself, satisfying himself, grasping everything and disregarding
everyone around him; and still he seems to follow a law of struggle, and does
follow it like the law of the beasts of the jungle. Nay! he has not even yet
quite left that stage nor realised that in obedience
to law will lie his ultimate happiness. But gradually and slowly he does learn
a law other than the law to which the brute pays compelled obedience. He learns
there is something higher than grasping. That a keener pleasure sometimes comes
from scarifying than from seizing. Love is the great teacher. Love is the great
educator. Love the great evolver. And the man gradually learns that a personal
sacrifice for something, for another whom he loves, gives a greater
satisfaction to his human nature than a grasping at that by which a beloved one
suffers. And then he begins dimly to grope after some other law, and he learns
that the great law of human love is not the law of the survival of the fittest,
but the law of the sacrifice of the stronger to the weaker, of the greater to
the lesser, in order that the lesser may also share in his own life. And by
very, very slow degrees he begins to see he is only a part of a larger whole,
and that he is as the cell in a body, and that the cell should subserve the purpose of the whole body, first of the organ
to which it belongs, and then in the organ, the service, the happiness of the
body as a whole. And with that there comes to him a great light. He begins to see that the part should
work for the whole and not only for the part which is its lower self. That it
is a greater and more noble and more human thing to sacrifice individual
inclinations and individual gains and to work with the Power that makes for
Righteousness. And he begins to see in the world the working of that Power in
its successes, in the things it breaks as well as in the things it supports;
and deliberately, of set volition of his own, that Will awakens in him - that
Will which is his higher quality - not the will merely to live, but the will to
live for others and to help in the building of a happier and a better world. And
when evolution has gone so far in this evolving man, in whom divinity is
unfolding more and more rapidly, there comes the time when his will is no
longer separate; when his will realises itself as
part of the divine Will which is evolving the worlds to higher, to grander
levels. And willingly, joyfully, he associates himself with that Will, until he
can say: "Lo, I live to do Thy Will, O God!" When he is thus
Self-determined, when by long experience, by bitter pain, he has learnt that
true happiness lies in harmonising the lower will
with the higher, and when that has become harmonised
in him so that it cannot change, then he passes out of the human into the
superhuman realms of being - but not before. And it is those who have reached
that stage in evolution, those whose will is perfectly harmonised
with the divine, those who live to obey the law of life and to serve their
brothers - those are They who form the Inner Government of the World, the Power that makes for Righteousness.
There, behind all that we call "powers" in this world, are the
superhuman Rulers, the superhuman Teachers, the superhuman Powers -
intellectual, mental, emotional, passional, material
- that play their part in the building up of the world. Those are at the back
of all the great religions. Those are at the back of all the great civilisations. Those are They whom all nations have recognised. They are sometimes called, as in
And if any of
you can realise that there is a possibility of the
kind of Plan that I have been suggesting; that we may find out what that Plan
is, and guide our lives thereby; that we may by study, by thought, by
meditation, by self-sacrifice, clear our eyes enough to have the vision of a Plan for human life and human
evolution; if you have caught one glimpse of that at any time, then you will realise there is nothing else worth living for in life save
to co-operate with that Plan and hasten the happiness of man. You will realise that it is worth while to live, whether your life
be joyous or sorrowful, if you can co-operate in making the world a little better,
a little less sad for the great masses of its population. You will realise that the object of human life is to bring the will of the individual into accord
with the will of the Highest; and having brought that will into accord, then to
work to carry it out among men; for knowledge that bears no fruit in action is
useless to humanity; knowledge worked out for human helping, forwards the
salvation of the world.
Lecture II
The Outer
Methods - The World's
FRIENDS: I
took as a title for this evening's talk the words "The Outer Methods - The
World's
When we begin
to deal with our own world we are then in a region where we can trace the
details of such evolution; where we can try and grasp the intimate method of
the unfoldment. And so we may gradually learn to understand the workings of our
own consciousness, finding them to be the reflections of the mightier
Consciousness that creates and upholds and regenerates the worlds. And looking
at it for a moment from this standpoint of the Life, we try to see everywhere
Life showing out its capacities and shaping matter, as we call it, for the
expression of those capacities. We realise that Life
is one, however multiple its manifestations. Just as we might regard
electricity as one force in Nature, though showing itself in different ways as
heat, as light, and so on, according to the nature or resistance of the matter
through which it is manifesting itself.
That unity of
Life - dealing with it only as it is shown in the many living things of our own
earth - has been, as you know, demonstrated comparatively recently by that
great Indian scientist, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose,
who had been experimenting over long, long years on mineral and vegetable,
striving to search out if it were true that the Life in them was the Life in
the animal and in the human, only more narrowly conditioned in its
manifestations. For many years he strove to prove it, to prove it in a
scientific way against much of prejudice, against age-long ideas which divided
Nature into the living and the non-living, whereas his contention was that
there was no such thing as a non-living
nature, but that all Nature was the expression of a Life. And lately he
succeeded in demonstrating to the world of science here the truth of his
contention, which he said was based on an ancient sentence in the language of
his own land, the Samskrit, a verse that he said was
sung by his ancestors on the banks of the river Ganga,
and he was only showing by scientific demonstration the great truth so long
before spoken by a divinely illuminated Teacher. And he showed by his
experiments how Life responded, whether you took it in the vegetable or the
animal. How it was similarly affected by drugs, by intoxicants and soporifics
of various sorts, and how the response of the indwelling Life could be traced
and shown in similar results, different as was the form in which that Life was
manifesting. That great demonstration is full of interest to those of us who
had taken from the great scriptures of the world, from the teachings of all
religions, that Life really lay behind all manifestations of material things,
and came forth from the ONE LIFE, the Limitless, the Incomprehensible, from
which come forth stream after stream, manifesting itself in what we call
matter.
Then, looking
for a moment at the many religions of the world, we find an expression used in
most of them - and in all of them so far as the qualities shown are recognised and seen - that Life in the universe creates;
that Life bodies itself in forms which it sustains and upholds; that Life, when
the form no longer will yield to its impulse, breaks it and casts it aside, and
regenerates for itself another form fitted for a further progress of the indwelling Life. So that in thinking of the
Life as one, we recognise that it shows itself out in
the worlds in this triple form which religion has often called a Trinity, which
shows really aspects of the Life, manifestations of the Life, Life remaining
ever ONE and showing itself out in this threefold fashion.
Then we take
a step further, and we realise that in our human
consciousness the same unity, the same triplicity,
may be seen. For as we think of ourselves we feel our unity, we feel that we
are one, that our consciousness is one, that it is our very Self, that which is
deepest within us, most real in us, that which impels us to action, to feeling,
to thought. And we see that we also have one Self, or rather are one Self, who
shows himself as Life, or Consciousness, in a similar triple fashion. For,
looking at human consciousness in the ordinary way, we see in that that
consciousness shows itself as Will, as Wisdom, as Awareness of an outer world,
and that these three, as we shall see in a moment, are conditioned by the
nature of the matter in which the Life is shown forth, each great aspect of the
Life appropriating to itself a special kind of matter, the vibrations in the
matter responding to the changes in the moods in consciousness. Seeing
ourselves thus, as a unity, manifesting as a triplicity,
we then begin to examine somewhat into the matter in which this Life is endeavouring to express himself. And we find that in our
physical world, when we study ourselves, we can recognise
certain higher and lower manifestations. We realise,
if we take the Awareness, that we have the synthetic in the Intellect that
combines; that we have, in what we sometimes call the Mind, the lower manifestation, that which
analyses; and that those two main qualities may be said to differentiate within
Awareness; Intellect as the higher power of thought in man, and the concrete,
reasoning Mind as its manifestation in a denser form of matter. And so we also realise that we have duality in our world again - Wisdom in
the higher manifesting as Love in the lower, the great power which holds all
together, while the mind separates by analysis, and then, out of those
separated factors, the intellect builds up some great idea and synthesises them into one. And so we find also that Will,
showing itself in the lower world as desire, motives all Activity. And in those
three of Mind and Love - that we may call emotion - and Activity, the
consciousness that we feel down here in our waking world manifests itself, in
these three ways, neither less nor more. In that practically all psychology,
eastern and western, is agreed, with slight differences of terms but with a
unity of thought. And the difference of terms that we find in the East is very
largely because their psychology is a very ancient science, while in the West
it is comparatively modern. So that in the East it has been worked out very
much into detail, into a very complicated science, whereas in the West it is
only growing somewhat into that complexity, but has not yet existed long enough
over here to make the same intricate researches that have been made in the
older countries of the world.
Glancing over
that rough sketch, and trying, as it were, to put it into a form which will
enable us to trace out our methods in involution and evolution, we realise that
science, western science, helps us enormously in the details of evolution; has
gathered together such a mass of
observations, has classified them with such care, has marked out their
resemblances and their differences so clearly, that it gives us an enormous
mass of knowledge, gained by the study
of phenomena in this our own physical world, which enables us to understand
very much better the larger generalisations which we sometimes find in religions -
those greater, wider outlines which are given to us by men who have climbed
through all stages of humanity until they have passed beyond the cycle of life
and death, constantly alternating, and have reached a perfection of human organisation, a perfection of body, of emotion, of mind,
which has enabled them to climb into the higher worlds where the origins of
these lower manifestations are to be
found, and so to reach a greater unity behind the manifold differences in the
lower world. And to some extent science is recognising
involution in these modern days, although not exactly as the ancients put it;
but the root-thought is the same. If you knew the immense change that came over
science - I was going to say since our own time, but I am almost afraid to say
that now that I am so old, and am speaking to so many whose time-measures are
of a shorter space; when I was young, I may say, science was then looking on
matter as the chief thing. You will remember that famous phrase of Tyndall's,
that everyone knows although it has become antiquated, that we must look to
matter for the promise and the potency of every form of life. That was the
thought in my younger days in the scientific world, and that there were many
organs in different bodies, and that
these practically created their functions; it was not until very much later -
more, I think, than twenty years afterwards - that that dictum of Tyndall was
turned quite upside down by Sir William Crookes, when
occupying the same chair in the British Association for the Advancement of
Science, and he exactly reversed it, and said that we must see in Life the
creator and moulder of matter. And that is the view
that has since swept everything before it, because further experiment and
further observation and more careful and accurate analysis have shown that in
the very simplest form of living matter - and all matter lives - the whole
fragment - we can call it nothing else - performs every function which is
necessary for the sustenance of life,
and that by the very performance of those functions of life continuously the
surrounding matter is shaped into organs which limit the part of that fragment
which performs a particular function. And the life and the function continually
going on, working and working, and repeating itself and repeating itself as the
life is maintained, forms more and more perfect organs for its own varied
functions; so that, instead of the old view that the organ in some wonderful
way gives rise to the function, we have the far simpler idea that may be
observed in Nature - that it is the function that shapes the organ. And some of
you, looking hack, may remember the very graphic way in which William Kingdon Clifford tried to explain that to the children.
When he wanted to get the children to understand a little what evolution meant,
he put it in a very simple and graphic way, and he told them about that great kingdom in Nature out of which the
birds and the reptiles, as we know them later, arose. He said that some of
these indeterminate creatures desired to crawl, and they became reptiles; and
others tried to fly, and they became birds. That is, that the will to exercise
a function determines the line of evolution of the creature; and although it
was put as a story, an explanation for children, it contains one of the
profoundest truths of Nature: that it is the Will, the will to live, the will
to think, the will to see, the will to hear, that forms the organs whereby all
those functions, that are willed by the Life itself, shape matter into organs
that enable that Life to express itself more completely, more perfectly, to
unfold more and more of that particular capacity by means of the organ it
created in a simpler form. Thus there is this constant interaction of Life and
Form; the Life willing and the Form adapting itself, the Life thinking - I have
no other word I can use - and thus creating, the Life supporting and continuing
and finally breaking the outworn form. And so we have this picture of an
ever-changing world in which the bodies and in which the Life have become more
and more complex, and the Life unfolds itself in ever larger and larger
capacities; and so the whole great world of living things is built up: in the
mineral world we see attraction and repulsion, affinities and disintegrations;
and in the vegetable world we see those moods showing themselves out more fully
as sensations; and in the animal world more perfectly still, showing out as
desires and cravings; and in the world of man yet more fully, by the working of
the mind, reflection of intellect, and
so showing out completely that great triplicity of
life.
