object:The Coming Race Contents
book class:The Coming Race
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
class:book
class:chapter
OLINI KANTA GUPTA
THE COMING RACE
NOLINI KANT A GUPTA
1944
SRI AUROBINDO LIBRARY
G. T., MADRAS
First Edition 1923.
Bevzsed Edition 1944.
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PUBLISHERS NOTE
In this edition the last two essays have been
added.* The first of them was published in the
Prabaddha Bharat , May 1943 and the second in the
Aryan Path , August 1943.
CONTENTS
Page
*
1. The New Humanity ... ... 1
2. The Creative Soul ... ... .... 10
3. Rationalism ... ... ... 17
i
4. The Intuition of the Age ... ... 26.
5. The Nietzschean Antichrist ... 43
6. On Communism ... ... ... 49
7. The Basis of Social Reconstruction ... 63
8. A Theory of Yoga... ... 71
9. The Parting of the Ways ... ... 83
L0. Principle and Personality. - ... ... 92
LI. The Basis of Unity ... ... 102
L2. Three Degrees of Social Reconstruction. 118
B
8
THE COMING RACE
THE NEW HUMANITY
i
The world is in the throes of a new
creation and the pangs of that new birth have
made mother Earth restless. It is no longer
a far-off ideal that our imagination struggles
to visualise, nor a prophecy that yet remains
to be fulfilled. It is Here and Now.
Although we may not know it, the New
Man the divine race of humanity is already
among us. It may be in our next neighbour,
in our nearest brother, even in myself. . Only
a thin veil covers it. It marches just behind
the line. It waits for an occasion to throw
off the veil and place itself in the forefront.
We are living in strenuous times in t which
age-long institutions are going down and new
1
THE COMING RACE
forces rearing their heads, old habits are
being cast off and new impulsions acquired.
In every sphere of life, we see the urgent
demand for a recasting, a fresh valuation of
things. From the base to the summit, from
the economic and political life to the artistic
and spiritual, humanity is being shaken to
bring out a new expression and articulation.
There is the hidden surge of a Power, the
secret stress of a Spirit that can no longer
suffer to remain in the shade and behind the
mask, but wills to come out in the broad day
light and be recognised in its plenary virtues.
That Power, that Spirit has been grow
ing and gathering its strength during all the
millenniums that humanity has lived through.
On the momentous day when man appeared
oft earth, the Higher Man also took his birth.
Since the hour the Spirit refused to be impri
soned in its animal sheath and came out as man.
it approached by that very uplift a greater
freedom and a vaster movement. It was
the crest of that underground wave which
peered over the surface from age to age, from
clime to clime through the experiences of
J
THE NEW HUMANITY
poets and prophets and sages the Head of
the Sacrificial Horse galloping towards the
Dawn. And now the days of captivity or
rather of inner preparation are at an end.
The voice in the wilderness was necessary,
for it was a call and a communion in the
silence of the soul. To-day the silence seeks
utterance. To-day the shell is ripe enough
to break and to bring out the mature and
.full-grown being. The king that was in
hiding comes in glory and triumph, in his
complete regalia.
Another humanity is rising out of the
present human species. The beings of the
new order are everywhere and it is they who
will soon hold sway over earth, be the head
and front of the terrestrial evolution in the
-cycle that is approaching as it was with man
in the cycle that is passing away. What will
this new order of being be like ? It will be
what man is not, also what man is. It will
not be man, because it will overstep the limi
tations and incapacities inherent in man ;
.and it will be man by the realisation of those
^fundamental aspirations and yearnings that
*
3
THE COMING RACE
have troubled and consoled the deeper strata
the soulin him throughout the varied
experiences of his terrestrial life.
The New Man will be Master and not
slave. He will be master, first, of himself
and then of the world. Man as he actually
is> is but a slave. He has no personal voice
or choice; the determining soul, the Ishwara,
in him is sleep-bound and hushed. He is a
mere plaything in the hands of nature and
circumstances. Therefore it is that Science
*
has become his supreme Dharmashastra ; for
science seeks to teach us the moods of Nature
and the methods of propitiating her. Our
actual ideal of man is that of the cleverest
slave. But the New Man will have found
himself and by and according to his inner
will, mould and create his world. He will
not be in awe of Nature and in an attitude
of perpetual apprehension and hesitation, but
will ground himself on a secret harmony and
union that will declare him as the lord. We
will recognise the New Man by his very gait
and manner, by a certain kingly ease and
dominion in every shade of his expression..
4
THE NEW HUMANITY
Not that this sovereign power will have
anything to do with aggression or over-bear-
ingness. It will not be a power that feels
itself only by creating an eternal opponent
Erbfeindby coming in constant clash with
a rival, that seeks to gain victory by subju
gating. It will not be Nietzschean will to
power/ - * which is, at best, a supreme Asuric
power. It will rather be a Divine Power, for
the strength it will exert and the victory it
will achieve will not come from the egoit is
the ego which requires an object outside and
against to feel and affirm itself but it will
come from a higher personal self which is one
with the cosmic soul and therefore with other
personal souls. The Asura, in spite of, or
rather, because of his aggressive vehemence
betrays a lack of the sovereign power that is
calm and at ease and self-sufficient. The
Devic power does not assert but simply
accomplishes; the forces of the world act
not as its opponent but as its instrument.
Thus the New Man shall affirm his indivi
dual sovereignty and do so to perfection by
expressing through it his unity with the
5
THE COMING RACE
C
cosmic powers., with the infinite godhead.
And by being Swarat Self-Master., he will
become Samrat, world-master.
This mastery will be effected not merely
in will, but in mind and heart also. For the
New Man will know not by the intellect
which is egocentric and therefore limited,
not by ratiocination which is an indirect and
doubtful process, but by direct vision, an
inner communion, a soul revelation. The
new knowledge will be vast and profound
and creative, based as it will be upon the
reality of things and not upon their shadows.
Truth will shine through every experience
and every utterance ff a truth shall have its
seat on our speech and mind and
hearing i: ,
so have the Vedas said. The mind and
intellect will not be active and constructive
agents but the luminous channel of a self-
luminous knowledge. And the heart too
which is now the field of passion and egoism
will be cleared of its noise and obscurity ; a
serener sky will shed its pure warmth and
translucent glow. The knot will be rent
asunder bhidyate hridaya granthih and the
<5
THE NEW HUMANITY
vast and mighty streams of another ocean
will flow through. We will love not merely
those to whom we are akin but Gods crea
tures, one and all; we will love not with the
yearning and hunger of a mortal but with
the wide and intense Rasa that lies in the
divine identity of souls.
And the new society will be based not
upon competition, nor even upon co-opera
tion. It will not be an open conflict, neither
will it be a convenient compromise of rival
individual interests. It will be the organic
expression of the collective soul of humanity,
working and achieving through each and
every individual soul its most wide winging
freedom, manifesting the godhead that is
proper to each and every one. It will be an
organisation, most delicate and subtle and
supple, the members of which will have no
need to live upon one another but in and
through one another. It will be, if you like,
a henotheistic hierarchy in which everyone
will be the greatest, since everyone is all and
all everyone simultaneously.
The New Humanity will be something
THE COMING RACE
in the mould that we give to the gods. It
will supply the link that we see missing
between gods and men ; it will be the race of
embodied gods. Man will attain that thing
which has been his first desire and earliest
dream.; for which he coveted the gods Im
mortality; amritatwam. The mortalities that
cut and divide; limit and bind man make
him the sorrowful being he is. These are due
to his ignorance and weakness and egoism.
These are due to his soul itself. It is the
soul that requires change; a new birth, as
Christ demanded. Ours is a little soul that
has severed itself from the larger and might
ier self that it is. And therefore does it die
every moment and even while living is
afraid to live and so lives poorly and miser
ably. But the age is now upon us when the
god-like soul anointed with its immortal'
royalties is ready to emerge and claim our
salutation.
The breath and the surge of the new
creation cannot be mistaken. The question
that comfronts us to-day is no longer whether
the New Man, the Super-humanity, will
S
THE NEW HUMANITY
come or if at all, when.; but the question we
have to answer is who among us are ready
to be its receptacle, its instrument and
embodiment.
THE CREATIVE SOUL
The difference between living organism
and dead matter is that while the former is
endowed with creative activity, the latter
has only passive receptivity. Life adds,,
synthetises, new-createsgives more than
what it receives; matter only sums up,
gathers, reflects, gives just what it receives.
Life is living, glad and green through its
creative genius. Creation in some form or
other must be the core of everything that
seeks vitality and growth, vigour and delight.
Not only so, but a thing in order to be real
must possess a creative function. We consi
der a shadow or an echo unreal precisely
because they do not create but merely
image or repeat, they do not bring out any
thing new but simply reflect what is given.
The whole of existence is real because it is
eternally creative.
So the problem that concerns man, the
riddle that humanity has to solve is how to
find out and follow the path of creativity.
If we are not to be dead matter nor mere
10
THE CREATIVE SOUL
shadowy illusions we must be creative. A
tnisconception that has vitiated our outlook
in general and has been the most potent
cause of a sterilising atavism in the moral
evolution of humanity is that creativity is an
aristocratic virtue, that it belongs only to the
chosen few. A great poet or a mighty man
of action creates indeed, but such a creator
does not appear very frequently. A Shake
speare or a Napoleon is a rare phenomenon ;
they are, in reality, an exception to the
general run of mankind. It is enough if we
others can understand and follow them
Mahajanoyena gatah let the great souls initi
ate and create, the common souls have only
to repeat and imitate.
But this is not as it should be, nor is it
the truth of the matter. Every individual
soul, however placed it may be, is by nature
creative; every individual being lives to dis
cover and to create. The inmost reality of
man is not a passive receptacle, a mere res
ponsive medium but it is a dynamoa
power-station generating and throwing out.
energy that produces and creates.
11
THE COMING RACE
Now the centre of this energy, the
matrix of creativity is the soul itself, one*s
own soul. If you want to createlive, grow
and be realfind yourself, be yourself. The
simple old wisdom still remains the eternal
wisdom. It is because we fall off from our
soul that we wander into side-paths, paths
that do not belong to our real nature and
hence that lead to imitation and repetition,
decay and death. This is what happens to
what we call common souls. The force of
circumstances, the pressure of environment
or simply the momentum of custom or habit
compel them to choose the easiest and the
readiest way that may lie before them. They
do not consult the demand of the inner being
but the requirement of the moment. Our
bodily needs, our vital hungers and our
mental prejudices obsess and obscure the
impulsions that thrill the hidden spirit. We
hasten to gratify the immediate and forget
the eternal, we clutch at the shadow and let
go the substance. We are carried away in
the flux and tumult of life. It is a mixed
and collective whirla Welt-Geist that
12
THE CREATIVE SOUL
moves and governs us. We are helpless
(Straws drifting in the current. But manhood
demands that we stop and pause, pull
ourselves out of the Maelstrom and be what
-we are. We must shape things as we want
and not allow things to shape us as they want.
