CHAPTER VII
The Ideal Law of Social Development
THE
true law of our development and the
entire object of our social existence can only become clear to us when we have
discovered not only, like modern Science, what man has been in his past
physical and vital evolution, but his future mental and spiritual destiny and
his place in the cycles of Nature. This is the reason why the subjective
periods of human development must always be immeasurably the most fruitful and
creative. In the others he either seizes on some face, image, type of the inner
reality Nature in him is labouring to manifest or else he follows a mechanical
impulse or shapes himself in the mould of her external influences; but here in
his subjective return inward he gets back to himself, back to the root of his
living and infinite possibilities, and the potentiality of a new and perfect
self-creation begins to widen before him. He discovers his real place in Nature
and opens his eyes to the greatness of his destiny.
Existence is an infinite and
therefore indefinable and illimitable Reality which figures itself out in
multiple values of life. It begins, at least in our field of existence, with a
material figure of itself, a mould of firm substance into which and upon which
it can build, - worlds, the earth, the body. Here it stamps firmly and fixes
the essential law of its movement. That law is that all things are one in their
being and origin, one in their general law of existence, one in their
interdependence and the universal pat- tern of their relations; but each
realises this unity of purpose and being on its own lines and has its own law
of variation by which it enriches the universal existence. In Matter variation
is limited; there is variation of type, but, on the whole, uniformity of the
individuals of the type. These individuals have a separate movement, but yet
the same movement; subject to some minute differences, they adhere to one
particular pattern and have the same
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assemblage
of properties. Variety within the type, apart from minor unicities of detail,
is gained by variation of group subtypes belonging to one general kind, species
and sub-species of the same genus. In the development of Life, before mind has
become self-conscious, the same law predominates; but, in proportion as life
grows and still more when mind emerges, the individual also arrives at a
greater and more vital power of variation. He acquires the freedom to develop
according, no doubt, to the general law of Nature and the general law of his
type, but also recording to the
individual law of his being.
Man, the mental being in Nature, is
especially distinguished from her less developed creatures by a greater power
of individuality, by the liberation of the mental consciousness which enables
him finally to understand more and more himself and his law of being and his
development, by the liberation of the mental will which enables him under the
secret control of the universal Will to manage more and more the materials and
lines of his development and by the capacity in the end to go beyond himself,
beyond his mentality and open his consciousness into that from which mind, life
and body proceed. He can even, however imperfectly at present, get at his
highest to some consciousness of the Reality which is his true being and
possess consciously also, as nothing else in terrestrial Nature can possess,
the Self, the Idea, the Will which have constituted him and can become by that
the master of his own nature and increasingly, 110t as now he is, a wrestler
with dominant circumstance but the master of Nature. To do this, to arrive
through mind and beyond mind at the Self, the Spirit which expresses itself in
all Nature and, becoming one with it in his being, his force, his
consciousness, his will, his know- ledge, to possess at once humanly and
divinely - according to
the law and nature of human
existence, but of human existence
fulfilled in God and fulfilling God in the world
- both himself and the world
is the destiny of man and the object of his individual and social existence.1
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This is done
primarily through the individual man; for this end man has become an individual
sow, that the One may find and manifest Himself in each human being. That end
is not indeed achieved by the individual human being in his unaided mental
force. He needs the help of the secret Divine above his mentality in his
superconscient self; he needs the help also of the secret Divine around him in
Nature and in his fellow-men. Everything in Nature is an occasion for him to
develop his divine potentiality, an occasion which he has a certain relative
freedom to use or to misuse, although in the end both his use and misuse of his
materials are overruled in their results by the universal Will so as to assist
eventually the development of his law of being and his destiny. All life around
him is a help towards the divine purpose in him; every human being is his
fellow-worker and assists him whether by association and union or by strife and
opposition. Nor does he achieve his destiny as the individual Man for the sake
of the individual soul alone, - a lonely salvation is not his complete
ideal, - but for the world also or rather
for God in the world, for God in all as well as above all and not for God
solely and separately in one. And he achieves it by the stress, not really of
his separate individual Will, but of the universal Will in its movement towards
the goal of its cycles.