When from
that we turn to ask a little as to how this Life involves itself and whether
any stages of involution can be seen, we come across a very remarkable
succession which is pictured for us in this world - which is really a refection
of the higher world of thought - which is pictured for us in the way that the
Life involves itself into form in the embryo which is to become the human
being. We see it elsewhere in all forms of life, tracing it from its new
conception to its outward manifestation, as a particular kind of plant, of animal,
of human, embryo; and those pictures in the lower world are not to be despised,
for they sometimes help us to understand a little more clearly, and to glimpse
a little more fully, the marvellous way in which in the higher, subtler worlds
the Life bodies itself forth. For, when the ONE that we speak of as the LOGOS
or the WORD - as I said to you last Sunday, the manifestation of this great Life in its divine aspect - when the
LOGOS begins a new universe, we read hints and suggestions in ancient, very ancient,
books that to some extent - a very limited
extent - are verifiable by those "who will take the trouble and
give the time to evolve in themselves some of the higher powers of the Life a
little in advance of the ordinary evolution of man; for you must remember that
human thought and human intelligence applied to the expansion of consciousness
may expand consciousness very much more rapidly than Nature itself, if left
un-assisted by the human mind in the long, long climbing upwards, the evolution
of humanity can do, and that just as in
the lower worlds you may evolve a type more rapidly by neutralising
laws that oppose you and utilising laws that help
you, whether in the plant or in the
animal kingdom - it is constantly done - so may man, if he realises the laws of mind, if he understands something of
the world of consciousness and the expansion thereof, so may he quicken that
expansion of consciousness and be able to reach higher worlds than our
physical, differentiated from us by the greater subtlety of their matter, but
all of them material, however fine and subtle that material of them may be.
Taking advantage of that, there are phrases we may find in some of the ancient
books which we are apt to take as purely metaphysical, allegorical, and pictorial,
call it what you will; and we find, for instance, in a great Indian book put into the mouth of God
the words: "I am the Life-Breath". The thought would be more familiar
to you if I quoted them from the Hebrew scripture, where it is written:
"By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them
by the breath of his mouth" (Psalm xxxiii. ).
Now Breath is
sometimes said to be Life and Life to be Breath, and in those lofty regions the
word Breath is not an ill-chosen word to use for the great out-breathing of the
divine Life which, gathering together from the boundless realms of space a
certain quantity of that far, far-off matter, makes, as it were, a ring round
it, in which He is going to build up His new system, and breathes His life into
that enclosed root-matter, as it is sometimes called; and by that Breath - if I
may take a very common illustration from right down here in the physical
world, as you may, if you breathe into a
glass of water, create little vacua which are not
really vacua, but are filled with your breath and
shelled with a little film of water - creates
the matter out of which He will build His special system, His worlds. In
that form, subtle beyond our thinking, minute beyond our imagination - and yet
if for a moment you will think of that building of a single form to which I
just now alluded - you will know that from a single cell you get a whole group
of cells by the forming within that simple cell of little lines of division,
not separating them off into separate things but making a mass of conjoined,
adherent cells, so bodying forth for us under our eyes, as it were, the great
picture of creative activity - first Unity, the One, then within that Unity the
delicate lines of separation, making the many, still in union, these marked -
out parts of future difference being still joined together; and then, later, in
some forms of living creatures you may see the breaking asunder of these
subdivided cells, and there you come to the picture of the great separative principle, the intellect, at work, with its
offspring of the mind. And then still further, passing downwards ever, you come
to the appearance, in still denser form of matter, of what we call attraction
and repulsion, of what we call love and hate when we come to human beings. And
when you examine those you begin to realise that the
Life, which is one, is ever seeking to reunite itself with the several portions
of itself that the impulse has divided coming down, but that the Life in each
separated form seeks the Life in other separated forms and tries to draw them
together, and the forms resist it, and the incongruous forms repulse it, and
a constant struggle goes on between the
Life which is seeking reunion and the forms which are insisting on their separateness; and you see how the
forms gather in fresh material in order that by grasping they may grow, and how
the Life is ever seeking to give itself out to find union with other lives,
until we find ourselves down here in a physical world of matter, and see its constant
struggle, its constant opposition between the indwelling Life desiring to unite
and the forms resisting, for fear that in the union they should lose their
individuality and no longer know themselves as living beings.
Now I have
spoken of different worlds here. I mean by that, different types of matter. It
is not difficult for you to realise that; if you
think of our physical world only, you have solid, you have liquid, you have gas
and you have ether, but you may have those all in one type of matter. You may
have physical matter, which shows itself as solid in the ice, as liquid in the
water, as vapour in the steam; and above that they
tell us there are ethers in which all the great forces play, which affect the
denser matter, but are not themselves directly cognisable
yet by human skill, being intangible. And knowing that that is so in our
physical world, it is not difficult to realise, I
think, that you may have different types of matter analogous to those. That,
speaking comparatively, you might think of your physical world as representing
the more solid forms of matter, the denser forms, I call them; and then you
might think of another type of matter above them, where the matter was far less
dense, which answers specially to those
moods of consciousness that we call the emotions and the passions and the
feelings. And then you might have yet a third type of matter - I am ascending
at the moment - in which the moods of consciousness we call thought embody
themselves, so that with every change of thought there is in that mental world
a form bodied forth, which is the thought-form, as we call it, seen by a large
number of people today, and by an ever-increasing number. And that, coming up
beyond that mental and intellectual world, you would then be coming - after the
great division of the intellect - you would then be coming into union once
again, corresponding to the union in the descending life, and beyond that yet
we may dream of unity, where the Oneness is recognised
by all.
I would ask
you, if you can, for a moment to keep that ladder in your mind. The descending
Life, which at first is One, coming from the divine world where separation is
not; and this great wave of Life comes down as a unity, the Spirit in man. And
next, it comes into a world of slightly denser matter, and then union is the
predominant mark; and next it comes into
a world of yet denser matter, and then separation becomes the dominant note in
that world. And still further down it comes into yet denser matter, where forms
are denser, showing itself forth as feeling that, strives to unite, and the
form that tries to keep separate, until
finally you arrive at your physical world, where these last three types are
manifest as our human consciousness, as body, emotion, and thought.
Suppose now
that Life turns upward again and begins
to climb. It will have to climb, enriched with all its long experiences,
fuller, more complex, far more wonderful; and carrying these with it upwards in
its climb, it will pass out of the great separation of dense matter here -
which is ever being consumed in the using - and pass upward into the world of
the emotions, where love and hate are
struggling, attraction and repulsion; and then into the world of the intellect,
where there will be still separation, and strong individuality showing itself
in human beings. And when you have reached that point, where we now are, then
you may begin to forecast what the next great advance of humanity will be -
that it must be towards union. That is the next upward rung, as it were, the
second downward rung in the involution of the Life, and that as the Life in
descending took to itself an atom of every one of these worlds of our fivefold
universe, and gathered round itself more of the matter of that world to form a sheath or body for the
expression of itself, so, after that downward descent was completed and the
activity of the Life was turned upwards, it would after a certain time reach
that same world of union through which it passed in its long descent into
grosser, and grosser, and grosser matter. And when we begin to enquire a little
more closely as to how it is that all this great, this tremendous accumulation
of powers, of capacities, which the Life gathers round itself is achieved, what
is the method by which that gathering is made and individualised,
then you come to that central idea of the great religions, the idea of the
Reincarnation of the human Spirit. The Spirit is ever leaving the material
bodies in which he clothes himself and which, being material, are subject to decay. "God
created man to be immortal", it is said in one of the Hebrew Scriptures,
called apocryphal by the Christian Church, "and made him in the image of
His own Eternity". Every man in the image of God is eternal as God Himself
is eternal, and that is the pledge of Life on the other side of death, although
it goes far, far, far beyond that. Man is eternal in his nature, and can only
be subject to death so far as his outer casing is concerned. HE cannot die. The
gathering of faculties is, as I said, by reincarnation. Now think for a moment
over what that means, for I have not time to go into details. There are three
of these outer coatings of the Eternal Spirit in man in the three worlds of
mind, of feeling, and of action respectively. These are the three worlds in
which he evolves his forms and unfolds his powers. Living here in the physical
world he is clothed in a triple body: the body through which he expresses
activity; this one that you see, our dense body; permeating this is the finer
body in which he expresses emotions; and, permeating both, is the still finer
body in which he expresses thought. But, being material, they are all
perishable. They are not made in the image of God's Eternity. And so, it being
a peculiarity of matter that it is resistant, that it cannot without
disintegration be pressed beyond a certain point, that in building up a form
that form is able to grow, taking from the particular world to which it belongs
more and more matter, assimilating it, transmuting it into its own special kind
of material, and so going on growing and growing. But the physical body reaches
the limit, of its growth. Emotions in their own body go on while the physical body is decaying. Thought in its
own body goes on while the physical body is disintegrating. They are reflections of those greater
spiritual originals of which I spoke, of Intellect, of Wisdom, and of Will,
that cannot perish. But these bodies of matter, each of which in turn
disintegrates - what should the embodied Spirit do when these bodies reach the
limit of their growth, when they reach the limit of their flexibility, when
they reach the limit of their adaptation to their several environments, and
begin to lessen in vigour, to decay in parts, and to
threaten total dissolution? What can he do save seek another set of forms,
inasmuch as he has not unfolded the wonderful wealth of his life? And that is
what reincarnation means; he passes through these three worlds of action, of
emotion, and of thought. The religions call them by many names. They speak of
the physical world as the mortal world; then they speak of an intermediate
world, which is not more closely or precisely described; and then they speak of
a heavenly world. I am using the words which express accurately the type of the
matter of which these three worlds are made: our dense matter which is used for
action, the rather finer matter which is used for emotion, and the yet finer
which is made for thought. Now how do
these conduce - for the duration of these three makes a life cycle, a life
period -how do they conduce to the gathering of experience and the enriching of
the human being in the next birth? In the world of action he sets many causes
going by his relationships with his fellow-men. He causes happiness, he causes
misery. He follows vices or he follows virtues. In the early stages he
does not know the difference between
right and wrong. He does not know that laws are around him, and that if he
strikes himself against a law he has to suffer. That is a thing he has yet to
learn in these bodies which his life informs, and in this world it is that he
gathers the material for this knowledge gradually by experience. But he cannot
gather all the experience he wants, because a life is too short a time for all
the causes he sets going to work out. He may kill a man, if he is a savage, and
that man goes out of his way, and the surrounding morality of the tribe does
not blame him if the man is not of his tribe, but a man of some other tribe,
because at first their views of morality are very limited. He has yet to learn
that killing is against the law of Nature for man, it comes within the scope of
the moral law; and he learns that on the other side of death in the region of
the emotions. I am putting this to you briefly and asserting it, but you can
read all about it, if you feel inclined. In that intermediate world he reaps
the result of the - not violations of law, which are impossible, but of the -
actions that disregard the law, whether he knows it or not. You may say: Is
that just? Is it just that when a child puts his hand into the fire, not
knowing that the fire burns, he suffers? The answer is: It is the condition of
the future knowledge of the child; he can never know, unless he comes up
against laws, that he cannot break them; and as he cannot break them he bruises
himself, and so he gathers knowledge. By that he gathers knowledge of Nature on
the one side by suffering, and he gathers knowledge on the other side when he
is in accord with the law; and in accord with the law he finds happiness. As the Lord Buddha once said,
speaking to an ignorant crowd: "Sorrow follows on wrongdoing, as the
wheels of the cart follow the heels of the ox. Happiness follows on right
doing, as the wheels of the cart follow the heels of the ox". He put it in
a way that the peasants round him could appreciate - the inviolability of moral
as of physical law. In that intermediate stage the man learns his lessons, some
of them, and takes a long time in the learning; and then that emotional body
breaks away from him, and he goes into what is called the heavenly world, that
we call the mental world, in his mind body, and there the thoughts that he has
had during his physical life here, they are the food on which the Spirit feeds.