Let each take cognisance of the godhead
that is within him for self is Godand in
the strength of the soul-divinity create his
universe. It does not matter what sort of
universe he creates, so long as he creates it.
The world created by a Buddha is not the
same as that created by a Napoleon, nor
should they be the same. It does not prove
anything that I cannot become a Kalidasa
for that matter Kalidasa cannot become what
I am. If you have not the genius of a
Shankara it does not mean that you have no
genius at all. Be and become yourself
ma gridhah kasyachit dhanam, says the Upanishad.
The fountain-head of creative genius lies
there, in the free choice and the particular
delight the self-determination of the spirit
within you and not in the desire for your
*
neighbours riches. The world has become
13
THE COMING RACE
dull and uniform and mechanical, since
everybody endeavours to become not himself,
but always somebody else. Imitation is
servitude and servitude brings in grief.
In one's own soul lies the very height
and profundity of a godhead. Each soul by
bringing out the note that is his, makes for
the most wondrous symphony. Once a man
knows what he is and holds fast to it, refusing
to be drawn away by any necessity or temp
tation, he begins to uncover himself, to do
what his inmost nature demands and takes joy
in, that is to say, begins to create. Indeed
there may be much difference in the forms
that different souls take. But because each
is itself, therefore each is grounded upon the
lundamental equality of things. All our
valuations are in reference to some standard
or other set up with a particular end in view,
but that is a question of the practical world
which in no way takes away from the
intrinsic value of the greatness of the soul.
So long as the thing is there, the how of it
does not matter. Infinite are the ways of
manifestation and all of them the very highest
14.
THE CREATIVE SOUL
and the most sublime, provided they are a
manifestation of the soul itself, provided they
rise and flow from the same level. Whether
it is Agni or Indra, Varuna, Mitra or the
Aswins, it is the same supreme and divine
inflatus.
The cosmic soul is true. But that truth
is borne out, effectuated only by the truth of
the individual soul. When the individual soul
becomes itself fully and integrally, by that
very fact it becomes also the cosmic soul.
The individuals are the channels through
which flows the Universal and the Infinite
in its multiple emphasis. Each is a particular
figure, aspect Bhava , a particular angle of
vision of All. The vision is entire and the
figure perfect if it is not refracted by the
lower and denser parts of our being. And
for that the individual must first come to
itself and shine in its opal clarity and
translucency.
Not to do what others do, but what your
soul impels you to do. Not to be others
but your own self. Not to be anything but
the very cosmic and infinite divinity of your
if*
THE COMING RACE
soul. Therein lies your highest-freedom and:
perfect delight. And there you are supremely
creative. Each soul has a consort Prakriti,.
Naturewhich it creates out of its own rib.
And in this field of infinite creativity the
soul lives, moves and has its being.
RATIONALISM
What is Reason, the faculty that is said
to be the proud privilege of man, the sove
reign instrument he alone possesses for the
purpose of knowing ? What is the value of
knowledge that Reason gives? For it is the
manner of knowing, the particular faculty
or instrument by which we know, that
determines the nature and content of know
ledge. Reason is the collecting of available
sense-perceptions and a certain mode of
working upon them. It has three com
ponent elements that have been defined as
observation, classification and deduction.
Now, the very composition of Reason shows
that it cannot be a perfect instrument of
knowledge; the limitations are theT inherent
limitations of the component elements. As
ft.
regards observation there is a two-fold
limitation. First, observation is a relative
term and variable quantity. One observes
through the prism of one J s own observing
faculty, through the bias of one J s own
17
personality and no two persons can have
absolutely the same manner of observation.
So Science has recognised the necessity of
personal equation and has created an ima
ginary observer, a ff mean man 33 as the
standard of reference. And this already
takes us far away from the truth, from
the reality. Secondly, observation is limited
by its scope. All the facts of the world,
all sense-perceptions possible and actual
cannot be included within any obser
vation however large, however collective
it may be. We have to go always upon
a limited amount of data, we are able
to construct only a partial and sketchy
view of the surface of existence. And
then it is these few and doubtful facts
that Reason seeks to arrange and classify.
That classification may ho Id good for certain
immediate ends, for a temporary under
standing of the world and its forces, either
in order to satisfy our curiosity or to gain
some practical utility. For when .we want
to consider the world only in its immediate
:relation to us, a few and even doubtful facts
RATIONALISM
W *
are sufficient the more immediate the
4
relation, the more immaterial the doubt
fulness and insufficiency of facts. We may
quite confidently go a step in darkness, but
to walk a mile we do require light and
certainty. Our scientific classification has a
back-ground of uncertainty, if not, of falsity;
and our deduction also, even while correct
within a very narrow range of space and
time, cannot escape the fundamental vices of
observation and classification upon which
it is based.
It might be said, however, that the
guarantee or sanction of Reason does not lie
in the extent of its application, nor can its
subjective nature (or ego-centric predica
tion, as philosophers would term it) vitiate
the validity of its conclusions. There is, in
fact, an inherent unity and harmony
between Reason and Reality. If we know
a little of Reality, we know the whole; if
we know the subjective, we know also the
objective. As in the part, so in the whole;
as it is within, so it is without. If you say
that I will die, you need not wait for my
19
the coming race
actual death to have the proof of your
statement. The generalising power inherent
in Reason is the guarantee of the certitude
to which it leads. Reason is valid., as it
does not betray us. If it were such as anti
intellectuals make it out to be, we would be
making nothing but false steps, would
always remain entangled in contradictions.
The very success of Reason is proof of its
being a reliable and perfect instrument for
the knowledge of Truth and Reality. It is
beside the mark to prove otherwise, simply
by analysing the nature of Reason and
showing the fundamental deficiencies of that
nature. It is rather to the credit of Reason
that being as it is, it is none the less a suc
cessful and trustworthy agent.
Now the question is, docs Reason never
fail? Is it such a perfect instrument as
intellectualists think it to be ? There is
ground for serious misgivings. Reason
says, for example, that the earth re
volves round the sun: and reason, it is
argued, is right, for we sec that all the facts
are conformable to it, even facts that were
20
RATIONALISM
hitherto unknown and are now coming into
our ken. But the difficulty is that Reason
did not say that always in the past and may
not say that always in the future. The old
astronomers could explain the universe by
holding quite a contrary theory and could
fit into it all their astronomical data. A
future scientist may come and explain the
matter in quite a different way from either.
It is only a choice of workable theories that
Reason seems to offer ; we do not know the
fact itself, apart perhaps from exactly the
amount that immediate sense-perception
gives to each of us. Or again, if we take an
example of another category, we may ask,
does God exist ? A candid Rationalist
would say that he does not know although
he has his own opinion about the matter.
Evidently, Reason cannot solve all the pro
blems that it meets; it can judge only truths
that are of a certain type.
It may be answered that Reason is a
faculty which gives us progressive knowledge
of the reality, but as a knowing instru
ment it is perfect, at least it is the only
21
THE COMING RACE
instrument at our disposal; even if it gives a
false, incomplete or blurred image of the
reality, it has the means and capacity of
correcting and completing itself. It offers
theories, no doubt; but what are theories ?
They are simply the gradually increasing
adaptation of the knowing subject to the
object to be known, the evolving revelation
of reality to our perception of it. Reason is
the power which carries on that process of
adaptation and revelation ; we can safely
rely upon Reason and trust it to carry on its
work with increasing success.
But in knowledge it is precisely finality
that we seek for and no mere progressive,,
asymptotic, rapprochement ad infinitum. No
less than the Practical Reason, the Theoretical
Reason also demands a categorical impera
tive, a clean affirmation or denial. If Reason
cannot do that, it must be regarded as ineffi
cient. It is poor consolation to man that
Reason is gradually finding out the truth or
that it is trying to grapple with the problems
of God, Soul and Immortality and will one
day pronounce its verdict. Whether we
22
RATIONALISM
have or have not any other instrument of
knowledge is a different question altogether.
But in the meanwhile Reason stands con
demned by the evidence of its own limi
tation.
It may be retorted that if Reason is con
demned, it is condemned by itself and by no
other authority. All argumentation against
Reason is a function of Reason itself. The
deficiencies of Reason we find out by the
rational faculty alone. If Reason was to die,
it is because it consents to commit suicide ;
there is no other power that kills it. But to
this our answer is that Reason has this mira
culous power of self-destruction ; or, to put
it philosophically, Reason is, at best an
organ of self-criticism and perhaps the organ
par excellence for that purpose. But criti
cism is one thing and creation another. And
whether we know or act, it is fundamentally
a process of creation; at least, without this
element of creation there can be no know
ledge, no act. In knowledge there is a
luminous creativity. Revelation or Categori
cal Imperative which Reason does not and
23
THE COMING RACE
cannot supply but vaguely strains to seize.
For that element we have to search else-
where, not in Reason.
Does this mean that real knowledge is
irrational or against Reason ? Not so neces
sarily. There is a super-rational power for
knowledge and Reason may either be a
channel or an obstacle. If we take our
stand upon Reason and then proceed to
know, if we take the forms and categories of
Reason as the inviolable schemata of know
ledge, then indeed Reason becomes an
obstacle to that superrational power. If, on
the other hand. Reason does not offer any
set-form from beforehand, does not insist
upon its own conditions, is passive and simply
receives and reflects what is given to it, then
it becomes a luminous and sure channel for
that higher and real knowledge.
The fact is that Reason is a lower mani-
v festation of knowledge, it is an attempt to
express on the mental level a power that
exceeds it. It is the section of a vast and
Unitarian Consciousness-Power ; the section
may be necessary under certain conditions
24
RATIONALISM
and circumstances, but unless it is viewed in
its relation to the ensemble, unless it gives
up its exclusive absolutism, it will be per
force arbitrary and misleading. It would
still remain helpful and useful, but its help
and use would be always limited in scope
and temporary in effectivity.
V
THE INTUITION OF THE AGE
All movementswhe ther of thought or
of life, whether in the individual or in the
massproceed from a fundamental intuition
which lies in the background as the logical
presupposition, the psychological motive and
the spiritual force. A certain attitude of the
soul, a certain angle of vision is what is
posited first ; all other thingsall thoughts
and feelings and activities are but necessary
attempts to express, to demonstrate, to realise
on the conscious and dynamic levels, in the
outer world, the truth which has thus already
been seized in some secret core of our being.
The intuition may not, of course, be present
to the conscious mind, it may not be
ostensibly sought for, one may even deny the
existence of such a preconceived notion and
proceed to establish truth on a tabula rasa j
none the less it is this hidden bias that
judges, this secret consciousness that formu
lates, this unknown power that fashions.