The object of all society should
be, therefore, and must become, as man grows conscious of his real being,
nature and des- tiny and not as now only of a part of it, first to provide the
conditions of life and growth by which individual Man, - not isolated men or a class or a privileged race, but all
individual men according to their capacity, - and the race through the growth
of its individuals may travel towards this divine perfection. It must be,
secondly, as mankind generally more and more grows near to some figure of the
Divine in life and more and more men arrive at it, - for the cycles are many
and each cycle has its own figure of the Divine in man, - to express in the
general life of mankind, the light, the power, the beauty, the harmony, the joy
of the Self that has been attained and that pours itself out in a freer and
nobler humanity. Freedom and harmony express the two necessary principles of
variation and oneness, - freedom of the
individual, the group, the race, co-ordinated harmony of the indivi-
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dual's forces and of the efforts of all individuals in
the group, of all groups in the race, of all races in the kind, - and these are the two conditions of
healthy progression and successful arrival. To realise them and to combine them
has been the obscure or half-enlightened effort of mankind throughout its
history, - a task difficult
indeed and too imperfectly seen and too clumsily and mechanically pursued by
the reason and desires to be satisfactorily achieved until man grows by
self-knowledge and self- mastery to the possession of a spiritual and psychical
unity with his fellow-men. As we realise more and more the right conditions, we
shall travel more luminously and spontaneously towards our goal and, as we draw
nearer to a clear sight of our goal, we shall realise better and better the
right conditions. The Self in man enlarging light and knowledge and harmonising
will with light and knowledge so as to fulfil in life what he has seen in his
increasing vision and idea of the Self, this is man's source and law of progress
and the secret of his impulse towards perfection.
Mankind upon earth is one foremost
self-expression of the universal Being in His cosmic self-unfolding; he
expresses, under the conditions of the terrestrial world he inhabits, the
mental power of the" universal existence. All mankind is one in its
nature, physical, vital, emotional, mental and ever has been in spite of all
differences of intellectual development ranging from the poverty of the Bushman
and negroid to the rich cultures of Asia and Europe, and the whole race has, as
the human totality, one destiny which it seeks and increasingly approaches in
the cycles of progression and retrogression it describes through the countless
millenniums of its history. Nothing which any individual race or nation can
triumphantly realise, no victory of their self-aggrandisement, illumination,
intellectual achievement or mastery over the environment has any permanent
meaning or value except in so far as it adds something or recovers something or
preserves something for this human march. The purpose which the ancient Indian
scripture offers to us as the true object of all human action, lokasamgraha, the holding together of
the race in its cyclic evolution, is the constant sense, whether we know or
know it not, of the sum of our activities.
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But within
this general nature and general destiny of man kind each individual human being
has to follow the common aim on the lines of his own nature and to arrive at
his possible perfection by a growth from within. So only can the race itself
attain to anything profound, living and deep-rooted. It cannot be done
brutally, heavily, mechanically in the mass; the group self has no right to
regard the individual as if he were only a cell of its body, a stone of its
edifice, a passive instrument of its collective life and growth. Humanity is
not so constituted. We miss the divine reality in man and the secret of the
human birth if we do not see that each individual man is that Self and sums up
all human potentiality in his own being. That potentiality he has to find,
develop, work out from within. No State or legislator or reformer can cut him
rigorously into a perfect pattern; no Church or priest can give him a
mechanical salvation; no order, no class life or ideal, no nation, no
civilisation or creed or ethical, social or religious Shastra can be allowed to
say to him permanently, "In this way of mine and thus far shalt thou act
and grow and in no other way and no farther shall thy growth be
permitted." These things may help him temporarily or they may curb and he
grows in proportion as he can use them and then exceed them, train and teach
his individuality by them, but assert it always in the end in its divine
freedom. Always he is the traveller of the cycles and his road is forward.