It is a world where the hard and cruel
things are kept outside, walled in, as it were, for the teaching of that
side of the life of this disembodied Spirit, and all that he has thought nobly
works itself out into mental Faculty; and all that he has thought of service
works itself out into greater capacity for service; and all that he has thought
of art works itself out into greater capacity for beauty; and all that he has
studied into greater capacity of mind; for the heaven world is the world of the
growth and the flowering of all the
seeds that we have sown in the sheath of our mortal body, that we call the mental body - our
germs of thought there grow, grow into flower, grow into fruit; that is, they change
into faculties, and these are brought back as the mental faculties, the mental
capacity, when the Spirit embodies himself again in a new body which is shaped
for the expression of the thoughts and the emotions that he brings back, and
you call these "character" and "temperament". Children are
born with very different characters, because they have led very different
lives, and different numbers of lives in the past. That is why there are no favourites in Nature; God is absolute Justice. The child
born with a noble character has won that character by ages of struggle, by ages
of toil, by many and many a defeat, and many and many a victory, until at last
he has shaped that character and brings it back again to earth to serve the
world. That is the great hope of reincarnation, why it is a true gospel for
men, universal in the old religions and spreading rapidly today. For men feel
that the immense inequalities of human capacity, of human power, of human mind,
and of human physical strength and health, that these are so desperately
different in the babes that are born into the world, that some never have a
chance while others can hardly fail to be successful; one is born a genius or a
saint, and the other is born an idiot or a criminal; and these frightful
inequalities in nature would be heart-breaking did we not know that it is a difference
of age, that is, a difference in the period at which a particular Spirit
entered into this world of evolution, and one has had very little time in which
to unfold himself, and is still in the grip of this intractable matter, that is, the matter of our physical
world, and the other has had a long time and has largely mastered it. And the
cravings, and the longings, and the desires of
the old experiences are behind the latter, and whisper to him whether he
shall yield or resist; and as out of long experience he has learnt that to go
against the law brings misery, and to go with the law means happiness,
therefore it is that the accumulated experience, laid up in that great
reservoir of the Spirit within him, what you call conscience, is found in the older
and therefore the more developed children when they are born into the world.
And if you say to such a child, "It is wrong to hurt another," the
child responds at once; that which is within him of his own experience, that realises that you are telling him the truth. And if you say
the same thing to a savage child, there is no response; he has not yet gathered
the experience that we speak of as conscience. And that, very roughly, is the
way in which reincarnation works. It is a particular phase of evolution applied
in this particular way to human beings. There are other forms of it in the
lower kingdoms; I am dealing here with man.
Now what
applies to one man applies also to Nations and to Races. That which you can
trace of order in the individual, you can also, if you will study, trace as of
order in the civilisations and the development of the
Races in our world. You will see at once that that is a very, very long
subject, and when I say a Race I mean by that, in the fullest sense of the
word, what we call a Root-Race, a Mother-Race. But in speaking thus I mean by
that the kind of differences you see in outer
form and appearance and everything, between say an ordinary Negro, a
Chinese or Japanese, and an Aryan. I take these three successive types of the
third, fourth, and fifth Root-Races to show you what I mean by a Root-Race;
that is, a Race that has a common likeness in all its branches by which you can
distinguish it from other Root-Races, although the mingling of them may blur
the likeness to some extent; you will have a certain form of head and a certain
setting and cutting of the features. And if for a moment you will take the
Aryan Race from its cradle in Central Asia, you will find there the root of
that marked difference from the Mongolians and other Asian Nations that
surrounded its cradle; and then you will find certain emigrations going out
from it and populating the Western World. Think of that Root-Race as one which
contains in it the germs of faculties and powers and emotions, the physical peculiarities
which are to be developed one after another in these emigrations which I speak
of, which left the cradle-land and went off westwards. Now these branches of
the Root-Race differ very much less from each other and have a common likeness
of type. They differ in colour very often; they differ in qualities very much.
You cannot develop by evolution at the same time qualities that are
antagonistic one to the other. You have to separate dominant qualities,
and then to develop, generally to
excess, in a sub-type, or sub-race, and later on to prune away the excess and
bring about a reunion. For evolution is like a great sea in which there are
successive waves. You know the rising tide does not run straight ahead all the
time. It goes on in waves, and a wave
forms, rises, breaks, and runs backward again; and so do these Races and
sub-races of man; they are like the waves in a coming tide, and as the tide
rises the waves break and retreat, but the tide made of successive waves
advances; for a while one wave is in
front of another; and so in the evolution of a great Race, you have this
Root-Stock, or Mother-Race, that I spoke of, in which you find enormous
variety, the germs which are going to be developed separately, the great
distinctive qualities which will be developed separately in the sub-races, and
these will have marked characteristics.
There will be something that will dominate a sub-race amid all the many human
qualities which it will evolve, which colours as it were the whole of them and
marks them as belonging to a particular type, or sub-division, of man.
Now if you
look at the Root-Stock, it is of course the remainder of the Aryans who, after
the emigrations, went southwards into India, those who are now called the
Indo-Aryans, to distinguish them from the emigrants who went westwards - four
sets of them.
You have that
which went into Egypt, the first emigration, or second sub-race, and they
developed particularly the physical body, in its inner mechanism and its
relations to the other and subtler worlds, what was called "the Wisdom of
Egypt", or the recognition of the relationships between the surrounding
subtler worlds and the physical man in the physical worlds. Its "wise men"
worked from the physical body, and a very deep knowledge of that -not only of
what you can see of the physical body, but also of the subtler, or etheric,
parts of it. And its Science is marked
by the peculiarity that it began always with the science that you reject as
science, thinking that your modern physical presentment is the whole of
Science, forgetting that Science should "weave for God the garment thou seest Him by". That is to say, they began with
Astrology and worked on to Astronomy, they began with Alchemy and worked on to
Chemistry, and so on. And this was the great characteristic of that emigration
which went to Egypt, and which spread southwards in Africa, and also went along
the borders of the Mediterranean.
Then you get
the next, the second emigration or third sub-race, which goes to Persia. And
there you had the peculiar note, the note of Purity, which dealt not only with
thought and emotion, but also with the elements, as the Ancients called them,
the Earth, the Air, the Fire, the Water. They all had to be kept pure. And so
you find that the Parsi in modern India, the
descendant of the Perso-Aryans, will not bury
his dead, because that would pollute the Earth; he will not burn his dead,
because that would pollute the Fire; he will not put his dead into the rivers,
because that would pollute the Water. And that purity of the elements is a very
remarkable step forward in human thought. That was the great contribution of
Persia, which as you know made a mighty Empire, as Egypt had done before it,
and that thought survives.
In every
sub-race you have two Beings, the Lawgiver and the Teacher of the Religion. The
Law-giver makes a polity, an outer civilisation, a
framework for the Nation. The Teacher gives the religion which works in with that polity, develops it,
strengthens it, limits it or enlarges it.
And then you
come to the next emigration, third emigration, or fourth sub-race, the
Indo-Keltic. That had the dominant note of Beauty. The "beauty that was
Greece", as they say. Art was its great characteristic. The beauty of
painting, the beauty of sculpture, the beauty of architecture, and also the
beauty of language, in which it embodied its thoughts in its literature, a
wonderful language, a flexible language, a language full of music to the ear,
as well as able to express the minute diversities of thought. And the Latin
Nations, as they are called, show out that beauty, for they have descended from
this fourth sub-race, the Keltic, and the French, Spanish, and Italian
languages still show this in their music and accuracy. Beauty, remember, is a
great emotion, and that third emigration developed the emotional qualities of
the human being, for emotion dominated, however it showed itself forth, as you
still find in the southern or Latin Nations of
Europe, as well in the northern Kelts - the southern Irish, or the
Highland Scotch.
And then came
next the Teutonic, in order to develop the concrete mind. You see we are
following the same order. That is what makes this comparatively easy to understand
in all its complexity, if you have once grasped the dominating principle. These
sub-races develop one by one these characteristics of human beings, so adding
more and more to the great store of man. And when you come to what was the
fourth emigration, the fifth sub-race, then you have the development of that
scientific, concrete mind which you see
in this Teutonic sub-race, whether you call them Teutons - though that is not a
popular name today - or whether you call them English, because they are both of
the same stock, or Americans, or your Self-governing Dominions in their white
races. It is a sub-race marked by the activity of this concrete mind, and
showing itself forth mostly in science and its practical applications, in organisation and self-discipline, with an overwhelming
sense of the value of individuality. And
all these things have been developing one after another, until we get the human
beings of today, with these types developed in them, each with one dominating
faculty. And it is this dominating faculty which makes the great difference
between the Kelt and the Teuton, with results which are going on at the present
time within the limits of this one Kingdom. They cannot understand each other.
They are two different types; different sub-races, with different ways of
looking at the world; and until they learn to sympathise,
instead of quarrelling, they cannot find a really true union. It is not the
fault of either side, but the fundamental; differences of the human temperament
are in the way. And so we come to where we are now, in our fourth and fifth
sub-races.
But, you say,
you have left out the Root-Stock. The remarkable point about that is that that
shows out in itself at different stages of its own growth resemblances of the
succession of sub-races born of it, and it is the only one of the great civilisations of antiquity that still endures - a thing to
remember when we are coming to our next two lectures. For you have to remember
that India was a mighty, civilised power, trading, colonising,
enormously wealthy, with a wonderful and varied literature, when she traded
with Babylon years before the Christian
Era, and she came down all through the millennia, still showing out these
wonderful capacities and varied powers
of mind. She was philosophical, she was political, she tried every form of
political government that has since been tried in the daughter sub-races. In
the time of Alexander, in the fourth century before the Christian Era, there
were fourteen Schools of Political Science - I mean by Schools, not buildings,
but types of thought - existing in India, discussing, quarrelling, and
agreeing; working themselves out sometimes in Republics, sometimes in City
States like those of Greece, sometimes in Council Governments, sometimes in Royal
Governments and sometimes in Imperial Governments, and so on, an extraordinary mass of political experiments
and of knowledge developed from these. Most of you know India vaguely as
philosophical, you know her as metaphysical, you know her as religious, but
very few of you know her as political. And yet her experiments in political
life have been far more numerous than those of other Nations, because her life
is so much longer, a Nation that has had - to say the very least of it - a civilisation for at least
years, as great and as complex as that of Babylon - a remarkable
phenomenon, because all the daughter civilisations
have perished, and the present one is perishing, broken into pieces.
If you realise that we have come to that stage, you will see what I mean by the phrase "The
World's Opportunity". We have come, as it were, to the point in the
development of the concrete mind where other lines of thought and other methods
of thought have to be taken up. The next stage beyond the mind which was the separating
force, is that of the uniting, the union.
I ought to
have said - I forgot it at the moment in speaking of the Lawgiver and the
Teacher - it is a peculiarity of Christianity, which was given for the special
development of the individual, that no polity was given with that which was
distinctly Christianity. In all other cases they work together, but in the
development of the individual, which was the work of Christianity - the value
of the individual, the strength of the individual, the combativeness of the
individual which inevitably grew out of it, in order that strength might be
developed - there was no definite Lawgiver with a political plan put on
Christendom, but only religion given by the great Teacher, the Christ. He gave
the religion, and it was to work itself out in all its wonderful variety, just
because it was specifically, an individualising
faith, and that was why it lost reincarnation; that doctrine was taught in many
different forms in the early Church, and then it was banned the form adopted by
Origen by a Church Council.