26
THE INTUITION OF THE AGE
Now, what is the intuition that lies
behind the movements of the new age?
What is the intimate realisation, the underly
ing view-point which is guiding and model
ling all our efforts and achievements
our science and art, our poetry and
philosophy, our religion and society ? For,
there is such a common and fundamental
note which is being voiced forth by the
human spirit through all the multitude of its-
present-day activities.
A new impulse is there, no one can
deny, and it has vast possibilities before it,,
that also one need not hesitate to accept.
But in order that we may best fructuate what
has been spontaneously sown, we must first
recognise it, be luminously conscious of it and
develop it along its proper line of growth.
For, also certain it is that this new impulse
or intuition, however true and strong in
itself, is still groping and erring and mis
carrying ; it is still wasting much of its-
energy in tentative things, in mere experi
ments, in even clear failures. The fact is that
the intuition has not yet become an enlight-
27
THE COMING RACE
ened one, it is still moving, as we shall
presently explain, in the dark vital regions
of man. And vitalism is naturally and
closely affianced to pragmatism, that is to
say, the mere vital impulse seeks immediately
to execute itself, it looks for external effects,
for changes in the form, in the machinery
only. Thus it is that we sec in art and lite
rature discussions centred upon the scheme of
composition, as whether the new poetry should
be lyrical or dramatic, popular or'aristocralic,
metrical or free of metre, and in practical
life we talk of remodelling the state by new
methods of representation and governance,
of purging society by bills and legislation, of
reforming humanity by a business pact.
All this may be good and necessary, but
there is the danger of leaving altogether out
of account the one thing needful. We must
then pause and turn back, look behind the
apparent impulsion that effectuates to the
Will that drives, behind the ideas and ideals
of the mind to the soul that informs and
inspires; we must carry ourselves up the
:stream and concentrate upon the original
28
THE INTUITION OF THE AGE
source, the creative intuition that lies hidden
somewhere. And then only all the new
stirrings that we feel in our heartour urges
and ideals and visions will attain an effec
tive clarity, an unshaken purpose and an.
inevitable achievement.
That is to say, the change has been in
the soul of man himself, the being has veered
round and taken a new orientation. It is
this which one must envisage, recognise and
consciously possess, in order that one may
best fulfil the call of the age. But what we
are doing instead is to observe the mere-
external signs and symbols and symptoms, to
fix upon the distant quiverings, the echoes
on the outermost rim, which are not always
faithful representations, but very often dis
torted images of the truth and life at the-
centre and source and matrix. We must
know that if there has been going on a redis
tri bution and new-marshalling of forces, it is
because the fiat has come from the Etat
Major.
Now, in order to understand the new
orientation of the spirit of the present age,.
29
THE COMING RACE
we may profitably ask what was the inspira
tion of the past age, the characteristic note
which has failed to satisfy us and which we
are endeavouring to transform. We know
that that age was the Scientific age or the
age of Reason. Its great prophets were
Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists or if you
mount further up in time, we may begin from
Bacon and the humanists. Its motto was
first, The proper study of mankind is
man and secondly. Reason is the supreme
organon of-knowledge, the highest deity in
manla Deesse Raison. And it is precisely
against these two basic principles that the
new age has entered its protest. In face of
Humanism, Nietzsche has posited the Super
man and in face of Reason Bergson has
posited Intuition.
The worship of man as something essen
tially and exclusively human necessitates as
a corollary, the other doctrine, viz. the deifi
cation of Reason; and vice versa. Huma
nism and Scientism go together and the
whole spirit and mentality of the age that is
passing may be summed up in those two
30
THE INTUITION OF THE AGE
words. So Nietzsche says, ec All our modern
world is captured in the net of the Alexan-
.drine culture and has, for its ideal, the
theoretical man, armed with the most power
ful instruments of knowledge, toiling in the
service of science and whose prototype and
original ancestor is Socrates. Indeed, it may
be generally asserted that the nation whose
prophet and sage claimed to have brought
down Philosophia from heaven to dwell
upon earth among men was precisely the
nation, endowed with a clear and logical
intellect, that was the very embodiment of
rationality and reasonableness. As a matter
of fact, it would not be far wrong to say that
it is the Hellenic culture which has been
moulding humanity for ages ; at least, it is
this which has been the predominating factor,
the vital and dynamic element in mans
nature. Greece when it died was reborn in
Rome; Rome, in its return, found new life
in France; and France means Europe. What
Europe has been and still is for the world
and humanity one knows only too much.
And yet, the Hellenic genius has not been the
31
THE COMING RACE
sole motive power and constituent element;
there has been another leven which worked
constantly within, if intermittently without.
If Europe represented mind and man and
this side of existence, Asia always reflected
that which transcends the mind the spirit,
the Gods and the Beyonds.
However, we are concerned more with:
the immediate past, the mentality that laid
its supreme stress upon the human rationa
lity. What that epoch did not understand
was that Reason could be overstepped, that
there was something higher, something
greater than Reason; Reason being the
sovereign faculty, it was thought there could
be nothing beyond, unless it were deraison.
The human attri bute par excellence is
Reason. Exactly so. But the fact is that
man is not bound by his humanity and that
reason can be transformed and sublimated
into other more powerful faculties.
Now, the question is, what is the insuffi
ciency of Reason ? How does it limit man ?
And what is the Superman into which man
is asked or is being impelled to grow ?
32
THE INTUITION OF THE AGE
Reason is insufficient and unsatisfactory
*
because, as Bergson explains, it does not and
can not embrace life as a whole, seize man
and the world in an integral realisation.
The greater part of the vast mystery of
existence escapes its envergure. Reason is
that faculty which is for analysing, defining,
classifying and fixing things. It is a power
that has grown in man in order that he may
best manipulate the things of the world. It
is utilitarian, practical in its nature and
outlook. And as practical dealing requires
that things should be stable and separate
entities, therefore Reason cannot but see
things in solid and in the fragments of a
solid. It cuts up existence into distinct parts
and diverse elements; and these again it
seeks to relate and aggregate, in accordance
with what it calls te laws 33 . Such a process
has been necessary for man in conducting
life and action successfully. Originally a
bye-product of active life. Reason gradually
separated itself and came finally to have an
independent status and function, became or
sought to become the instrument of know
ledge, of Truth.
c 3
THE COMING RACE
But although Reason has been and is
useful for the practical, we may say almost,
the manual aspect of life, life itself it leaves
unexplained and uncomprehended. For life
is mobility, a continuous flow that has
nowhere any gap or stop and things have in
reality no isolated or separate existence, they
merge and mingle into one another and
form an indissoluble whole. Therefore the
forms and categories that Reason imposes
upon existence are more or less arbitrary;
they are shackles that seek to bind up and
limit life, but are often rent asunder in the
very effort. So the civilisation that has its
origin in Reason and progresses with dis
coveries and inventionsdevices for artfully
manipulating naturehas been essentially
and pre-eminently mechanical in its structure
and outlook. It has become more and more
efficient perhaps, but less and less soul-
inspired, less and less endowed with the
free-flowing sap of organic growth and
vitality.
So instead of the rational principle, the
new age wants the principle of Nature or
34.
THE INTUITION OF THE AGE
Life. Even as regards knowledge Reason is
not the only, nor the best instrument. For
animals have properly no reason; the
nature-principle of knowledge in the
animal is Instinct the faculty that acts so
faultlessly, so marvellously where Reason
can only pause and be perplexed. This is
not to say that man is to or can go back to
this primitive and animal function; but
certainly he can replace it by something
akin which is as natural and yet purified
and self-consciousillumined instinctive may
say or Intuition, as Bergson terms it. And
Nietzsches definition of the Superman has
also a similar orientation and significance ;
for, according to him, the Superman is man
who has outgrown his Reason, who is not
bound by the standards and the conventions
determined by Reason for a special purpose.
The Superman is one who has gone beyond
f good and evil/ who has shaken off from
his nature and character elements that are
ff human, all too human who is the em
bodiment of life-force in its absolute purity
and strength and freedom.
35
THE COMING RACE
This then is the mantra of the new age
Life with Intuition as its guide and not
Reason and mechanical efficiency, not Man
' but Superman, The right mantra has been
found, the principle itself is irreproachable.
But the interpretation, the application, does
not seem to have been always happy. For,
Nietzsche^s conception of the Superman is
full of obvious lacunae. If we have so long
been adoring the intellectual man, Nietzsche
asks us, on the other hand, to deify the vital
man. According to him the superman is he
who has (i) the supreme sense of the ego
(2) the sovereign will to power and (3) who
lives dangerously. All this means an Asura,
that is to say, one who has, it may be,
dominion over his animal and vital impul
sions in order, of course, that he may best
gratify them but who has not purified
them. Purification does not necessarily
mean annihilation but it does mean sublima
tion and transformation. So if you have to
transcend man, you have to transcend egoism
also. For a conscious
egoism
very
man
36
THE INTUITION OE THE AGE
sense of egoism you do not supersede man
but simply aggrandise your humanity,
fashion it on a larger, a titanic scale. And
then the will to power is not the only will
that requires fulfilment, there is also the will
to knowledge and the will to love. In man
these three fundamental constitutive ele
ments coexist, although they do it, more
often than not, at the expense of each other
and in a state of continual disharmony. The
superman, if he is to be the man who has
surmounted himself^, must embody a poise
of being in which all the three find a fusion
and harmonya perfect synthesis. Again,
to live dangerously may be heroic, but it
is not divine. To live dangerously means
to have eternal opponents, that is to say, to
live ever on the same level with the forces
you want to dominate. To have the sense
that one has to fight and control means
that one is not as yet the sovereign lord,
for one has to strive and strain and attain.
The supreme lord is he who is perfectly
equanimous with himself and with the
world. He has not to batter things into a
37
THE COMING RACE
shape in order to create. He creates means,
he manifests. He wills and he achieves
God said e let there be light 5 and there was
light
As a matter of fact, the superman is not,,
as Nietzsche thinks him to be, the highest
embodiment of the biological force of Nature,
not even as modified and refined by the
aesthetic and aristocratic virtues of which the
higher reaches of humanity seem capable.
For that is after all humanity only accentu
ated in certain other fundamentally human
modes of existence. It does not carry far
enough the process of surmounting. In
reality it is not a surmounting but a new
channelling. Instead of the ethical and
intellectual man, we get the vital and aes the
tic man. It may be a change but not a
transfiguration.
And the faculty of Intuition said to be
the characteristic of the New Man does not
mean all that it should, if we confine our-
selves to Bergson's definition of it. Bergson
says that Intuition is a sort of sympathy , a
community of feeling or sensibility with the
38
THE INTUITION OF THE AGE
urge of the life-reality. The difference
between the sympathy of Instinct and the
sympathy of Intuition being that while the
former is an unconscious or semi-conscious
power, the latter is illumined and self-cons
cious. Now this view emphasises only the
feeling-tone of Intuition, the vital sensibility
that attends the direct communion with the
life movement. But Intuition is not only
purified feeling and sensibility, it is also
purified vision and knowledge. It unites us
not only with the movement of life, but also
opens out to our sight the Truths, the funda
mental realities behind that movement.