True, his life and growth are for
the sake of the world, but he can help the world by his life and growth only in
proportion as he can be more and more freely and widely his own real self.
True, he has to use the ideals, disciplines, systems of co-operation which he
finds upon his path; but he can only use them well, in their right way and to
their right purpose if they are to his life means towards something beyond them
and not burdens to be borne by him for their own sake or despotic controls to
be obeyed by him as their slave or subject; for though laws and disciplines
strive to be the tyrants of the human soul, their only purpose is to be its
instruments 'and servants and when their use is over they have to be rejected
and broken. True it is, too, that he has to gather in his material from the
minds and lives of his fellow-men around him and to make the most of the
experience
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of humanity's past ages and not confine himself in a
narrow men tality; but this he can only do successfully by making all this his
own through assimilation of it to the principle of his own nature and through
its subservience to the forward call of his enlarging future. The liberty
claimed by the struggling human mind for the individual is no mere egoistic
challenge and revolt, however egoistically or with one-sided exaggeration and
misapplication it may sometimes be advanced; it is the divine instinct within
him, the law of the Self, its claim to have room and the one primary condition
for its natural self-unfolding.
Individual man belongs not only to
humanity in general, his nature is not only a variation of human nature in
general, but he belongs also to his race-type, his class-type, his mental,
vital, physical, spiritual type in which he resembles some, differs from
others. According to these affinities he tends to group himself in Churches,
sects, communities, classes, coteries, associations whose life he helps, and by
them he enriches himself and the life of the large economic, social and
political group or society to which he belongs. In modern times this society is
the nation. By his enrichment of the national life, though not in that way
only, he helps the total life of humanity. But it must be noted that he is not
limited and cannot be limited by any of these groupings; he is not merely the
noble, merchant, warrior, priest, scholar, artist, cultivator or artisan, not
merely the religionist or the worldling or the politician. Nor can he be
limited by his nationality; he is not merely the Englishman or the Frenchman,
the Japanese or the Indian; if by a part of him- self he belongs to the nation,
by another he exceeds it and belongs to humanity. And even there is a part of
him, the greatest, which is not limited by humanity; he belongs by it to God
and to the world of all beings and to the godheads of the future. He has indeed
the tendency of self-limitation and subjection to his environment and group,
but he has also the equally necessary tendency of expansion and transcendence
of environment and groupings. The individual animal is dominated entirely by
his type, subordinated to his group when he does group himself; individual man
has already begun to share something of the infinity, complexity, free
variation of the Self we see manifested
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in the world. Or at least he has it in possibility even
if there be as yet no sign of it in his organised surface nature. There is here
no principle of a mere shapeless fluidity; it is the tendency to enrich himself
with the largest possible material constantly brought in, constantly
assimilated and changed by the law of his individual nature into stuff of his
growth and divine expansion.
Thus the
community stands as a mid-term and intermediary value between the individual
and humanity and it exists not merely for itself, but for the one and the other
and to help them to fulfil each other. The individual has to live in humanity
as well as humanity in the individual; but mankind is or has been too large an
aggregate to make this mutually a thing intimate and powerfully felt in the
ordinary mind of the race, and even if humanity becomes a manageable unit of
life, intermediate groups and aggregates must still exist for the purpose of
mass-differentiation and the concentration and combination of varying
tendencies in the total human aggregate. Therefore the community has to stand
for a time to the individual for humanity even at the cost of standing between
him and it and limiting the reach of his universality and the wideness of his
sympathies. Still the absolute claim of the community, the society or the
nation to make its growth, perfection, greatness the sole object of human life
or to exist for itself alone as against the individual and the rest of
humanity, to take arbitrary possession of the one and make the hostile
assertion of itself against the other, whether defensive or offensive, the law
of its action in the world, - and not,
as it unfortunately is, a temporary necessity, - this attitude of societies, races, religions, communities, nations,
empires is evidently an aberration of the human reason, quite as much as the
claim of the individual to live for himself egoistically is an aberration and
the deformation of a truth.
The truth
deformed into this error is the same with the community as with the individual.