Reincarnation
diminishes the value of the individual the value of the individual life. You
always have another chance, you always have another opportunity. You may have
failed, but you say: "I shall have another life, and I will succeed".
You may have broken down, but you say:
"I shall have another life, and I will stand up". It lessens the
value of the individual life. Whereas to drop reincarnation out of religion,
and to make the everlasting future of the man depend on the way in which he
lives or believes in this one brief mortal life, gave an enormous strength to
the development of the individual. This life was like a lifeboat in a storm, on
which all the lives of the sailors depend; the whole life of the man depended
on his single earth-life; everlasting happiness, everlasting misery, turned on
these few years of mortal life. Not a very rational view, I grant, but a
necessary view for development (for reasons you will see in the later
lectures), where another view of the relations of human beings had to be taken.
And the
world's opportunity lies in this, that we are now at the transition stage of
human evolution, of racial evolution, in which the next step forward, according
to the ladder that was descended and that we are ascending, is Union, and not
persistence in division.
You may not
have thought, when I began, that I was coming to that conclusion. I wanted it
to rest on a definite and reasoned basis. For there are being born today in all
parts of the world, and most largely in America, a new type of men, not that
which is concerned with the individualising mind but with the Life, which is thinning
and lessening the walls, trying to unite itself with the life in others that
once more it may be one. And if you look at the records in the Washington
Bureau of Ethnology, you may find traced out the physical characteristics of
this new type. They call it American;
that does not matter; there are more of them in America, and so they
have drawn more attention, but there are many in other countries; they are
being born in different parts of the world, this same type, recognisable
and distinguishable from the ordinary multitude by their similarities. It means
a new departure. It means another quality is coming out now, and that the
cultivation of human individuality has done its work, and that the civilisation which embodied individuality is breaking into
pieces all around us, because it naturally has its end in combat and war, with
war between Nation and Nation, combat between class and class within the limit
of a Nation. And if you look abroad you will see signs of a desire for more
union, signs of aspiration for a more human life, signs of a longing that
within a Nation classes shall unite and form a real family, instead of being
warring fragments as they are unhappily at the present time. And whether by
success or failure in the struggles between classes, one thing is sure, that
they will find that union and co-operation are better than division and combat,
and that to work for a common end is more important than the pressing of the
interests of a particular individual or a class of individuals. Whether by pain
or by necessity, the world is being pushed in that direction. It may resist,
and reap still much fruit of misery; but if wisdom is chosen, it will recognise its opportunity, marked by its place in
evolution; it will then work for Union, for an ever wider and wider circle of
Union, class united with class, and Nation with Nation, and later, Humanity in
one great Unity in the far, far future that is before us, that our study may
forecast with certainty. Everything that
tends to Union now is on the line of evolution, and everything that tends to
separation is on the line of the past which we ought to have outgrown; and the
great difference in the coming years - that to which I hope to lead you in the
next two lectures - is that we have before us now in this land of Great Britain
a possibility - if we can take it up and carry it out - of making a model for
the future Federation of the World. The world is not yet ripe, because of the
great differences between the Races, to join them all together in the perfect
Federation. But it is possible here, where there are links, which have been
bonds of Empire and shall become links of Commonwealth, if you can bring about
Union, Union between India and Britain, between East and West, between Asia and
Europe. For that reason were India and Britain brought together, that they
might unite the elder and the younger races in a Commonwealth of Free Nations,
where all shall stand together, linked by amity, friendship, mutual respect,
mutual support, mutual service, equally free, equal in status, the first great
conglomeration of peoples brought together, not in an Empire made by force, but
in a Commonwealth made by mutual goodwill and friendliness. That is the great
opportunity of Britain and India today, and that will be the model for the
World's Federation in the future.
Lecture III
The Conflict
of East and West
FRIENDS: We
have arrived tonight at what I may call the more concrete part of the subject
on which these four talks are being delivered. In the first lecture, you may
remember, I carried you far away into regions not very closely thought over as
a rule, dealing with the Inner Government of the World. Last Sunday I tried to
put before you the methods of that Government, and to suggest a great
opportunity that lay before the world of building a civilisation
on securer, on more permanent, lines.
Today, I have
as title "The Conflict of East and West". Sometimes I am inclined to
think that here in the West you almost forget that there is an East throbbing with life, throbbing with energy,
full of aspirations, full of hopes; and an East, moreover, that has behind it -
especially in the country most closely connected with yourselves - a past so
immense in its length, so complicated in its details, that one wonders almost,
living there, as I of course do, why Great Britain does not take more interest
in India, and see whether it may not be possible, looking at the two civilisations so different in their character, it may not
be possible to build a mightier civilisation by blending the ideals, the two being at first
sight opposed but really complementary the one to the other. For the length of
Indian history is a phenomenon unique in history - and I will come to that in a
moment, when I remind you that the first conflicts, as it were, between East
and West one can pass over very swiftly, for they were physical, not a conflict
of Ideals but a conflict of Nations. Europe invaded by Asia and Asia invaded by
Europe; the pendulum of power swinging from one side to the other.
Not very long
ago, in India, I read an English review, or rather an English book, which
remarked, for the first time I had seen it in an English book, on this swing of
the pendulum between these two great divisions, the great continents of Asia
and Europe. And the writer said - a rather surprising statement, coming as it
did from a Westerner - that the pendulum was now swinging towards Asia,
suggesting dominance of eastern ideals and of eastern power.
Each of these
great invasions of one continent by the other has left its traces behind; and
it is not easy to decide which of the two has left its mark more deeply on the
other. Sometimes we forget, in the case of war, in the case of invasions, that
they have an aftermath of benefit to both countries or to both continents. When
Alexander invaded India, although his stay was not long there, still Greek influence
existed over a considerable period; and you cannot but notice the influence of
Greek art on Indian art, the effects that you find in statues, the effects that
you find in carvings of various kinds, the Greek type coming out, and almost,
in some parts of the country,
overbearing the purely Asiatic. And if you look for the swing on the other way,
then you cannot but notice that when the learning came from Arabia and was
carried by the Moors into southern Europe and into Spain, it was one of the
results of that invasion, of that settling, that science revived again in
Europe, and began its great struggle against the Roman Catholic Church, being
accused first as a form of sorcery; and even a
Roman Pope, Sylvester the Second, I think it was, because he used
compasses and drew some of the propositions of Euclid, was said by the
"wise" men around him to be practising magic and to be having
dealings with the devil. Still, despite that opposition, science made its way,
and the darkness that followed on the fall of Rome was finally dispelled by the
advance of science, and Europe took up again, after a thousand years of
darkness, science where it had been left in Greece and in Egypt.
And so, if
you look at philosophy instead of science, you find how in southern Italy the
memories of Pythagoras had survived, and the school of Pythagoras had left its
traces even in the monasteries of the Middle Ages; and we remember that
Pythagoras drew his teachings from Egypt and then from India, so that from the
far East and from the middle East there came that great Greek philosophy which moulded all the thought of Europe, stamping itself deeply
into the minds of the people. But the greatest influence that has been
exercised over
Looking thus
hastily over these changes, alike in the physical world of Nations and in the
ideal world of thought and emotion, which are held up by the various Nations as
goals towards which they strive, we begin to wonder a little whether this
opposition is always to continue; whether
part of that Great Plan, of which I spoke in my first lecture, may not include,
by the union of Great Britain and India, a blending of the ideals into a
greater Ideal of the Future, when each shall learn from each and shall take
that which is good from the other, while
preserving that which each has worked out as
good for itself.
Looking now
for a moment at
If you turn
aside from ordinary western history for the moment, you find suggestions, when
Plato writes of what the Egyptians told him when he was passing through the
Egyptian Initiation into the Mysteries, and how they spoke of the great island Poseidonis, which is recognised
now as an eastern part of the great continent of Atlantis, the last of that to
survive so far as the western world is concerned.
It is said
that the Indo-Aryans came down into India across Kashmir and Baluchistan and Assam, where passes existed for their
passage - came down about B.C., shortly
before that tremendous earthquake that
caused, and the tidal wave that followed on, the ruin, the destruction
that Plato speaks of as falling upon Poseidonis; but
it does not particularly matter, nine thousand years more or less will not
really affect the point that I want to put to you. A great German scholar says
that the religious literature of the Indo-Aryans, the Vedas, cannot be younger
than five thousand years before the time of Christ, the Christian Era. And we
come across touches of this very ancient
You think of
Or, if you
take the Empire of his grandson Ashoka, you find it
stretching from the Hindu Khush right down to what is
now Madras; and you find Viceroys there - not only one Viceroy, as in modern
times, but four Viceroys - through whom that great Empire was administered; Ashoka,
of course, the fifth, over them all.
If you went
further East you would find her colonies clearly traceable today by the marks
of her civilisation and her religion in Java, in
I take first,
however, the religious side, for every great Teacher of religion that the world
has known is an Asiatic, and that must
mean something for the world. Not one has been born out of Asia; and a vast continent
that has thus given to the world Those who are more revered than any monarch,
more revered than any conqueror, Those who are crowned with the love, the
adoration of Humanity - whether you take the Lord Buddha or the Lord Christ -
surely such a continent has something worth hearing by the West; something to
say which may be of use in trying to outline our ideals of the future, the
rebuilding of civilisation out of the fragments that
lie around us today.
So let us for
a moment glance, not at the detail which touches your modern problems - that I
keep for next Sunday - but at the great Ideals which underlie the civilisations of the East and of the West. For it is these
big Ideals which mould the thoughts and hearts of men. It is these which really
make a civilisation, however important the economic
aspect of it may be, or the political aspect of it may be; there is something
that is greater than the outer organisation, and that
is the Ideals which mould the brains and the hearts of the people, and which
gradually civilise and train and uplift.
Now, what are
the Ideals of the East as opposed, for the moment, to the Ideals of the West?
You must remember that, when we speak in this sense of the East, we speak of
India, for India has dominated the civilisation of
Asia. If you look at Japan, they tell you that they draw from India their civilisation. If you look at China, you find there the
multitudes who bow before the Lord Buddha. The great mystic Lao-tsze, the great
philosopher Confucius, appeal more to the learned among the Chinese; and very
splendid are their sayings and their thoughts. But Buddhism spread upwards,
northwards from India, passed through Tibet, went on into China, so that some
of the most splendid of the Lord Buddha's teachings come to us in Chinese garb
and are translated from the Chinese into our own tongue, profoundly interesting
when put side by side with those that came from the Pali - more familiar
over here than those that are drawn from
the Chinese recensions of His teachings, - on some
points differing considerably, although the outline of the morality is
identical. But in the Chinese, more of philosophy than as yet has made very
much impression, I think, in Great Britain, although in the Pali you find the
philosophy differs on one great point from that which we find in China. Putting
it roughly, I would say that China has remembered that the Lord Buddha was a
Hindu, and took some of the essential truths of the great spiritual verities
for granted, speaking to Hindus from the Hindu view of truth; and that is found
more in the recensions that come from China than from
those that come from Ceylon, from Burma, and from Siam. But it is not that
difference that I have aught to do with really this evening.
It is
interesting, as regards the Lord Buddha Himself, that He lived surrounded
largely by Republics, and based His own great Order and the government of His
Order on the Council Government that He found in the Republics; so that, when
in that Order some new law is to be promulgated and His directions, as exist in
the books, are carried out, we find, in
what we may call the great Buddhic Parliament, political method is used in a
religious assembly, and that when the law is proposed it is put to the vote by
acclamation; if any dissent in that, it is argued and put again the second
time, and still unanimity is sought for; and if for the third time after
discussion unanimity is not found, then they proceed to the voting, in the way
they did in Lord Buddha's day when they voted in the political Councils, with
little slips of wood, one coloured for
"Yes" and one for "No". Sometimes a secret ballot, if they
wished it, and sometimes open voting. And it may be well just to bear that in
mind, because it may get out of your minds the idea that these things are not
familiar by tradition and by practice right down through Hindu history.