Bergson does not, of course, point to any
existence behind the continuous flux of life-
power the elan vital. He seems to deny
any static truth or truths to be seen and
seized in any scheme of knowledge. To him
the dynamic flow the Heraclitian panta reel
is the ultimate reality. It is precisely to this
view of things that Bergson owes his concep
tion of Intuition. Since existence is a conti-
L
nuum of Mind-Energy, the only way to know
it is to be in harmony or unison with it, to
39
THE COMING RACE
move along its current. The conception of
knowledge as a fixing and delimiting of
things is necessarily an anomaly in this
scheme. But the question is, is matter the
only static and separative reality ? Is the
flux of vital Mind-Energy the ultimate
truth ?
Matter forms the lowest level of reality.
Above it is the elan vital. Above the elan
vital there is yet the domain of the Spirit.
And the Spirit is a static substance and at
the same f a dynamic creative power. It is
Being (Sat) that realises or expresses itself
through certain typal nuclei or nodi of cons
ciousness (chit) in a continuous becoming, in
a flow of creative activity (ananda). The
dynamism of the vital energy is only a re
fraction or precipitation of the dynamism of
the spirit; and so also static matter is only
the substance of the spirit concretised and
solidified. It is in an uplift both of matter
and vital force to their prototypes swarupa ,
and swabhavain the Spirit that lies the real,
transformation and transfiguration of the/
humanity of man.
40
THE INTUITION OF THE AGE
This is the truth that is trying to dawn
upon the new age. Not matter but that
which forms the substance of matter, not
intellect but a vaster consciousness that
informs the intellect, not man as he is, an
aberration in the cosmic order, but as he may
and shall be the embodiment and fulfilment
of that orderthis is the secret Intuition
which, as yet dimly envisaged, nevertheless
secretly inspires all the human activities of
to-day. Only, the truth is being interpreted,
as we have said, in terms of vital life. The
intellectual and physical man gave us one
aspect of the reality, but neither is the vital
and psychical man the complete reality.
The one acquisition of this shifting of the
view point has been that we are now in touch
with the natural and deeper movement of
humanity and not as before merely with its
artificial scaffolding. The Alexandrine civi
lisation of humanity, in Nietzsche J s phrase,
was a sort of divagation from nature, it was
following a loop away from the direct path
of natural evolution. And the new Renais
sance of to-day has precisely corrected this
41
THE COMING RACE
aberration of humanity and brought it again
in a line with the natural cosmic order.
Certainly this does not go far enough
into the motive of the change. The cosmic
order docs not mean mentalised vitalism
which is also in its turn a section of the inte
gral reality. It means the order of the spirit,
it means the transfiguration of the physical,
the vital and the intellectual into the
supernal Substance, Power and Light of that
Spirit. The real transcendence of humanity
is not the transcendence of one or other of
its levels but the total transcendence to an
altogether different status and the trans
mutation of humanity in the mould of that
statusnot a Nietzschean Titan nor a
Bergsonian Dionysus but the tranquil vision
and delight and dynamism of the Spirit
the incarnation of a god-head. .
THE NIETZSCHEAN ANTICHRIST
Nietzsche as the apostle of force is a
name now familiar to all the world. The
hero, the warrior who never tamely accepts
suffering and submission and defeat under
any condition but fights always and
fights to conquersuch is the ideal man,,
according to Nietzsche,the champion
of strength, of greatness, of mightiness..
The dominating personality infused with
the supreme ee will to power 53 he is
Ueber Mensch, the Superman. Sentiment
does not move the mountains, emotion
diffuses itself only in vague aspiration. The
motive power, the creative fiat does not dwell
in the heart but somewhere higher. The
way of the Cross, the path of love and charity
*
and pity does not lead to the kingdom of
Heaven. The world has tried it for the last
twenty centuries of its Christian civilisation
and the result is that we are still living in a
luxuriant abundance of misery and sordidness
and littleness. This is how Nietzsche thinks-
43
THE COMING RACE
and feels. He finds no virtue in the old
regimes and he revolts from them. He wants
a speedy and radical remedy and teaches
that by violence only the Kingdom of
Heaven can be seized. For, to Nietzsche the
world is only a clash of forces and the Super
man therefore is one who is the embodiment
of the greatest force. Nietzsche does not care
for the good, it is the great that moves him.
The good, the moral is of man, conventional
and has only a fictitious value. The great,
the non-moral is, on the other hand, divine.
That only has a value of its own. The good
is nothing but a sort of makeshift arrange
ment which man makes for himself in order
to live commodiously and which changes
according to his temperament. But the
great is one with the Supreme Wisdom and
is absolute and imperative.
The good cannot
create the great; it is the great that makes
for the good. This is what he really means
when he says, They say that a good cause-
sanctifies war but I tell thee it is a good war
that sanctifies all cause/ 5 For the goodness
of your cause you judge by your personal
44
* t
4 p ^ ^
THE NIETZSCHEAN ANTICHRIST
predilections, by your false conventionalities,
by a standard that you set up in your
ignorance. But a good war, the output of
strength in any cause is in itself a cause of
salvation. For thereby you are the champion
of that ultimate verity Which conduces to
the ultimate good. Do not shrink, he would
say, to be even like the cyclone and the
avalanche, destructive, indeed, but grand
and puissant and therefore truer emblems
of the Beyond-Jenseitthan the weak, the
little, the pitiful that do not dare to destroy
and by that very fact cannot hope to create.
This is the Nietzsche we all know. But
there is another aspect of his which the world
has yet been slow to recognise. For, at
bottom, Nietzsche is not all storm and fury.
If his Superman is a Destroying Angel, he is
none the less an angel. If he is endowed
with a supreme sense of strength and power,
there is also secreted in the core of his heart
a sense of the beautiful that illumines his
somewhat sombre aspect. For although'
Nietzsche is by birth a Slavo-Teuton, by
culture and education he is pre-eminently
45
P-
V
THE COMING RACE
Hellenic. His earliest works are on the
subject of Greek tragedy and form what he
describes as an Apollonian dream . 33 And
to this dream, to this Greek aesthetic sense
more than to any thing else he sacrifices jus
tice and pity and charity. To him the weak
and the miserable, the sick and the maimed
are a sort of blot, a kind of ulcer on the
beautiful face of humanity. The herd that
wallow in suffering and relish suffering dis
figure the aspect of the world and should
therefore be relentlessly mowed out of exis
tence. By being pitiful to them we give our
tacit assent to their persistence. And it is
precisely because of this that Nietzsche has
a horror of Christianity. For compassion
gives indulgence to all the ugliness of the
world and thus renders that ugliness a neces
sary and indispensable element of existence.
To protect the weak, to sympathise with the
lowly brings about more of weakness and
more of lowliness. Nietzsche has an aristo
cratic taste par excellencewhat he aims at
is health and vigour and beauty. But above
-all it is an aristocracy of the spirit, an aristo-
THE NIETZSGHEAN ANTICHRIST
cracy endowed with all the richness and
heauty of the soul that Nietzsche wants to
establish. The beggar of the street is the
symbol of ugliness, of the poverty of the
spirit. And the so-called aristocrat, the
millionaire of to-day is as poor and ugly as
any helpless leper. The soul of either of
them is made of the same dirty, sickly stuff.
The tattered rags, the crouching heart, the
effiminate nerve, the unenlightened soul are
the standing ugliness of the world and they
have no place in the ideal, the perfect huma
nity. Humanity according to Nietzsche, is
made in order to be beautiful, to conceive the
beautiful, to create the beautiful. Nietzsches
Superman has its perfect image in a Grecian
.statue of Zeus cut out in white marble
Olympian grandeur shedding in every line
ament Apollonian beauty and Dionysian
vigour.
The real secret of Nietzsches philosophy
is not an adoration of brute force, of blind
*
irrational joy in fighting and killing. Far
from it, Nietzsche has no kinship with Treit-
schke or Bernhardi. What Nietzsche wanted
47
THE COMING RACE
was a world purged of littleness and ugliness,,
a humanity, not of saints, perhaps, but of
heroes, lofty in their ideal, great in their
achievement, majestic in their empirea
race of titanic gods breathing the glory of
heaven itself.
ON COMMUNISM
Communism is the synthesis of collecti
vism and individualism. The past ages of
society were characterised more or less by a
severe collectivism. In ancient Greece,
more so in Sparta and in Rome, the indivi
dual had, properly speaking, no separate
existence of his own ; he was merged in the
State or Nation. The individual was con
sidered only as a limb of the collective being,
had to live and labour for the common weal.
The value attached to each person was
strictly in reference to the output that the
group to which he belonged received from
him. Apart from this service for the general
unit the body politicany personal endea-
ft
vour and achievement, if not absolutely dis
couraged and repressed, was given a very
secondary place of merit. The summum
bonum of the individual was to sacrifice at
the altar of the res publica, the bonum publicum.
In India, the position and function of the
State or Nation was taken up by the society.
THE COMING RACE
Here too social institutions were so consti
tuted and men were so bred and brought up
that individuality had neither the occasion
nor the incentive to express itself, it was a
thing that remained, in the Kalidasian
phrase, an object for the ear only srutau
sthita. Those who sought at all an indivi
dual aim and purpose, as perhaps the Sannya-
sins, were put outside the gate of law and
society. Within the society, in actual life
and action, it was a sin and a crime or at least
a gross imperfection to have any self-regard
ing motive or impulse ; personal preference
was the last thing to be considered, virtue
consisted precisely in sacrificing one*s own
taste and inclination for the sake of that
which the society exacts and sanctions.
Against this tyranny of the group, this
absolute rule of the collective will, the
human mind rose in revolt and the result
was Individualism. For whatever may be
the truth and necessity of the Collective,
the Individual is no less true and necessary.!
|The individual has his own law and urge of
'ibeing and his own secret godhead. The
50
ON COMMUNISM
i
collective godhead derides the individual
godhead at its peril. The first movement of
the reaction, however, was a run to the other
extremity; a stern collectivism gave birth to
an intransigent individualism. The indivi
dual is sacred and inviolable, cost what it
may. It does not matter what sort of
individuality one seeks, it is enough if the
thing is there. So the doctrine of indivi
dualism has come to set a premium on
-egoism and on forces that are disruptive of
all social bonds. Each and every individual
has the inherent right, which is also a duty,
to follow his own impetus and impulse.