The nation or community is an aggregate life that expresses the Self according
to the general law of human nature and aids and partially fulfils the
development and the destiny of mankind by its own development and the pursuit of
its own destiny according to the law of its being
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and the nature of its corporate individuality. It has like the individual the right to be itself, and
its just claim, as against any attempt at
domination by other nations or of
attack upon its separate development by any excessive tendency of human
uniformity and regimentation, is to defend its existence, to insist on being
itself, to persist in developing according to the secret Idea within it or, as
we say, according to the law of its own nature. This right it must assert not
only or even principally for its own sake, but in the interests of humanity.
For the only things that we can really call our rights are those conditions
which are necessary to our free and sound development, and that again is our
right because it is necessary to the development of the world and the
fulfilment of the destiny of mankind.
Nor does
this right to be oneself mean with the nation or community any more than with
the individual that it should roll itself up like a hedgehog, shut itself up in
its dogmas, prejudices, limitations, imperfections, in the form and mould of
its past or its present achievement and refuse mental or physical commerce and
interchange or spiritual or actual commingling with the rest of the world. For
so it cannot grow or perfect itself. As the individual lives by the life of
other individuals, so does the nation by the life of other nations, by
accepting from them material for its own mental, economic and physical life;
but it has to assimilate this material, subject it to the law of its own
nature, change it into stuff of itself, work upon it by its own free will and
consciousness, if it would live securely and grow soundly. To have the
principle or rule of another nature imposed upon it by force or a
de-individualising pressure is a menace to its existence, a wound to its being,
a fetter upon its march. As the free development of individuals from within is
the best condition for the growth and perfection of the community, so the free
development of the community or nation from within is the best condition for
the growth and perfection of mankind.
Thus the law
for the individual is to perfect his individuality by free development from
within, but to respect and to aid and be aided by the same free development in
others. His law is to harmonise his life with the life of the social aggregate
and to pour himself out as a force for growth and perfection on huma-
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nity. The law for the community or nation is equally to
perfect its corporate existence by a free development, from within, aiding and
taking full advantage of that of the individual, but to respect and to aid and
be aided by the same free development of other communities and nations. Its law
is to harmonise its life with that of the human aggregate and to pour itself
out as a force for growth and perfection on humanity. The law for humanity is
to pursue its upward evolution towards the finding and expression of the Divine
in the type of mankind, taking full advantage of the free development and gains
of all individuals. and nations and groupings of men, to work towards the day
when mankind may be really and not only ideally one divine family, but even
then, when it has succeeded in unifying itself, to respect, aid and be aided by
the free growth and activity of its individuals and constituent aggregates.
Naturally,
this is an ideal law which the imperfect human race has never yet really
attained and it may be very long before it can attain to it. Man, not
possessing, but only seeking to find himself, not knowing consciously, obeying
only in the rough subconsciously or half-consciously the urge of the law of his
own nature with stumblings and hesitations and deviations and a series of
violences done to himself and others, has had to advance by a tangle of truth
and error, right and wrong, compulsion and revolt and clumsy adjustments, and he
has as yet neither the wide- ness of knowledge nor the flexibility of mind nor
the purity of temperament which would enable him to follow the law of liberty
and harmony rather than the law of discord and regimentation, compulsion and
adjustment and strife. Still it is the very business of a subjective age when
knowledge is increasing and diffusing itself with an unprecedented rapidity,
when capacity is generalising itself, when men and
nations are drawn close together and partially united though in an
inextricable, confused entanglement of chaotic unity, when they are being
compelled to know each other and impelled to know more profoundly themselves,
man- kind, God and the world and when the idea of self-realisation for men and
nations is coming. consciously to the surface, -
it is the natural work and should be the conscious hope of man in such an age
to know himself truly, to find the ideal law of his
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being and his development and, if he cannot even then
follow it ideally owing to the difficulties of his egoistic nature, stilt to
hold it before him and find out gradually the way by which it can become more
and more the moulding principle of his individual and social existence.
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