Now as to
these ideals: What is the profound difference between them? In India the human
being is regarded as "the man, the wife, and the child". None of the
three is complete by him or herself. The Hindu scriptures have it: "God
created men to be fathers and women to be mothers", and the ideal human
being is therefore defined in one of the great books of the law as "the
man, the wife, and the child". The family is the unit, not the individual.
And this has profound and far-reaching results. The family has grown in India
into what is called the joint family. That is to say, that the father and the
mother and the sons and their wives form an ever-increasing family, the daughters
becoming part of the family of their husbands; and in these joint families,
which still exist down to the present day and
stretch backwards far into the night of time, there is practically
scarcely any distinction between the children of the family, so far as regards
fathers or uncles; they are all one family; with the result that among the
Hindus has grown up a sense of community that you do not find here in the West,
where the married couple go out to make a separate home, a home of their own, separate
from the parents. And all through this joint family there is common property
belonging to the home, and the elder the
trustee of that property; and, looking back to the village life, you see how
naturally that grew up in those villages, which are the units of government in
India, made naturally out of families and allied families. That has gone on, as
I said, right down to the present day, but it is gradually breaking up.
Individualism is asserting itself there as it has long asserted itself in Europe,
so that the joint family is becoming less common, although in that huge
population of India you find it up and down among the more orthodox
Indians. There is a tendency to break
away from it, and the result of that presumably will be to loosen the bonds of
the family. One effect it had was that you did not have the terrible poverty
that you have where individualism has swayed the people as an ideal, for the
old people were inevitably nourished and guarded and cared for in the joint
home; the children, they also were educated and trained and supported in the
joint home. And this strong family tie influenced the whole life of India,
first in making general the community ideal, which was the ideal of the
village, and then in making the whole State largely communal, with the
inevitable results that I will speak of
next week in the questions of holding land, crafts, and so on.
Now what
comes out of that ideal when you look at it from the moral standpoint? Clearly
the sense of Duty, the sense of Obligation. Where you take a family, elders,
contemporaries, and youngers, the success, of the
family or its destruction rests on the discharge: of the mutual family duties
and obligations. In India it has not been the way to look upon man as born
free, because to the logical mind of the Hindu a baby left free and untended,
without others performing duties and owing obligations to it, would have a
remarkably small chance of surviving into boyhood or girlhood or maturity; for
the baby is a helpless creature when born into the world. And the whole result
of recognising that fact; and looking on the family
as a unit in the State, gradually transferred the idea of duty and obligation
within the family to duties and obligations of the citizens to the State. That
is the dominant note in India: Duty. They have their own word for it, an
untranslatable word: DHARMA. And the whole civilisation
is practically worked out on the basis of the family. If you take the duties
which grow out of the family tie, the tie of blood and the affection which
grows up in the family from duties rendered by each to each, you have there in
love the real bond between elders and contemporaries and youngers,
with the recognition of the various duties which each owes to all. And if you
take that family idea which knows no law, since "love is the fulfilling of
the law", and if you extend the family idea to the members of the
Community or of the State, if you see
them as elders, contemporaries, and youngers, and
duties belonging to each grade in life, you then pass on to what was the
original of the Caste ideal, not as it is today, a matter of pride, of
oppression, but as it was in the days when it was founded, and founded on the
ideal of the family. For you have there - and the thought has come back again
in Ruskin - the recognition of the functions in every Nation, without which a
Nation cannot exist; you have the citizens of the State with their duties to
the State, the functions which they discharge, so that all the functions of the
individual become part of a National Service; and in this great division of the
Castes - which was into Brain-Workers,
Rulers, Organisers and Distributors, or
Merchants, and Producers of wealth - you have there the four great functions of
National life, each equally sacred as a Function discharged to the whole, not
simply an individual gaining his livelihood, but a citizen performing a certain
part as an organ in the National life. And as long as they went by qualities,
as long as each type of human being passed into his appropriate discharge of
function as marked out by his capacities, so long the organisation
was fruitful of good to the State; but when it passed into being a mere matter
of birth, when it became purely hereditary, when into the Caste of
Brain-Workers someone might be born who had no high intellect, who was not a
scientist, or philosopher, or teacher of religion, or teacher in the schools or
colleges or universities, but had
capacities quite other, fitting him for other work, then it was that Caste
confusion arose, because capacity no longer marked out the function to be
discharged in the Nation; it became a
hereditary matter, and those who were born into a particular family need not
have any necessary power or capacity for the Caste to which they nominally belonged.
And so you had the destruction practically of the system, for the life went out
of it. While the life was in it, and every citizen of the State was himself
discharging a National Service and not simply gaining a livelihood, then it
worked well and gave great stability to the social system. How that might be
brought into modern life without the rigidity which ruined it, and ruins it
still in India; when it shall be made dependent on the faculties as shown in
the educational period, marking the avocation into which a boy or a girl should
pass - then in the fulness of time you will have what
was good and avoid what was evil in that system. And that some of the great
thinkers of our own time have seen. Ruskin was one; Auguste
Comte was another; but he brought in the hereditary principle, and made it even
more hopeless as an organisation of the State.
Now, looking
for a moment at those family duties that I spoke of, externalise
them to the Nation, make them universal, make them to be rendered by all and made
permanent, and you have the social virtues. When you realise
duties, when you realise that the nature of the
duties depends on your own faculties and on the faculties of those around you,
then you begin to realise what it means when it is
said that "love is the fulfilling of the law". For in that family
emotion when rendered universal and rendered permanent as a part of the
character, you have, instead of emotion, virtue, all the virtues that grow out of love. And that has been admirably
shown by an Indian writer, Bhagavan Das, who pointed out that out of the emotion of love, made
permanent in the character, all virtues grow; out of the emotion of hate
rendered permanent, all vices develop; and for the first time, I think, these
Foundations of virtues and vices were shown clearly and definitely by him, one
of the outcomes of modern Indian thought, valuable when you are dealing with
the building up of a civilisation. Let us then take,
as we well may, because there is no challenge on this point, that the great
idea, the ruling Ideal of India, lies in the discharge of duty and the
obligations between members of a Community or a Nation.
Now when you
look at Greece and Rome, they come, as it were, half-way between Asia and
Europe, influenced by Asia certainly and then influencing Europe; you have a
peculiar change in the family, and the State becomes purely masculine. This
comes out in Aristotle. He says that everyone who is a citizen of a State must
be capable of fulfilling any office in the State; and he took it for granted
that there were a large number of offices in the State, in fact practically all
of them, that could not be filled except by men; and so no one but a man could
be a citizen in his City State. That again influenced Rome very largely, with the
addition of the tremendous power given to the father of the family - the power
of life and death over his sons. And curiously that purely masculine ideal was
revived in modern Germany in its Ideal of the State. If you take a well-known
writer, Bluntschli, you find him declaring that the
State must be masculine, and he argues in his book on the line of the pure
masculinity of the State. That has
probably passed out of State ideals by the war. Passing from Greece and Rome,
on which I need not dwell, you come to the modern ideal call it modern although
you have just to look for a moment at your Anglo-Saxon forefathers, whose
Village System was practically the same as the Indian, and you find there the
same arrangement of the Villages; they brought it from Central Asia, and on
that English liberty is founded. The unwritten laws of England, the unwritten
Constitution of England, those are based entirely on that great Village System
in England, when the Teutonic people came over and brought it with them. And that
unwritten law and Constitution is what has been picked out from time to time in
history, as in the Magna Carta, in the Bill of Rights
- before all Statutes, before all Parliaments, the inalienable right of the
Aryans to life, to liberty, and to property, and on that is based the great
Liberty of this country; that Liberty that England has held up as an ideal in
the past, and to which if she is false today she seals her own doom, for she has been Liberty's standard-bearer among
all the Nations of the world, and has made Liberty synonymous with her name.
And now we
come to the ideal of that, so different from the ideal of the East; it is the
Ideal of Individuality - the individual. Now that is a necessary ideal. Without
the strong individual you could not take the next step onwards, the next great
step in civilisation. For you can no more build a
house without bricks or stones, than you can build a lasting civilisation in which the sense of individuality had not
been developed. Now that is based on
Christianity. Christianity was the first religion in the world that laid
tremendous stress on the value of the individual. The other religions, like the
polities founded on them, always took as unit the family, never the individual;
and that is the peculiar value of Christianity to the world - it brought out
the sense of individuality and its value. It has worked much harm on its way,
for that is but one of the two great ideals of Christianity; the other one was
the Ideal of Service. After strength had been developed, after strength had
proved itself, then strength was to be used for service and not for oppression;
that was the second point. Now the first was connected with the development of
the concrete mind. You remember that I pointed out to you how these various capacities in the human
being were evolved one after another in the long course of evolution; and just
as emotion and art and the love of beauty were the special evolution of the
Keltic sub-race, or the Latin races, whichever you choose to call them - Greeks,
Romans, southern European peoples - just as emotion was the mark of the Kelt
and is the mark of the Kelt today, so the concrete mind was the mark of the
Teuton - the German. Teuton is a better name, because Germany is only one part
of the Teutonic sub-race, and Scandinavians and Britons, all these belong to
that great sub-race, and in them you find the high development of the concrete
mind. Science is its mark; the immense development of science among these
people of the Teutonic sub-race is due to that development of the lower mind in
man which works by observation, by reasoning, by argument, by logic, caring
less for the beauty of expression than
for the depth and the strength and the logical character of the thought. The
profound difference between the two sub-races, Kelts and Teutons, is one reason
of the constant misunderstandings that you find between England and Ireland,
members of those two sub-races, the one moved by emotion, the other by
reasoning, the one full of impulse and the other more cautious and more
logical. Looking at this - this development of the concrete mind, with the
tremendous sense of its own rights, its own individuality - you come to the
more modern phase of thought, where you have the individual clothed with his rights as the
unit in the State. They talk of course about the contract, the social contract,
that everybody knows never took place, and is only a word used in order to
explain a certain relationship between human beings, that each has his own
rights inalienable and born in him, rights that he may properly assert against
all comers, the inherent liberty of man - profound truth, although veiled in so
much of error and for so long.
Now in
Christianity two great doctrines disappeared which had existed everywhere in the
elder civilisations of the East. I mentioned them in
my first lecture the doctrine of Karma, or cause and effect, universal
causation; and the doctrine of Reincarnation, the individual life prolonged,
dwelling in one body after another, passing innumerable times through birth and
death, and bringing with it into each successive birth the results of past
struggles and past failures, as explained last week. These underlaid
the whole of the thoughts of the East, and do still. The doctrine of reincarnation, that, as already said, had
been taught in various forms in the early Church and by the early Church
Fathers, was banned by the Church in the sixth century, I think it was, and so
it vanished for a time from the Christian world, except among heretics, among
the Albigenses and others. That was a necessary loss
of a great truth, because the doctrine of reincarnation does, as already
pointed out, diminish the value of each separate individual human life. If you
have not done it in this life, you will do it in another; if you have missed
your chances here, you will grasp them in another.
The doctrine
is coming back again now that the strength of the individual is well
established in the western world. It is re-emerging because of its eminent
rationality, because of its obvious applicability to the varying capacities of
men. At the time it was obscured in order that the individual might grow into
strength and power. Now inevitably that led to much of conflict, not only of
Nation against Nation, but of class against class, of man against man, and so
you had the great struggles that you find in Europe. The individual claimed his
own right: "Let the best man win"; it is a very popular axiom still,
but that means anarchy. "Let the best man serve" is the truth, and
that means ordered progress. And that is the second great ideal of
Christianity. It was that on which the Christ laid such immense stress.