Society is nothing but the battle ground
*
for competing individualities the strong
est survive and the weakest go to the
wall. Association and co-operation are
instruments that the individual may use
and utilise for his own growth and de
velopment but in the main they act
as deterrents rather than as aids to the
expression and expansion of his charac
teristic being. In reality, however, if we
probe sufficiently deep into the matter we
51
THE COMING RACE
find that there is no such thing as corporate-
life and activity; what appears as such is-
only a camouflage for rigorous competition ;
at the best, there may be only an offensive-
and defensive alliancehumanity fights
against nature, and within humanity itself
group fights against group and in the last,
analysis, within the group, the individual
fights against the individual. This is the
ultimate Law the Dharma of creation.
Now, what such an uncompromising
individualism fails to recognise is that indivi
duality and ego are not the same thing, that
the individual may have his individuality
intact and entire and yet sacrifice -his ego,,
that the soul of man is a much greater thing
than his vital being. It is simply ignoring
the fact and denying the truth to say that
man is only a fighting animal and not a.
loving god, that the self within the individual
realises itself only through competition and.
not co-operation. It is an error to conceive
society as a mere parallelogram of forces,
to suppose that it has risen simply out of the
struggle of individual interests and continues.
52
ON COMMUNISM
to remain by that struggle. Struggle is only
one aspect of the thing, a particular form
.at a particular stage, a temporary manifes
tation due to a particular system and a
particular habit and training. It would be
nearer the truth to say that society came
into being with the demand of the individual
soul to unite with the individual soul, with
the stress of an Over-soul to express itself in
a multitude of forms, diverse yet linked
together and organised in perfect harmony^
Only, the stress for union manifested itself
first on the material plane as struggle:
but this is meant to be corrected and
transcended and is being continually
corrected and transcended by a secret
harmony, a real commonality and bro
therhood and unity. The individual is
not so self-centred as the individualists
make him to be, his individuality has a
much vaster orbit and fulfils itself only by
fulfilling others. The scientists have begun
to discover other instincts in man than those
of struggle and competition ; they now place
.at the origin of social grouping an instinct
53
THE COMING RACE
which they name the herd-instinct : but this is
only a formulation in lower terms, a transla
tion on the vital plane of a higher truth and
reality the fundamental oneness and accord
of individuals and their spiritual impulsion
to unite.
However, individualism has given us a
truth and a formula which collectivism
ignored. Self-determination is a thing which
has come to stay. Each and every indivi
dual is free, absolutely free and shall freely
follow his own line of growth and develop
ment and fulfilment. No extraneous power
shall choose and fix what is good or evil for
him, nor coerce and exploit him for its own
benefit. But that does not necessarily
mean that collectivism has no truth in it;
collectivism also, as much as individualism,,
has a lesson for us and we should see
whether we can harmonise the two. fCol-
lectivism signifies that the individual should
not look to himself alone, should not be shut
up in his freedom but expand himself and
envelop others in a wider freedom, see other
creatures in himself and himself in other
54
ON COMMUNISM
creatures, as the Gita says/j Collectivism
demands that the individual need not and
should not exhaust himself entirely in secur
ing and enjoying his personal freedom, but
that he can and should work for the
salvation of others; the truth it upholds is
this that the individual is from a certain
point of view only a part of the group and
by ignoring the latter it ignores itself in
the end.
Now, a spiritual communism embraces
individualism and collectivism, fuses them
in a higher truth, establishes them in an
intimate and absolute harmony. The indi-)
vidual is 'the centre, the group is the circum-^
ference and the two form one whole circle.)
The individual by fulfilling the truth of his
real individuality fulfils also the truth of a
commonality. There are no different laws
for the two. The individuals do not stand
apart from and against one another, the
dharma of one does not clash with the dharma
of the other. The ripples in the bosom of
the sea, however distinct and discrete in
appearance, form but a single mass, all follow
55
THE COMING RACE
the same law of hydrodynamics that the
mother sea incarnates. Stars and planets
and nebulae, each separate heavenly body
has its characteristic form and nature and
function and yet all fulfil the same law of
gravitation and beat the measure of the silent
symphony of spaces! v- Individualities are
the freedoms of the collective being and
collectivity the concentration of individual
beings. The same soul looking inward
appears as the individual being and looking
outward appears as the collective being/) '
Communism takes man not as ego or the
vital creature ; it turns him upside down
urdhomulo 3 vaksakhah and establishes him
upon his soul, his inner godhead. Thus
established the individual soul finds and
+
fulfils the divine law that by increasing itself
it increases others and by increasing others it
increases itself and thus by increasing one
another they attain the supreme good. Un
less man goes beyond himself and reaches
this self, this godhead above, he will not find
any real poise, will always swing between
individualism and collectivism, he will remain
56
ON COMMUNISM
always boundbound either in his freedom
or in his bondage.
A commune is a group of individuals
having a common self and a common life-
intuition. A common self presupposes the
realisation by each individual of his deepest
being the self which is at once distinct
from and instinct with other selves; a com
mon life-intuition presupposes the awaken
ing of each individual to his inmost creative
urge, which, pure and true and vast as it is,
fulfils itself in and through other creative
urges.
A commune, further, is not only a
product or final achievement; it is also a
process, an instrument to bring about the
desired end. A group of individuals come to
have a common self and a common life-
intuition in and through the commune l and
in and through the commune does each indi
vidual progress to the realisation of his
deepest self and the awakening of his inmost
life-intuition.
The individual must find himself and
establish his secret god-head, and then only.
THE COMING RACE
when such free and integral individualities
meet and reciprocate and coalesce., can the
community they form have a living reality
and a permanent potency. On the other
hand, unless individuals come together and
through the interchange of each others soul
and substance enhance the communal God
head, the separate individual godheads also-
will not manifest in their supreme and sove
reign powers.
If society, that is to say, community, be
the field kshetra for the individual to live,,
move and have its being, then we must begin,
at the very outset with the community itself,
at least, with a nucleus that will go to form
such a thing. The fear that the untimely
grouping together of immature souls may
crush out individuality and dig its own grave-
has, no doubt, sufficient justification behind
it to deter one from the attempt; but
neither can we be certain that souls nursed
and nourished in solitary cells, absolutely
apart from any mellowing and broadening
influence of the outside world will ever reach,
to that stage of perfect maturity when they
58
ON COMMUNISM
will suddenly and spontaneously break open
their cells and recognise in one another the
communal brother-self.
As a matter of fact, the individual is not
and can not be such an isolated thing as our
egoistic sense would like to have it. The
sharp angularities of the individual are being,
at every moment, chastened by the very
primary conditions of life ; and to fail to-
recognise this is the blindest form of igno
rance. It is no easy task to draw exactly
the line of distinction between our individual
being and our social or communal being.
In actual life they are so blended together
that in trying to extricate them from each
other, we but tear and lacerate them both*
The highest wisdom is to take the two to
gether as they are, and by a gradual purify
ing processboth internal and external,,
internal in thought and knowledge and will,
external in life and actionrestore them to
their respective truth and law So.tyo.fn and.
Ritam.
The individual who leads a severely
individual life from the very beginnings
59
THE COMING RACE
whose outlook of the world has been fashio
ned by that conception, can hardly, if at all,
enter at the end the communal life. He
must perforce be either a vagabond or a
recluse. But the recluse is not an integral
man, nor the vagabond an ideal personality.
The individual need not be too chaste and
shy to associate with others and to give and
take as freely and fully as he can. Indivi
duality is not necessarily curtailed or muti
lated in this process, but there is this other
greater possibility of its getting enlarged and
enhanced. Rather it is when you shut
yourself up in your own self, that you stick
to only one line of your personality, to a
single phase of your self and thus limit and
diminish yourself; the breadth and height
and depth of your self, the cubic complete
ness of your personality you can attain only
through a multiple and variegated stress by
which you come in contact with the world
and things.
So first the individual and then the com
mune is not the natural nor the ideal prin
ciple. On the other hand, first the com-
60
ON COMMUNISM
raune and then the individual would appear
to be an equally defective principle. For
first a commune means an organisation, its
laws and rules and regulations, its injunc
tions and prohibitions ; all which signifies or
comes to signify that every individual is not
free to enter its fold and that whoever enters
must know how to dovetail himself therein
and thus crush down the very life-power
whose enhancement and efflorescence is
sought. First a commune means necessarily
a creed, a dogma, a set form of being and
living indelibly marked out from before
hand. The individual has there no choice
of finding and developing the particular
creed or dogma or mode of being and living,
from out of his own self, along his particular
line of natural growth; all that is imposed
upon him and he has to accept and make it
his own by trial and effort and self-torture.
Even if the commune be a contractual asso
ciation, the members having joined togethei
in a common cause to a common end, by
voluntarily sacrificing a portion of their
personal choice and freedom, even then it is
61
THE COMING RACE
not the ideal thing; the collective soul will
be diminished in exact proportion as each indi
vidual soul has had to be diminished, be that
voluntary or otherwise. That commune is
i
plenary and entire which ensures plenitude
and entirety to each of its individuals.
Now how to escape the dilemma ? Only
if we take the commune and the individual
together en bloc , as has already been sugges
ted. This means that the commune should
be at the beginning a subtle and supple
things without form and even without name,
it should be no more than the circumambi
ent aura the sukshma deha that plays
around a group of individuals who meet and
unite and move together by a secret affinity,
along a common path towards a common
goal. As each individual develops and
defines himself, the commune also takes a
more and more concrete shape; and when
at the last stage the individual rises to the
full height of his godhead, takes possession
of his integral divinity, the commune also
establishes its solid empire, vivid and vibrant
in form and name.
62
THE BASIS OF SOCIAL
RECONSTRUCTION
I Any real reconstruction of society, any
permanent reformation of the world pre
supposes a real reconstruction, a permanent
reformation of human nature. Otherwise
any amount of casting and recasting the
mere machineries would not bring about any
appreciable result, but leave the thing as it
isj Change the laws as much as you like,
but if you do not change the nature of man,
the world will not change. For it is man
that makes laws and not laws that make
man. Laws express at best the demand
which man feels within himself. A truth
must realise itself in h uman, nat.ure-b efone-it
can be codified. You may certainly legalise
an ideal, but that does not necessarily mean
realising it. The realisation must come first
in nature and character, then it is naturally
translated into laws and institutions. A man
lives the laws of his soul and being and not
the law given him by the shastras. He
*
63
THE COMING RACE
violates the shastras, modifies them, utilises
them according to the greater imperative of
his Swabhava.
The French Revolution wanted to
remould human society and its ideal was
liberty, equality and fraternity. It pulled
down the old machinery and set up a new
one in its stead. And the result ? ec Liberty,.
Equality, Fraternity ^ remained always in
effect a cry in the wilderness. Another
wave of idealism is now running over the
earth and the Bolshevists are its most fiercely
practical exponents. Instead of dealing
merely with the political machinery, the
Socialistic Revolution tries to break and
remake, above all, the social machinery.
But judged from the results as yet attained
and the tendencies at work, few are the
reasons to hope but many to fear the worst.
Even education does not seem to promise us
anything better. Which nation was better
educatedin the sense we understood and
still commonly understand the wordthan
Germany ? And yet we have no hesitation
to-day to call them Huns and Barbarians-
64
THE BASIS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION
That, education is not giving us the right
thing is proved further by the fact that we
are constantly changing our programmes
and curriculums, everyday remodelling old
institutions and founding new ones. Even
a revolution in the educational system will
not bring about the desired millennium, so
long as we lay so much stress upon the
system and not upon man himself. And
finally, look to all the religions of the world
we have enough of creeds and dogmas, of
sermons and mantras, of churches and
templesand yet human life and society do
not seem to be any the more worthy for it.
Are we then to say that human nature
is irrevocably vitiated by an original sin and
that all our efforts at reformation and
regeneration arc, as the Indian saying goes,
like trying to straighten out the crooked tail
of a dog ?
It is this persuasion which has led many
-spiritual souls, siddhas, to declare that tneirs
isnot the kingdom upon this earth, but that
the kingdom of Heaven is within. And it is
why great lovers of humanity have sought
65
c 5
THE COMING RACE
not to eradicate but only to mitigate., as far
as possible, the ills of life. Earth and life, it
is said, contain in their last analysis certain
ugly and loathsome realities which are an
inevitable and inexorable part of their subs
tance and to eliminate one means to annihi
late the other. What can be done is to
throw a veil over the nether regions in
human nature, to put a ban on their urges
and velleities and to create opportunities
to make social arrangements so that the
higher impulses only find free play while the
lower impulses, for want of scope and indul
gence, may fall down to a harmless level.
This is what the Reformists hope and want
and no more. Life is based upon animality,
the soul is encased in an earth-sheathman
needs must procreate, man needs must seek
food. But what human effort can achieve is
to set up barriers and limitations and form
*
channels and openings, which will restrain
these impulses, allow them a necessary modi
cum of play and which for the greater part
will serve to encourage and enhance the
nobler urges in man. Of course, there will
66
THE BASIS OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION
^remain always the possibility of the whole
:ScafFolding coming down with a crash and
the aboriginal in man running riot in his
nudity. But we have to accept the chance
^nd make the best of what materials we have
in hand.
No doubt this is a most dismal kind of
pessimism. But it is the logical conclusion
of all optimism that bases itself upon a parti
cular view of human nature. If we question
that pessimism, we have to question the very
grounds of our optimism also. As a matter
of fact, all our idealism has been so long
infructuous and will be so in the future, if
we do not shift' our foundation and start
from a different Intuition Weltanschauung.
Our ideals have been mental construc
tions, rather than spiritual realitiesrealities
of the deepest and highest being. And the
power by which we sought to realise those
ideals was mainly the insistence of our emo
tional urges, rather than Nature's Truth-
Power. For this must be understood that
-the mental, the vital and the physical form
.a nexus of reality which works in its own
THE COMING RACE
inexorable law and so long as we are within
them we cannot but obey the laws that guide-
them. Of these three strata which form the
Human adkara, it is the vital which holds the
key to maffs nature. It is the executive
power, the force that fashions the realities
on the physical plane; it is what creates the
character. The power of thought and senti
ment is often much too exaggerated, even so
the power of the body, that of physical and
external rules and regulations. The mental
or the physical or both together can mould,
the vital only to a limited extent, to the
extent which is allowed by the inherent law
*
of the vital. If the demands of the mental 1
and the physical are stretched too far and',
are not suffered by the vital, a crash and
catastrophe is bound to come in the end.
This is the meaning of the Reformists
pessimism. So long as we remain within the
domain of the triple nexus, we must always
take account of an original sin, an aboriginal
irredeemability in human nature. And it is
this fact which a too hasty optimistic idea
lism is apt to ignore. The point, however,.
.68
rHE BASIS OE SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION
at man need not be necessarily bound to
triple chord of life. He can go beyond,
scend himself and find a reality which is
>asis of even this lower poise of the
:al and vital and physical. Only in
r to get into that higher poise we must
y transcend the lower, that is to say, we
not be satisfied with experiencing or
laging it through the mind and heart
must directly commune with it, be it.
e is a higher law that rules there, a
:r that is the truth-substance of even
ntal and hence can remould it with a
eign inevitability, according to a
;rn which may not and is not the
rn of mental and emotional idealism,
the pattern of a supreme spiritual
m.
A ; hat then is required is a complete
ual regeneration in man, a newstruc-
of his soul and substancenot merely
ealisation of the highest and supreme
Truth in mental and emotional conscious
ness, but the translation and application
of the law of that truth in the power of
69
THE COMING RACE
the vital. It is here that failed all the-
*
great spiritual or rather religious move
ments of the past. They were content with,
evoking the divine in the mental being, but.
left the vital becoming to be governed by the
habitual un-divine or at the most to be just
illumined by a distant and faint glow which,
served, however, more to distort than
express the Divine.
The Divine Nature only can perma
nently reform the vital nature that is ours.
Neither laws and institutions, which are the
results of that vital nature, nor ideas and
ideals which are often a mere revolt from and
more often an auxiliary to it, can comm and
the power to regenerate society. If it is'
thought improbable for any group of men to
attain to that God Nature, then there is
hardly any hope for mankind. But improba-
V
ble or probable, that is the only way which
man has to try and test, and there is none:
other.
A THEORY OF YOGA
Yoga is another form of a normal func
tion. in man, it is the consciously regulated
and heightened process of a habitual activity
of the mind.
*
*
The recent science Of Psycho-analysis has
*
1
brought to light certain hidden springs and
undercurrents of the mind ; it has familiarised
us with a mode of viewing the entire psychi
cal life of man which' will be fruitful for our
4
present enquiry. Mind, it has been found,
is a house divided against itself, that is to say
it is an arena where different and divergent
forces continually battle against one another.
There must be, however, at the same time,
some sort of a resolution of these forces,
some equation that holds them in balance,
otherwise the mind the human being itself
would cease to exist as an entity. What is
the mechanism of this balance of power in
*
the human mind ? In order to ascertain that
we must first of all know the fundamental
nature of the struggle and also the character
71
THE COMING RACE
of the more elemental forces that are engaged
in it.
There are some primary desires that
seek satisfaction in man. . They are the vital
urges of life, the most prominent among'
them being the instinct of self-preservation
and that of self-reproduction or the desire to
preserve ones body by defensive as well as
by offensive means and the desire to multiply
oneself by mating. These are the two
biological necessities that are inevitable to
mans existence as a physical being. They
give the minimum conditions required to be
fulfilled by man in order that he may live
and hence they are the strongest and the
most fundamental elements that enter into
his structure and composition.
It would have been an easy matter if
these vital urges could flow on unhindered in
their way. There would have been no pro
blem at all, if they met satisfaction easily and
smoothly, without having to look to other
factors and forces. As a matter of fact, man
does not and cannot gratify his instincts
whenever and wherever he chooses and in an
+
72
A THEORY OF YOGA
-open and direct manner. Even in his most
primitive and barbarous condition, he has
often to check himself and throw a veil, in so
many ways, over his- sheer animality. In
the civilised society the check is manifold and
is frankly recognised. We do not go straight
as our sexual impulsion leads, but seek to
hide and camouflage it under the institution
of marriage; we do not pounce upon the
food directly we happen to meet it and
snatch and appropriate whatever portion we
get but we secure it through an elaborate
process, which is known as the economic
system. The machinery of the state, the cult
of the kshattriya are roundabout ways to meet
our fighting instincts.
What is the, reason of this elaboration,
this chfeck and constraint upon the natural
and direct outflow of the animal instincts in
*
man ? It has been said that the social life of
man, the fact that he has to live and move
t
as member of a group or aggregate has im
posed upon him these restrictions. The free
and unbridled indulgence of one J s bare'
aboriginal, impulses may be possible to crea-
73
THE COMING RACE
tures that live a separate, solitary and indi
vidual life but is disruptive of all bonds
necessary for a corporate and group life. It
is even a biological necessity again which
has evolved in man a third and collateral
primary instinct that of the herd. And it
is this herd-instinct which naturally and.
spontaneously restrains, diverts and even
metamorphoses the other instincts of the:
mere animal life. However, leaving aside 7 )
for the moment the question whether man J st
ethical and spiritual ideals are a mere dissi- S
mulation of his animal instincts or whether /
they correspond to certain actual realities, j
apart from and co-existent with these latter,we 'K
will recognise the simple fact of control and^
try to have a glimpse into its mechanism.
There are three lines, as the Psych'o-ana-
lysts point out along which this control or .
censuring of the primary instincts acts..
Fir^t, there is the line of Defence Reaction . i)
That is to say, the mind automatically takes.,
up an attitude directly contrary to the:
impulse, tries to shut it out and deny alto
gether its existence and the measure of the:
74
A THEORY OP YOGA
insistence of the impulse is also the measure
of the vehemence of the denial. It is the
case of the lady protesting too much. So it
happens that where subconsciously there is a
stiong current of a particular impulse,
consciously the mind is obliged to take up a
counteracting opposite impulse. Thus in
presence of a strong sexual craving the mind
as if to guard and save itself engenders by
a reflex movement an ascetic and puritanic
mood. Similarly a strong unthinking physi
cal attraction translates itself on the cons
cious plane as an equally strong repulsion.
Secondly, there is the line of Substitution.
Here the mind does not stand in an anta
gonistic and protestant mood to combat and
repress the impulse, but seeks to divert it into
other channels, use it to other purposes which-
uo not demand equal sacrifice, may even, on
the other hand, be considered by the con
scious mind as worthy of human pursuit.
Thus the energy that normally would seek
sexual gratification might find its outlet in
the cultivation of art and literature. It is a
common thing in novels to find the heroine.
75
THE COMING RACE
disappointed in love taking finally to works
of charity and beneficence and thus forgetting
her disappointment. Another variety of this
is what is known as drowning one's sorrow
in drinking."
Thirdly, there is the line of Sublimation
'll is when the natural impulse is neither
repressed nor diverted but lifted up into a
higher modality. The thing is given a new
sense and a new value which serve to remove
the stigma usually attached to it and. thus
allow its free indulgence. Instances of carnal
love sublimated into spiritual union, of
passion transmuted into devotion (Bhakti) are
common enough to illustrate the point.
The human mind naturally, without any
effort on its part, takes to one or more of
these devices to control and conceal the
aboriginal impulses. But this spontaneous
process can be organised and consciously
regulated and made to serve better the pur
pose and urge of Nature. And this is the
beginning of yoga the conscious fulfilment
-of Nature. The Psycho-analysists have given
us the first and elementary stage of this
76
A THEORY OF YOGA
process of yoga. It is, we may say, the-
fourth line of control. With this man enters
a new level of being, develops a new mode of
life. It is when the automatism of Nature is /
replaced by the power of Conscious Control.