"Let him that is greatest among you, be as he that doth serve. Behold, I
am among you as he that serveth." And so again in
the writings of one of His great Apostles you
find that supreme truth in the example of the Christ: "Though He
were rich, yet for our sakes He became poor, that we by His poverty might
become rich". There you have the
doctrine of Human Brotherhood, the doctrine of human sacrifice, put in a single
sentence, embodied in a superhuman life. And that second great ideal,
following, as it did follow in the course of evolution, on the unbounded
strength of the individual and his grasping, with the resultant anarchy, has
now to come to the front as the dominating part of one of our great ideals of
the future. That is the greatest contribution that Christianity has made to the
world, not an enforced sacrifice, but a voluntary sacrifice, the sweeping down
of the high to lift up the lowly, and the using of all strength for helping the
weak.
Now much has
been done in Britain to emphasise that truth, and
there is one point I would like to put to you, because I know it is one as to
which a very great and not wholly unfair attack is made on the great
combinations of manual workers here - a groping after a very great truth, but
crude in its expression, and so easily twisted and shown to be absurd and
mischievous. For it is put in a very crude form - that the best workman shall
limit his skill, his work, his production, so as not to outdo his weaker
brother, whose capacity and skill are less. Now that is the doctrine which has
been more attacked perhaps than any other in Trade Unionism; and naturally so,
put in that very crude form, for people see that it diminishes production and
thus injures the Nation. "You are making a certain arrangement for helping
certain brothers in your Union, but you are
injuring your Nation by diminishing your own productive power";
and, put in that way, it is difficult to defend. But if you can see what
underlies it, if you can see into the dim gropings of
minds which have caught a glimpse of the beauty of Brotherhood and are trying
to realise it in the family sense, in which the
younger is not crushed because his capacities are less or his strength is
smaller, but rather helped and cherished by his elders because he is yet young,
and not able to fight for himself in the battle
of life; if you can see that in that there is a sense of a larger Self
that has to be served above the smaller Self, then you will realise
that they are groping after a mighty truth, only the way in which it is put is
crude and unwise. And it is as well sometimes to look at a thing that you do
not like from its better side and not from its worse, to try to see the motive
of the people who make a rule that seems at first so mischievous, so
restrictive; and you can only do it by, as it were, trying to get into their
hearts and minds, and thus see at what they are really aiming. Then you will
begin to realise that just because that feeling of
brotherhood has grown up among the manual workers in the country, that Britain
is perhaps almost the only country which can make the great transition into a
higher civilisation without a revolution which shall
whelm the Nation in disaster. It is just that realisation
that everyone is part of a larger Self, whose interests have to be thought of,
a Self that has to be expanded and has to embrace the Nation and not a particular craft only, which
is true; so that you will not have certain bodies of workers set over, as it
were, against the Nation, striving to impose
their will upon it by the power of numbers and of the National life
which they hold in their hands, but you will have an organised
Nation, in which everyone will have his place, everyone will have his work,
will have his own function to discharge. Then we may realise
that this is really what we are striving after, to under stand how to reconcile
the claims of the Nation and the claims of the individual, the family Ideal of
the East and the individualistic Ideal of the West.
For, have not
Britain and India something to learn of each other, as I suggested in the
beginning? And may we not find next week, in looking more into the detail, that
each has something to teach the other, each has something to give? That in this
age-long evolution towards different Ideals each has gone to excess along its
own particular line, and needs to be corrected by the other? That the Ideal of
the family carried to excess has led to too much submission, too much
subservience, too much erasing of the individual, too little care for liberty?
But India has been learning and assimilating the Ideal of the West more rapidly
than the West is inclined to learn and assimilate the Ideal of the East. For
India has caught from you your sense of liberty, your feeling of the value of
the individual, your realisation that a Nation to be
really great must be free throughout; and that this is to be won, not - if it
may be - by conflict, but by mutual understanding and sympathy and desire to
serve. And so it is that in these Ideals, which seem to be so contrary, we may
find in each the corrective of the other; that we have to blend together the
liberty of the individual and also the
welfare of the Nation, that the Nation is a family on a larger scale, a
greater Self, to which the smaller selves must conform themselves; that we may
find after all that in these two Nations, one the great elder of the East, the
other inspiring and largely guiding the West, that. they have been brought up
apart, that they have been developed separately, that their religions have been
different, in order that the two great Ideals might be gradually evolved
throughout the ages, and then brought together, then bound together, then
united, different as they are; that we may find the blending of two great
Ideals, the joining together of two necessary views of human life, and so may
find a reconciliation, not for these two great countries only, but for the
whole of Humanity.
Then it shall
be realised that men live not for themselves but for
all, that even Nations exist not for themselves but for all the other Nations
together; and from these ideals of family and of individuality we may find a
yet higher Ideal, in which each shall take its place, and that shall form in
turn a platform on which a still mightier Ideal shall lift itself - that great
Ideal of Nations as one Family, the Ideal of Universal Peace.
Lecture IV
The Ideal of
the Future
FRIENDS: In
reading a newspaper today I found a very interesting lecture by Sir Michael
Sadler, who is apparently very largely in his thought as to the reorganisation of Society running along the line on which I
have been trying to lead you in the last three weeks. He points out - he is
speaking at Mirfield, opening some buildings for a
new Community - he points out that modern civilisation
is a colossal fact, and then goes on to say that this modern civilisation has been achieved by the courage and labour of
western men during four centuries. It is
obvious from the context and from looking back that he is really starting with
the sixteenth century, after the Wars of the Roses, and passing on through the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth. Then he says that through these
centuries "the great characteristic, the essence, of Western Civilisation, was Power. Its phases had been: the power of
the individual Pioneer; the power of the State; the power of the Sea; the power
of the Machine; the power of Coal; and the power of High Explosives". And
through this stupendous outburst of Power, Providence had permitted a great change in the minds of men all over
the world. Then he goes on to say:
In the heart
and conscience of modern civilisation there is now foreboding,
Power, which is the essence of modern civilisation,
threatens to destroy it. Three men as typical as Viscount Grey, Mr. H. G.
Walls, and the Dean of S. Paul's, warn us that modern civilisation
is at the cross-roads of its destiny. Unless by some deflection of its recent
purpose, Power can be concentrated upon the constructive works of Peace, it
will destroy civilisation by War.
Then he goes
on to point out that just at this moment there is a certain tendency to turn
back, with "some amount of wistfulness", he calls it, to medieval
times; and he slightly elaborates that thesis, and shows how in Industry there
has been some revival of the Medieval Guild, how in Art a similar change has
shown itself, how in Politics the Nations are looking to a Council of Peoples,
and are recognising Nationhood but trying to allay
its rivalries. And alluding to Matthew Arnold, he says that he felt in himself
the attractions of the Middle Ages as a Past, but that instead of that
"men are looking at a possible revival drawn from it as the dawn of a new
era". And finally he goes on to say that history cannot repeat itself, but
that though we cannot go back to the Middle Ages and become medieval in our
thought and way of life, it is possible that
the future
may blend some medieval ideas with those derived from the age of Power, and
that what is perilous in some modern tendencies may be transmuted by a
re-discovery of some aspects of Mediaeval Life into an improvement of the
present condition. All honour to those who, while bravely modern in spirit, are
willing to learn from and to practise what was best
in the Mediaeval way of life.
And he
mentions three Powers that, he says, then worked in harmony in the life of
Christendom; they were: the Priesthood, the Empire, and the University;
"For all three, in a form adapted to modern needs, the modern world may
find a place".
Now under
that conception there lies, I think, a profound truth. I should go much further
back than the Mediaeval Age. It is, I think, the tendency only of the modern
European mind which stops within the boundaries of Europe and the age of Europe
and refuses to go further East, where civilisations
endured for so much longer periods, periods of which it would not be unfair to
say that some aspects of Medieval Europe were the reproduction of the further
East. I mentioned to you, I think, in one of my lectures, in speaking of the
East, that Europeans always look back only as far as Aristotle, except Maine,
who saw that Humanity had had a much longer experience before Aristotle was
born than since his time, and desired to trace much of modern Europe right back
to the immemorial traditions of India and her organisation
for the individual and the State. Tonight I am going to try to draw out some of
those ancient ideals, which, blended with our modern ideals, may give us an
Ideal for the immediate Future. Not for the very, very far-off future, for
Nations, like individuals, cannot proceed by immense leaps, immense changes in
human nature; but, given time and thought, I believe there are no limits to the
power of perfecting our Humanity, and that the task before us is so to change
the forms of our polity as to enable a great change to take place, which is
imminent, on our threshold - as, in
fact, I have suggested to you in the lectures that lie behind us
tonight.
Let me very
briefly recall to you the path along which I have tried to lead you. In the
first lecture we dealt with the question - Is there a Plan? Then in the second
we considered the methods of the Plan, having seen reason enough to accept, as
a hypothesis even, that a Plan underlies the whole of the evolution of our
world, the whole of the evolution of our system, and probably far, far beyond.
In that second lecture we studied the methods, and we found that these might be
divided into two parts - the involution of life in matter, and the evolution of
matter into a great succession of forms. Looking at the involution, we saw the
five stages. The Self, the great Unit, descending into contact with matter,
preserves its own essential unity; we may call it the world, or plane, of
Unity. Then we saw within that Unity internal divisions arising, so that we had
Union; these cohered still together and were encircled as it were by the Unity
itself. Descending into a third stage, we found distinct separation; barriers
arose, it is the plane of Intellect, the I-hood, the Self-hood, coming
downwards in order to shape bodies for his own expression. Then we came to a
fourth stage, where attractions and repulsions seemed to be the great new
elements unfolding in the life. And lastly, to the denser physical, where the
life was most cribbed and cabined, most resisted by external matter - matter
almost smothering the life, which had then to subdue matter and make it plastic
for its own purposes. Looking at the evolution where the life was to
ascend again through the five stages, we
found how that showed itself in the formation and the forms of matter. It
passed through the lowest of these and made the Mineral Kingdom in the physical
world, then onwards to the Vegetable, onwards to the Animal, until it reached
the Human form, until Humanity appeared. And we saw that that, so far as we can
judge, is the highest form that has yet appeared in this up-climbing of the life,
and we noticed in that human form greater and
greater refinement and beauty were introduced, and that when the human
was, as it were, fixed as the model form, then great internal changes made it
more and more responsive to the moulding life within.
And we traced that evolution upward, and we found that it had in its way
unfolded not only the form of man, but desires and passions and emotions, the
second of the upward stages; that it had
unfolded mind, the third of the upward stages; and is now on the threshold of
the fourth. Looking at it in that way, we came by a sort of compulsion as to
what that next stage must be, as we glanced backward at it when the life was
occupied in its descent; and we found
that we were on the threshold of the plane of Union, where separation was to be
largely overcome, where working together was to take the place of working
against each other, where we might look forward to a civilisation
which should recognise Brotherhood as the law of
life, and where gradually we were to see developed all the changes in the
polity and the mechanism necessary to make a great co-operative, instead of
combative, civilisation. And looking at these great
stages, as they came one after another on the
stage of Humanity, we noticed that in these there were successive waves,
as it were, of civilisation, and that in every case,
except the last, there was a Lawgiver moulding the
outer civilisation and a Teacher giving a religious
form suitable for the proposed outer polity, a
religion which should give out the old truths in a new shape, and thus
by stage after stage should bring out the various perfections of the ever
unfolding life. But in the fifth we found that there was no lawgiver - there
was a religion - no lawgiver to make a polity, because it was the age where
individualism especially was to be developed, whether in the individual or the
Nation, and hence a religion was given which had in it two great ideals to be
successively shown on the world-stage in the great drama. On the one side the evolution
of the individual and his value; on the other side the duty of the individual,
when he had gained and realised his strength, to turn
that strength to service and not to oppression.
And so we
came still further onwards, and we were able in this long, long evolution to
find, in studying two great divisions of our globe, East and West, that there
we came to a great conflict, a conflict first physical, and then a conflict of civilisations and of ideals. And you remember how I pointed
out to you that in the East the family was the unit in the Nation, while in the
West the individual was the unit in the Nation; that inevitably out of that
there came great differences, fundamental differences, in civilisation;
for the ideal of the family inevitably
develops the sense of corporate life, the sense of the duty of every member of
the family to every other, the binding
sense of obligation of the various parts of the family; the elders, the
contemporaries, and the youngers were bound together
in their mutual relationships by this binding law of duty. On the other hand,
where the individual was the unit, necessarily the idea of inherent rights
arose; and that these rights, as well as the ideal of duty, had both been
carried to excess. In the East, where duty was the ideal, there had developed
tyranny, the feeling of duty tending to over-submission; while in the West the
ideal of rights run to excess led inevitably to conflict, and finally to
anarchy. And so it is that along that line of thought, although in very much
fuller detail, we find the same fundamental idea as we find here in the rapid
sketch made by Sir Michael Sadler, and we realise
that we are indeed at the crossway for Humanity today; that Humanity has to
work out a new form of civilisation, as it has worked
out so many forms of civilisation in the past. And so
I would say to you that there is every reason for hope and no reason for
despair; for man has rebuilt many shattered civilisations
on a better basis, and can rebuild the civilisation
that lies shattered behind us by the War
into a nobler, a more lasting, civilisation if - and
that if is the condition - if he will recognise the laws of Nature as they have not been recognised in the past, the Law of Brotherhood as the basis
of civilisation, the Law of Sacrifice as the life and
the sustainer of civilisation. And so we come in our
study to ask here again, very, very briefly, not in detail, how were the older
Nations organised? and we may put it, I think,
shortly in this form: in those of the East
and in Feudal Europe, Mediaeval Europe, but especially in the East, the
communal feeling was in the ascendant, men felt themselves as a community far
more strongly than as individuals; while in the civilisation
called by Sir Michael the civilisation of which the
essence is Power, there men felt themselves much more as individuals than they realised the bonds of living in a community, the natural
feeling which is vital in the future. And looking at it in that way, then we
find evolved in the East what is known as the Caste system. That was based
entirely on the ideal of Duty; the Duty of the learned to teach; the Duty of
the strong to protect; the Duty of the organiser and
the distributor of goods to distribute them; and the Duty of the producer to
produce. So that you have four great functions coming out in the National
life the Duty of the teacher; the Duty
of the protector; the Duty of the organiser and
distributor; and the Duty of the producer of wealth. And wherever you find a
Nation, these four fundamental duties must always exist; you cannot get rid of
them. They are woven into all social, and communal, and National life. And we
have to consider how these four functions, the functions of the educator in the
widest sense of the term, the functions of the legislator, the functions of the
merchant, and the functions of the
producer, how these ought to be arranged in a reconstruction of society.
Now the ruin
of the caste system was brought about by its becoming a matter of birth only
instead of a matter of capacity. There lies the reason why it has become a
rigid system which it is found necessary to
destroy, if India is to rise to real freedom and real citizenship. And
when we look at the less-developed form of caste, the feudal system, we find
the same characteristic there fundamentally, the idea of Duty. Privilege was
counterbalanced by duty, and there again the birth element came in and led to
its destruction eventually. When we look on the later centuries and find the
great struggle that takes place in England - we can take England as an example
of other western countries - where the individual fights, as it were, for his
own hand, there arises the feature of class, and into that from feudalism comes
also this element of birth. Personally, although that is a mere detail, and
many of you will very likely disagree with it, I think it a very good thing in
a Nation that great National Service should be recognised
by honour; I believe that that is good, but when it descends to somebody else
who has not deserved it, then it becomes an abuse, a danger. If you want to
bring in the element of birth you ought to copy the Chinese, who put it on a
much more sensible footing. Where a title of honour was given in China, the
ancestors were ennobled and not the posterity. Now, that, I submit, is
eminently reasonable. They have something or other at least to do with the man
who has done great service to the State, as they are his ancestors, and so they
may share in the recognition; and the other advantage is that they are not on
the physical plane at the moment, and therefore they cannot in any way dishonour the title to the Nation's respect which is
bestowed on a particular person. But the moment you run the other way arid
ennoble the posterity, then you bring in
a mischievous element, the element of birth, for it does not follow that his
posterity will do well; as a matter of fact, they are sometimes exceedingly
unsatisfactory. Then you get a great danger and a great cause of anger, that
privilege is given where there is nothing in the individual to deserve it.
Privilege gained by duty is one thing; privilege going with an individual life
that has no duties imposed on it by the State is a very different thing, and is
a source of decay in a civilisation.
Now, looking
at it then for a moment from that standpoint, I would ask you: How are we to
find out some way in which these functions may be divided? There is only one
way that I can think of, and that is by capacities; and the capacities can only
be understood, found out, by education, if in education you allow the natural
faculties of the child to develop. If in education you insist on a high level
of general education and culture, then, and then alone, can you look for social
equality. If you take a scientist, if you take a highly educated philosopher,
if you take an educated man of any type, provided he is highly educated and
cultured, such men or women can meet in perfect social equality, although their
avocations may be entirely different. It is not a question of what the man
does, it is a question of what the man is; and education is absolutely
necessary before social equality can possibly be gained in any Nation. Hence
also education must be prolonged far more than at present is recognised as necessary in modern life. People in modern
life are quarrelling over half-timers, over boys and girls who are to earn
their own livelihood; but I claim for
every child of this Nation the right to develop the whole of his faculties to
the utmost extent that those faculties are capable of development, and that
implies a long education, not a short or a medium one; it implies not only what
I said, that a certain level of education and culture must be common to
everyone born into the Nation, but it implies also that as the particular capacities
of the young person develop themselves, that is the mark of his place in
the National life. What is called
vocational education, in the fullest sense of the word, is necessary in order
that all the individuals in a Nation may find their appropriate sphere of work;
work for which their faculties fit them, and which therefore is an enjoyment in
the carrying of it out, and not a drudgery, as it too often is in our own days.
Hence I submit that the time for education is the whole period of youth, vocational
in the latter part, general in the earlier; and that the education should go as
far as the faculties are aided in their development by it - roughly, during the
first twenty - one years of life.
Leaving that
for a moment - for I shall have just for an instant to return to it in dealing
with our Ideal - let me point out to you that the next thing you have to
consider is the result in the past of the economic condition of the Nation. You
have to start with the question of the holding of land. You have to consider
the relationship between labour and capital in the production of wealth. Unless
these can be organised on a system of mutual
advantage and National contentment, it is impossible, it would be unrighteous,
that any civilisation should endure. And so,
glancing backward, we find one point of
enormous importance as regards the land, and that is, if you take a country
like India, land has always been communal property until quite lately. There
was no such thing as private ownership of land until after certain arrangements
made by the British; until they came there, and brought their own ideas with
them, there was no idea that land should ever be held as private property; it
was held for use, not for ownership; and the arrangements which were made with
other parties in the Village -which was the place where all National wealth was
produced - the arrangements made were such that the Village held the land and
it was used by the people of the Village. I have not time to go into the
details of that. It is an admirable system if you care to look it up. But it
came to an end in southern India in . Let me remind you that what we have in
India as a Province, you have as a Kingdom. Our Province of Madras has a larger
population than England and Wales, and you have to consider that when you are
trying to study a very complex civilisation, that
varies very much according to the past history of India. But this one may say:
everywhere where there were Kings, the King had a right to the produce of part
of the land; a part of the land was put aside for the King in exchange for his
protection, and cultivated for him, and he was given the produce of the land,
not the land. And when he "gave a Village", as you sometimes find, to
some successful General, all that the successful General had was the right to
the produce of the King's land, but never the ownership of it. Looking at it in
that way, you find that the land in
India, with the crafts which were carried on in the Village, were enormously
remunerative; that these two things, land, labour-and-capital joined together,
were the producers of wealth throughout Indian civilisation.
And I may remind you that it admittedly lasted more than five thousand years,
and all Indians say immensely longer. I do not want to dwell upon it, but
contrast that five thousand years with the four centuries that Sir Michael
alleges cover your own civilisation of Power. Not
that you need necessarily reproduce it, but that you can learn some great
principles from it, and that one great principle is that the land of a Nation
is the gift of Nature to the Nation that lives on that land, and not to
individuals; and that great principle was recognised
not only in the East, but also in Feudal times in Europe, and that is why I
classed Feudalism to some extent as Communal, for land in Feudal days, held by
the great Nobles, was held under conditions, principally of Military Service,
as also in the case even of the Yeoman who held the land under the Feudal System; before that the
Village system, which was brought from the East, prevailed, and characterised the times of your greatest freedom, the times
of the Anglo-Saxon. But these Feudal nobles bore very heavy duties; they had to
bear the whole protection of the Nation, to guard it in Peace and in War, and
only by that duty could they keep on holding their land.
Now I know
that many great landholders, having been relieved from all duty imposed on them
by the State, have imposed duty on themselves by the tradition of their great Order, by their hereditary
love for the people who live on the land; and in the cases of men who feel the
duty of their past, it has made them the friends and the helpers of their
people, and they have discharged, splendidly discharged, their many duties; but
they imposed the duties on themselves; it was not the recognition that with the
land went duties, and with privilege went responsibility. And so you find many
who disregard it and care not for it and are indifferent, and who look on the
wealth that comes to them by their ownership as theirs by right, instead of
wealth conjoined with duties. And that has been terribly broken up by the War,
because, as you know, the great landowners suffer tremendously from wealth
taxation, and so they are selling their lands and great houses, and the whole
of that side of English civilisation is passing away,
with all in it that was beautiful and splendid in its time. It is going down in
ruin.
And then,
trying to see how the other things are to be changed, I have to remind you that
what is called Capital is not only the surplus of labour employed on land or
material, but it is also, not as so many people seem idly and foolishly to
think, enormous stores of coin, but much more largely credit, so that it
vanishes in a most remarkable way. It is not really safe; it is represented by
pieces of paper, securities they are called, but they have become "scraps
of paper" to a very large extent in regard to the value generally given to
them. If you want to see how credit can collapse, look at Russia, where the
revolution from which so much was hoped in the beginning has had to allow -
despite the ideas of those who led it -
Peasant Proprietorship, a new form of ownership, and now is saying that it must
have capitalism back again - the result of over - rapid changes where fanatics
tried to force a sudden revolution for which the masses of the people were not
in any way prepared. And so we come back to this; we find this tremendous
difficulty facing us, that the landholders are disappearing; and if you think
for a moment of the land-holding as land, you will realise
that the land and all that was in the land belonged to them, so that many of
them have become enormously wealthy, where coal was discovered, or in other
cases iron has been found in their properties, and it is those discoveries that
have largely made the enormous differences between wealth and poverty in modern
life; not only the wealth of the surface of the land, unjust as that was unless
duties were performed in exchange, but everything in the land laid up there by
Nature through thousands and millions of years was brought to the surface and
became their private property; so some of the enormous fortunes were made of some of the great
landholders ; and of that you have to
think in dealing with reconstruction, because we have now come to the great
difficulty that with the disappearance of these great landholders Labour and
Capital find themselves face to face. Between them the duel is going on to the
destruction of both.