Man is not here a blind instrument of forces,
his activities (both indulging and controlling)
are not guided according to an ignorant sub
mission to the laws of almost subconscious
impulsions. Conscious control means that
the mind does not fight sliy of or seek to
elude the aboriginal insistences, but allows
them to come up freely, meets them squarely,
recognises them and establishes an easy
mastery over them.
The method of unconscious or subcon
scious nature is fundamentally that of
repression. Apart from Defence Reaction
which is a thing of pure coercion, even in
Substitution and Sublimation there always
remains in the background a large amount
of repressed complexes in all their primitive
strength. The system is never entirely
purified but remains secretly pregnant with
those urges; a part only is deflected and
77
THE COMING RACE
%
camouflaged, the surface only assumes a
transformed appearance. And there is
.always the danger of the superstructure
coming down helplessly by a sudden
upheaval of the nether forces. The whole
system feels, although not in a conscious
manner, the tension of the repression and
suffers from something that is unhealthy and
ill-balanced. Dante*s spiritualised passion is
a supreme instance of control by Sublima
tion, but the Divina Comedia hardly bears the
impress of a serene and tranquil soul,
sovereignly above the turmoils of the tragedy
of life and absolutely at peace with itself.
In conscious control, the mind is for the
first time aware of the presence of the
repressed impulses, it seeks to release them
from the pressure to which they are habi
tually and normally subjected. It knows
and recognises them, however ugly and
revolting they might appear to be when they
present themselves in their natural nakedness.
Then it becomes easy for the conscious
determination to eliminate or regulate or
transform them and thus to establish a
t
78
A THEORY OF YOGA
healthy harmony in the human vehicle. The
-very recognition itself, as implied in con
scious control, means purification.
Yet even here the process of control and
transformation does not end. And we now
come to the Fifth Line, the real and intimate
path of yoga. Conscious control gives us a
natural mastery over the instinctive impulses
which are relieved of their dark tamas and
attain a purified rhythm. "We do not seek to
hide or repress or combat them, but surpass
them and play with them as the artist does
with his material. Something of this lcatharsis ,
this aestheticism of the primitive impulses
was achieved by the ancient Greeks. Even
-then the primitive impulses remain primitive
all the same; they fulfil, no doubt, a real
and healthy function in the scheme of life,
but still in their fundamental nature they
continue the animal in man. And even
when Conscious Control means the *utter
elimination and annihilation of the primal
instinctswhich, however, does not seem to
be a probable eventualityeven then, we
say, the basic problem remains unsolved;
79
THE COMING RACE
for the urge of nature towards the .release:
and a transformation of the instincts does-
not find satisfaction, the question is merely
put aside.
Yoga, then, comes at this stage and'
offers the solution in its power of what we-
may call Transubstantiation. That is to say,
here the mere form is not changed, nor the*
functions restrained, regulated and purified,
but the very substance of the instincts is.
transmuted. The power of conscious control
is a power of the human will i.e. of an indi
vidual personal will and therefore necessarily-
limited both in intent and extent. It is a
power complementary to the power of Nature,
it may guide and fashion the latter accord
ing to a new pattern, but cannot change the-
basic substance, the stuff of Nature. To that
end yoga seeks a power that transcends the-
human will, brings into play the supernal j
puissance of a Divine Will. ^
This
is
meaning
the moral struggle in man, t he continuou s
endeavour towards a transvaluation of the
primary and aboriginal instincts andTmpul-
80
A THEORY OF YOGA
ses. Looked at from one end, from below
up the ascending line, mans ethical and
spiritual ideals are a dissimulation and subli
mation of the animal impulsions. But this is
becauseas we see, if we look from the
other end, from above down the descending,
lineman is not all instinct, he is not a
mere blind instrument in the hands of Nature
forces. He has in him another source, an
opposite pole of being from which other im
pulsions flow and continually modify the
structure of the lower levels. If the animal
is the foundation of his nature, the divine is
its summit. If the bodily demands form his
manifest reality, the demands of the spirit
enshrine his higher reality. And if as
regards the former he is a slave, as regards
the latter he is the Master. It is by the
interaction of these double forces that his
whole nature has been and is being fashioned.
Man does not and cannot give carte blanche to
his vital inclinations, since there is a pres
sure upon them of higher forces coming,
dcv/n from his mental and spiritual levels-
It is these latter which .have deviated
81
c 6
THE COMING RACE
him from the direct line of the pure animal
life.
Thus then we may distinguish three
types of control on three levels. First, the
natural control, secondly the conscious i.e. to
say the mental the ethical and religious
control, and thirdly the spiritual or divine
control. Now the spirit is the ultimate truth
and reality, behind the forces that act in the
mind and in the body, so that the natural
control and the ethical control are mere
attempts to establish and realise the spiritual
control. The animal impulses feel the
hidden stress of the divine urges that are
their real essence and thus there rises first an
unconscious conflict in the natural life and
then a conscious conflict in the higher ethical
life. But when both of these are transcended
and the conflict is carried on to a still higher
level, then do we find their real significance
and arrive at the consummation to which
they move. Yoga is the ultimate transvalua
tion of physical (and of moral) values, it is
the trans-substantiation of life-power into, its
.spiritual substance.
82
*
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS
To be divine or to remain humanthis
is the one choice that is now before Nature in
her upward march of evolution. What is the
exact significance of this choice ?
To remain human means to continue
the fundamental nature of man. In what
consists the humanity of man ? We can
.ascertain it by distinguishing what forms the
animality of the animal, since that will give
us the differentia that nature has evolved to
raise man over the animal. The animal,
again, has a characteristic differentiating it
from the vegetable world, which latter, in its
turn, has. something to mark it off from the
inorganic world. The inorganic, the vege
table, the animal and finally manthese are
the four great steps of Nature 3 s evolutionary
course.
The differentia, in each case, lies in the
4 -
degree and nature of consciousness, since it
is consciousness that forms the substance and
83
THE COMING RACE
determines the mode of being. Now, the
inorganic is characterised by un-consciousness,.
the vegetable by subconsciousness, the animal.
*
by consciousness and man by self-conscious
ness. Man knows that he knows, an animal
only knows; a plant does not even know, it
merely feels or senses ; matter cannot do that
even, it simply acts or rather is acted upon.
We are not concerned here, however, with
the last two forms of being ; we will speak of
the first two only.
We say, then, that man is distinguished
from the animal by his having consciousness
as it has, but added to it the consciousness of
self. Man acts and feels and knows as much
as the animal does ; but also he knows that,
he acts, he knows that he feels, he knows that
he knowsand this is a thing the animal-'
cannot do. It is the awakening of the sense-
of self in every mode of being that charac
terises man, and it is owing to this-
consciousness of an ego behind, of a perma
nent unit of reference, which has modified
even the functions of knowing and feeling,
and acting, has refashioned them in a mould!
84
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS
which is not quite that of the animal, in spite
-of a general similarity.
So the humanity of man consists in his
consciousness of the self or ego. Is there no
other higher mode of consciousness ? Or is self-
consciousness the acme, the utmost limit to
which consciousness can raise itself? If it is
so, then we are bound to conclude that
humanity will remain eternally human in its
fundamental nature; the only progress, if
progress at all we choose to call it, will
consist perhaps in accentuating this con
sciousness of the self and in expressing it
through a greater variety of stresses, through
a richer combination of its colour and light
and shade and rhythm. But also, this may
not be sothere may be the possibility of a
further step, a transcending of the consci
ousness of the self. It seems unnatural and
improbable that having risen from un-con
sciousness to self-consciousness through a
m
.series of continuous marches. Nature should
suddenly stop and consider what she had
achieved to be her final end. Has Nature be
come bankrupt ofher creative genius, exhaus.
85
the coming race
1
ted of her upward drive ? Has she to remain)
content with only a clever manipulation, a
mere shuffling and re-arranging of the
materials already produced ?
* ____
As a matter of fact it is not so. The
glimpses of a higher form of consciousness-
we can see even now present in self-cons
ciousness. We have spoken of the different
stages of evolution as if they were separate
and distinct and incommensurate entities.
They may be described as such for the
purpose of a logical understanding, but in
reality they form a single p ro gressive con ti--
nuum in which one level gradually fuses into
another. And as the higher level takes up
the law of the lower and evolves out of it a
characteristic function, even so the law of
the higher level with its characteristic func
tion is already involved and envisaged in the
law of the lower level and its characteristic
function. It cannot be asserted positively
that because man^s special virtue is self-con
sciousness, animals cannot have that quality
on any account. We do see, if we care to-
observe closely and dispassionately, that
86
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS
animals of the higher order, as they approach
the level of humanity, show more and more
evident signs of something which is very
much akin to, if not identical with the human
characteristic of self-consciousness.
So, in man also, especially of that order
which forms the crown of humanityin
poets and artists and seers and great men of
actoncan be observed a certain characteris
tic form of consciousness, which is something
other than, greater than the consciousness of
the mere self. It is difficult as yet to charac
terise definitely what that thing is. It is the
awakening of the self to some thing which is
beyond itselfit is the cosmic self, the over
soul, the universal being; it is God, it is
Turiya , it is satchid-ananda in so many ways
the thing has been sought to be envisaged
and expressed. The consciousness of that
level has also a great variety of names given
to it Intuition, Revelation, cosmic cons
ciousness, God-consciohsness. It is to be
noted here, however, that the thing we are
referring to, is not the Absolute, the Infinite,
the One without a second. It is not, that is
87
THE COMING RACE
to say, the supreme Reality the Brahman
in its static being, in its undivided and in
divisible unity; it is the dynamic Brahman,
that status of the supreme Reality where
creation, the diversity of Becoming takes rise,
it is the Truth-world Ritam the domain of
typal realities. The distinction is necessary,
as there does seem to be such a level of cons
ciousness intermediary, again, between
man and the Absolute, between self-cons
ciousness and the supreme consciousness.
The simplest thing would be to give that
intermediate level of consciousness a negative
namesince being as yet human we cannot
foresee exactly its composition and function
the super-consciousness.
\,The jnflatu of something vast and trans
cendent, something which escapes all our
familiar schemes of cognisance and yet is in
sistent with a translucent reality of its own,
we do feel sometimes within us invading and
enveloping our individuality, lifting up our
sense of self and transmuting our personality
into a reality which can hardly be called
merely human^ All this life of ego-bound
88
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS
rationality then melts away and opens out
the passage for a life of vision and power.
Thus it is the poet has felt when he says,
there is this incalculable element in human
'life influencing us from the mystery which
envelops our being, and when reason is
.satisfied, there is something deeper than
Reason which makes us still uncertain of truth.