And with that
rapid survey of how things are, we have then to realise
that great changes should come not by force but by conviction. That is, by
great ideals that capture the minds of the people, and so lend to them the
enthusiasm by which mighty transformations
can be achieved. Do not, because I use the word "Ideal",
connect together with it the idea of the unpractical idealist, because I can
assure you that if you study history you will find the idealists who stand out
from the rest are the most practical people. It is mind and not form that is
the creator; and if you could for a moment doubt that an ideal can arouse and
transform the characters of men, look
back to , and see what the ideals then held up achieved, what an effect they
had on the Nations of the world; when in that day when War first broke out,
when England held up the ideal of liberty, of faith to her plighted word, and
of the protection of a little country unfairly, unrighteously
invaded, it was that ideal which sent all the youths of the Universities into
the trenches and made them ready to die, not for some sordid reason, not for
some hope of personal triumph, but for that great Ideal of Liberty, for which
they were willing to perish in order that it might be secure. And that great
Ideal rang round the world. It was that that awakened India; that which made
India spring to the helping of England; that which drove her soldiers across
the sea, coming to a land which was not theirs, to a people whom they did not
know, to institutions and customs to which they were utterly alien, and yet
which carried them into the trenches, there dying shoulder to shoulder beside
your men, believing they fought for Liberty, and therefore willingly throwing
their lives away. All that was said over here by your great statesmen who held
up those ideals; it was Mr Asquith who taught Indians that a foreign yoke was
degradation to a Nation, intolerable, he
said, and inconceivable; and his words rang round India. It was that which has
largely made Indian unrest, that for which the only possible outcome was to
give freedom, as your Parliament happily has begun to give it. Ideals, they are
the mightiest things in all the world, the only things that can transform the
world, the only things which can change human nature and make the selfish
unselfish and the weak strong. And if you think of it for a moment, take it if
you will in a much more concrete form than the one I have given. What is the
Flag of a Regiment? You may say, only a piece of rag or cloth. Aye, but into
that cloth are woven all the memories of the past; into that the common
sufferings, the common struggles, the common victories, and also the common
defeats; and that Flag of the regiment has become so much a symbol of its
honour to rough men and to poor men, to those of the population here taken into
the Army because they could find nothing else which would accept them, that
it has transformed their character, so
that they are now forbidden to carry their Flag into battle, because it was
ever surrounded by heaps of corpses, because they would die rather than let it
fall into the enemies hands. You cannot have a stronger proof of the power of
the ideal within the roughest and the most thoughtless of men. It is to these
ideals that I trust, to the Ideal of the Future, the creation of that civilisation which I believe the present generation will
help in building.
And here I
refer again for one moment to Education, only to remind you that the Ideal of
the Future for education is in these words which I have already stated; that every child born into our Nation must
have the opportunity of developing every capacity he brings with him through
the gateway of birth. That, and nothing less than that, is the education that
he should have. And I go one step further: I claim that that education shall be
free to the child of every citizen; not only the primary education, but the
education of the higher schools, of the University itself. For wealth and
capacity do not always go together; ability and money are not always found in
the same family; and it is capacity to profit by higher education that gives
the child or the youth the right to that education.
Now, looking
at it in that way, let us consider the three great divisions in a Nation as
regards age. I submit that the first twenty-one years should be given to the
building of the citizen, that is, to the education of the child, of the youth,
and of the young man - including, of
course, in the word "man", "woman", as I cannot keep on saying always "he and she"
- that is the educational period.
Then, coming
to the other extreme of life, old age, in that there should not be
bread-winning any more than in the time of youth, for the value of old age to
the Nation is experience, knowledge gained by living; and the old men will be
the counsellors of the Nation, provided that you have
a number also of the mature, of the young, in order that the future may be
considered as well as the past.
And the
middle period of life, from twenty-one onwards to whatever you make your
beginning of old age - as it differs much with different people, - whatever
that time may be, the bread-winning
period of life should be always between those two limits. The duty of the young
is to study to be good citizens. The duty of the mature is to live the life of
the citizen, discharging every duty faithfully. The duty of old age is to be of
any service they can to the Nation, in which they have been educated, in which
they have served.
And so you
begin to realise that in this Nation you will have to
begin to reorganise it into the great functions; and
that, I think, is what Sir Michael means when he speaks about these three
things which sustained the harmonious life of Christendom; he calls them the
Priesthood, the Empire, and the University. For "Priesthood" I would
like to substitute the Spiritual and Intellectual Teachers of the Nation. The
word "Priest" I have no objection to, but it is as true of science as
it is true of religion - except in the sense that in religion it is used for
dealing with the greater verities of human life and emotions and mentality,
leading those onwards along a spiritual path, while in science the Priest of
science is the Interpreter of Nature here, the Nature which surrounds us with
its countless phenomena. And I submit you must have the class from which you can
take your Priest, or, if you prefer it, the class which is the Teacher of the
Nation in every line of thought and life. It would include the scientist and
the doctor, the philosopher and the metaphysician, the whole of the learned
men, the thinkers, and the artists of the Nation, who come under this great
head; for they are really the educators
of the people, and not only the teachers of the schools, of the colleges, and
of the universities. And this class is
necessary for the Nation's advance and prosperity. It does not need great
wealth; it needs great knowledge and wisdom. And their duty is helping others
to share in that which their intellect has discovered and formulated to the
world and thus enlightened it. Intellect illuminated by the Spirit is the guide
of the spiritual life of the people, and without that spiritual life no civilisation will endure; for material ideals alone can
never uplift a Nation to an enduring life; you must have the ideal of the
spiritual before you, and that means the One-ness of the Whole.
And just as
you must have your educative class, so you must have your Statesmen and your
Legislature and your Army and your Navy and your Police - although I hope the
functions of the three last will become very much lighter as the duties of the
Teachers are more fully and more justly discharged. And on that I venture to
differ from a very eminent man when he said it was not the job of the teachers
of religion to interfere in the other departments of life, like labour, industry,
the relations of mercantile bodies, politics, and the rest. There is no
department of human life into which religion should not enter and spiritualise that department. The great duty of the
teaching class in all its phases, whether of science or of religion, was, and
is, to spiritualise each department. Of politics, so
that they may be the politics of noble and upright men, and no excuses be made
for political expedients to cover falsity, or perjury, or wrong. To spiritualise all mercantile relationships, so that a
merchant should not do in his mercantile capacity what he would not do to his
friend or to his brother. To spiritualise labour, so that the man who produces may fill
his vocation in the Nation, and realise that to
labour honourably, truthfully, well, is as spiritual
a vocation as that of any priest or minister of religion can be. Only in that
way shall we learn either the Law of Brotherhood or the Law of Sacrifice; for
every vocation in a Nation is honourable, provided it
is honourably done and carried out uprightly and
righteously.
Now, what
signs are there in our world of today in this direction? There is certainly a
tendency towards
But all these
things are passing, and will be grown out of. What it is desirable now to recognise is that you must go onward into a life in which
the motive is a common motive, and in which work is for the common good; in
which we want to help each other, and not to trample each other down. That is
the Union into which we must inevitably pass. It is the next stage in
evolution, and if it is not accepted willingly, then it will come by
destruction, for that which is against Nature cannot endure.
Now of Great
Britain, I ask: What is her place in the Plan? Great Britain has a possibility
before her, and a power of accomplishing that possibility, which are not so
great in any other Nation in the world. I will tell you exactly what I mean.
When I was here in it was just in the
crash of the Russian Revolution, and I ventured to say to a great body of Trade
Unionists and working men that Britain was the one country in the world, I
believed, where by training and self-discipline and the power of combination in
the unions, and the learning in the unions of discipline, there was good hope
that this tremendous transformation might be made without revolution or
violence. Things are not as hopeful today as they were then; and largely
because the sense of duty, and of discipline and loyalty to leaders is lacking;
these things have broken down very much amongst those who were the most
splendid examples of them a few years ago; and
that because a class is taking the place of the Nation and the power of
the class - what they are pleased to call the dictation of the proletariat - is
striving to compel the Nation. There is no class, autocratic or democratic or
proletariat or monarchic, that has the right to dictate to the Nation and say
what it should do. It is not because they are many that they have the right to
kill Liberty. Not because they are strong and can starve the Nation into
submission have they the right to tyrannise. I
protested against it when employers tried to starve the workmen into breaking
unionism; and I protest against it as much today, when the strong by numbers
try to starve the country, because they are engaged in quarrels with their
employers. I believe it is possible that these dangers can be overcome, and I
want to put to you as my last point that the tendencies everywhere are not only
towards Union within the Nation, but of Union of larger and larger Nations as
we go on in evolution. In the past those larger Unions have always been made by
military force, by power, by trampling on the weaker Nations and incorporating
them with the stronger by annexation of other peoples' countries. That they
call annexation rather than robbery, because it is a prettier word and covers
over what really has occurred. They have been made by aggressive war, which is
murder on a vaster scale, which is the outcome of hatred, and therefore
destructive and demoralising; and by diplomacy, which
is too often only a many-syllabled word for untruth
and intrigue.
Now Britain
has the opportunity to make a mighty Empire - Empire I call it for a moment,
for its name has been Empire hitherto;
and the great point which was decided by the Maker of the Plan in the last war
was, that two Empires, symbolising two great
principles, should be flung together in the clash of war. And the one principle
was the principle of autocracy and military power, and there was a splendid,
highly organised army to rule the world by the
imposition of power. And the other principle was a loosely knit kind of Empire,
with, as the other side called it, "a contemptible little army", very
small, a thing to be walked over by the great military power, and the loosely
knit Empire was to be rent in pieces in the clash of war. But to the world's
wonder it went the other way, and that loosely knit Empire became more and more
closely knit together as the war went on, and grew stronger and stronger, and
learned to organise power for war, and took many
steps onward which now they are trying to undo. They nationalised
the railways because they wanted to carry their soldiers, their munitions, and
their supplies of every sort; and now it is said that State management does not
pay, because all that was done free, without payment. The soldiers paid
nothing, and the State paid nothing for them; and then they say State
management is so very expensive. But you organised
for war, because without it you would have perished; and as you organised for war, cannot you organise
for peace in order that your people shall be happy? If you organised
for war against soldiers, cannot you organise against
poverty and ignorance and misery, and turn the whole power of the State in
order that the nation shall be happy and prosperous and contented? The same ability which organised
for war can organise for peace. The same sacrifice
that organised for war can also organise
for peace. Britain's opportunity is hers, because all round the world there are
Free Nations that have sprung from her, that you call the Self-Governing
Dominions, and other lands that have been acquired largely by the help of their
own people, and which you call Dependencies or Colonies; they, all that huge
possibility of all those varied Nations, not only of white people but of coloured, not only of western Nations but of eastern, not
only of Europe but of Asia, are awaiting federation. Think what it means if,
for the first time in the world, a Power as strong as you admittedly are today,
instead of relying on strength, tries to seek for and to do justice. Instead of
trying who can arm the most, try who can serve the best. Instead of trying to tyrannise over others, open to them the gates of Freedom,
and say to all the Nations that make up this great Empire: "Come and form
with us not an Empire, but a great Commonwealth of Free Nations; not a white
Commonwealth, but a Commonwealth into which men of every race, of every colour,
of every ancestry, of every creed, of every tradition and custom, shall come
willingly as free members." Ah! If Britain can do that, then she will do
her part in the Great Plan. That is her place; that is her opportunity. No other
Nation with dominions so widespread and so varied can build up that mighty
Commonwealth of Brotherhood, of all the races of every faith, of every colour,
of every line of thought. Have you the strength to do it? I believe you have. Have you the love to do it? I hope you have.
That is your
place in the Plan; take it or leave it. It is your decision, your right to say
what you will do. But if you can do it, if you will do it, if you will
encourage Freedom and not try to hold her back, if you will welcome her
everywhere where your power extends; if you will help, strengthen, inspire,
lead, but let the Nations take their Freedom and be your brothers and not your
subjects - then you will do more than make a great Federation, then you will do
more than build a mighty Commonwealth; you will build a Model, which the
world shall copy; you will build a
Temple, which shall become the model for the Temple of Humanity; within your
own power you will make Freedom extend everywhere over your Dominions, and thus
set an example that other Nations shall follow; for you will never reach true
Internationalism until the Nations have recognised
their Brotherhood, and have willingly joined together in bonds of Love, of
Amity, and of Freedom.
It must be
remembered that the triple Spirit is clothed throughout the human life from individualisation to initiation in a permanent though
evolving body, the causal body, with the sheaths of his two other aspects; and
that the permanent atoms of the mental, emotional, and physical bodies, with
all the new possibilities latent within them, are stored up in the causal body,
and are sent forth from it as the nuclei of the next mortal bodies, when the
Spirit reincarnates.
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What Theosophy Is From the Absolute to Man
The Formation of a Solar System The Evolution of Life
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Preface to the American Edition Introduction
Occultism and its Adepts The Theosophical Society
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