Above the human reason there is a trans
cendental sphere to which the spirit of men
sometimes rises, and the will may be forged
there at a lordly smithy and made the
nnbreakable pivot. (A.E .) 33
This passage from the self-conscient to
the super-conscient does not imply merely a
shifting of the focus of consciousness. The
transmutation of consciousness involves a
purer illumination, a surer power and a
wider compass; it involves also a funda
mental change in the very mode of being and
living. It gives quite a different life-intui
tion and a different life-power. The change
in the motif brings about a new form
altogether, a re-casting and re-shaping and
re-energising of the external materials as well.
89
I
THE CQMING RACE
As the lift from mere consciousness to self-
consciousness meant all the difference-
%
between an animal and a man, so the lift
again from self-consciousness to super-con
sciousness will mean the difference of a whole
world between man and the divine creature
that is to be.
Indeed it is a divine creature that should,
be envisaged on the next level of evolution.
The mental and the morale the psychical and
the physical transfigurations which must
follow the change in the basic substratum do
imply such a mutation, the birth of a new
species, as it were, fashioned in the nature of
the gods. The vision of angels and Siddhas,.
which man is having ceaselessly since his
birth, may be but a prophecy of the future,
actuality.
This then, it seems to us, is the imme
diate problem that Nature has set before
herself. She is now at the parting of the
ways. She has done with man as an essen
tially human being, she has brought out the
fundamental possibilities of humanity and
perfected it, so far as perfection may be
90
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS
attained within the cadre by which she chose
to limit herself; she is now looking forward
to another kind of experiment the evolving
of another life, another being out of her
entrails, that will be greater than the huma
nity we know to-day, that will be superior
even to the supreme that has yet been
actualised. '
Nature has marched from the unconscious
to the sub-conscious, from the sub-conscious
to the conscious and from the conscious to
the self-conscious; she has to rise yet again
from the self-conscious to the super-conscious.
The mineral gave place to the plant, the
plant gave place to the animal and the
animal gave place to man ; let man give
place to and bring out the divine.
91
PRINCIPLE AND PERSONALITY
It is asked of us why do we preach a
man and not purely and solely a principle.
Our ideal being avowedly the establishment
and reign of a new principle of world-order
and not gathering recruits for the camp of a
sectarian teacher, it seems all the more in
consistent, if not thoroughly ruinous for our
cause, that we should lay stress upon a
particular individual and incur the danger of
overshadowing the universal truths upon
which we seek to build human society. Now,
it is not that we are unconscious or oblivious
of the many evils attendant upon the system
of preaching a man the history of the rise
and decay of many sects and societies is there
to give us sufficient warning; and yet if we
cannot entirely give the go-by to personali
ties and stick to mere and bare principles, it
is because we have clear reasons for it,
because we are not unconscious or oblivious
either of the evils that beset the system of
preaching the principle alone.
PRINCIPLE AND PERSONALITY
Religious bodies that are formed through^
the bliakti and puja for one man. social recon-
M
structions forced by the will and power of a.
single individual, have already in the incep
tion this grain of incapacity and disease and
death that they are not an integrally self-
conscious creation, they are not, as a whole,
intelligent and wide awake and therefore-
constantly responsive to the truths and ideals-
and realities for which they exist, for which
at least, their founder intended them to exist.
The light at the apex is the only light and.
the entire structure is but the shadow of that
light; the whole thing has the aspect of a
dark mass galvanised into red-hot activity by
the passing touch of a dynamo. Imme
diately however the solitary light fails and
the dynamo stops, there is nothing but the
original darkness and inertia tamo asit
iamasa gudham agre.
Man, however great and puissant he
may be, is a perishable thing. People who-
gather or are gathered round a man and
cling to him through the tie of a personal
relation must fall off and scatter when the
93
THE COMING RACE
man passes away and the personal tie loses
its hold. What remains is a memory, a
gradually fading memory. But memory is
hardly a creative force, it is a dead, at best,
a moribund thing ; the real creative power is
Presence. So when the great man^s presence,
the power that crystallises is gone, the whole
edifice crumbles and vanishes into air or
remains a mere name.
Love and admiration for a mahapurusha is
not enough, even faith in his gospel is of
little avail, nor can actual participation,
consecrated work and labour in his cause
:save the situation; it is only when the
principles, the bare realities for which the
mahaputusha stands are in the open forum and
men have the full and free opportunity of
testing and assimilating them, it is only when
individuals thus become living embodiments
of those principles and realities that we do
create a thing universal and permanent, as
universal and permanent as earthly things
may be. Principles only can embrace and
unify the whole of humanity; a particular
personality shall always create division and
94
PRINCIPLE AND" PERSONALITY
>
limitation. By placing the man in front, we
erect a wall between the Principle and men
at large. It is the principles, on the con
trary, that should be given the place of
honour: our attempt should be to keep back
personalities and make as little use of them
.as possible. Let the principles work and create
in their freedom and power, untrammelled
by the limitations of'any mere human vessel.
We are quite familiar with this cry so
rampant in our democratic ageprinciples
and no personalities! And although we
.admit the justice of it, yet we cannot ignore
the trenchant onesidedness which it involves.
It is perhaps only a reaction, a swing to the
-opposite extreme of a mentality given too
much to personalities, as the case generally
has been in the past. It may be necessary,
as a corrective, but it belongs only to a
temporary stage. Since, however, we are
.an integral method. We shall have to curb
many of our susceptibilities, diminish many
of our apprehensions and soberly strike a
balance between opposite extremes.
95
THE COMING RACE
We do not speak like politicians or
banias; but the very truth of the matter
demands such a policy or line of action. It
is very well to talk of principles and princi
ples alone, but what are principles unless-
they take life and form in a particular in
dividual ? They are airy nothings, notions in
the brain of logicians and metaphysicians, fit.
subjects for discussion in the academy, but
they are devoid of that vital urge which
makes them creative agencies. We have-
long lines of philosophers, especially Euro
pean, who most scrupulously avoided all
touch of personalities, whose utmost care was-
to keep principles pure and unsullied; and.
the upshot was that those principles remained,
principles only, barren and infructuous, some
thing like, in the strong and puissant phrase;
of Baudelaire La froide majeste des femmes
steriles. And on the contrary, we have had.
other peoples, much addicted to personalities
especially in Asiawho did not care so-
much for abstract principles as for concrete
embodiments; and what has been the result,
here? None ( can say that they did not
96
PRINCIPLE AND PERSONALITY
produce anything or produced only still-born
things. They produced living creatures
ephemeral., some might say, but creatures
that lived and moved and had their days.
But, it may be asked, what is the neces
sity, what is the purpose in making it all a
one man show? Granting that principles
require personalities for their fructuation
and vital functioning, what remains to be
envisaged is not one personality but a plural
personality, the people at large, as many
individuals of the human race as can be
consciously imbued with those principles.
When principles are made part and parcel
of, are concentrated in a single solitary
personality, they get cribbed and cabined,
they are vitiated by the idiosyncrasies of the
man, they come to have a narrower field of
application ; they are emptied of the general
verities they contain and finally cease to have
any effect.
The thing, however, is that what you
call principles do not drop from heaven in
their virgin purity and all at once lay hold
of mankind en masse . It is always through a
97
c /
THE COMING RACE
particular individual that a great principle
manifests itself. Principles do not live in the
general mind of man and even if they live.,
they live secreted and unconscious ; it is only
a puissant personality, who has lived the
principle, that can bring it forward into life
and action, can awaken, like the VedicDawn,
what was dead in all mritam kanchana bodlia-
yanti. Men in general are by themselves inert
and indifferent; they have little leisure or
inclination to seek, from any inner urge of
their own, for principles and primal truths;
they become conscious of these only when
expressed and embodied in some great and
rare soul. An Avatar, a Messiah or a Prophet
is the centre, the focus through which a Truth
and Law first dawns and then radiates and
spreads abroad. The little lamps are all
lighted by the sparks that the great torch
scatters.
And yet we yield to none in our demand
for holding forth the principles always and
ever before the wide open gaze of all. The
principle is there to make people self-know
ing and self-guiding; and the man is also
03
PRINCIPLE AND PERSONALITY
there to illustrate that principle, to serve as
the hope and prophecy of achievement. The
living soul is there to touch your soul, if you
require the touch ; and the principle is there
by which to test and testify. For, we do not
ask anybody to be a mere automaton, a
blind devotee, a soul without individual
choice and initiative. On the contrary, we
insist on each and every individual to find
his own soul and stand on his own Truth
this is the fundamental principle we declare,
the only creedif creed it be that we ask
people to note and freely follow. We ask
all people to be fully self-dependent and
self-illumined, for only thus can a real and
solid reconstruction of human nature and
society be possible; we do not wish that they
should bow down ungrudgingly to any thing,
be it a principle or a personality. In this
respect we claim the very first rank of icono
clasts and anarchists. And along with that,
if we still choose to remain an idol-lover and
*
a hero-worshipper, it is because we recognise
that our mind, human as it is, being not a
simple equation but a complex paradox, the
4
THE COMING RACE
idol or the hero symbolises for us and for
those who so will,, the very iconoclasm and
anarchism and perhaps other more positive
things as wellwhich we behold within and
seek to manifest.
The world is full of ikons and archons
we cannot escape them, even if we try the
world itself being a great ikon and as great
an archon. Those who swear by principles,
swear always by some personality or other,
if not by a living creature then by a lifeless
book, if not by Religion then by Science, if
not by the East then by the West, if not by
Buddha or Christ then by Bentham or
Voltaire. Only they do it unwittingly they
change one set of personalities for another
and believe they have rejected them all. The
veils of Maya are a thousand-fold tangle ajid
you think you have entirely escaped her
when you have only run away from one fold
to fall into another. The wise do not
attempt to reject and negate Maya, but con
sciously accept herfreedom lies in a
knowing affirmation. So we too have accep
ted and affirmed an icon, but we have done
100
PRINCIPLE AND PERSONALITY
it consciously and knowingly; we are not
bound by our idol, we see the truth of it, and
-we serve and utilise it as best as we may.
101
i
THE BASIS OF UNITY
I
A modern society or people cannot have
religion,, that is to say, credal religion, as the
basis of its organized collective life. It was
medieval society and people that were
organized on that line. Indeed medievalism
means nothing more and nothing less
than that. But whatever the need and justi
fication in the past, the principle is an ana
chronism under modern conditions. It was
needed., perhaps, to keep alive a truth which
goes into the very roots of human life and
its deepest aspiration ; and it was needed
also for a dynamic application of that truth
on a larger scale and in smaller details, on the
mass of mankind and in its day to day life.
That was the aim of the Church Militant
and the Khilafat; that was the spirit,
although in a -more Sattvic way, behind
Buddhistic evangelism or even Hindu
colonization.
r
102
i
THE BASIS OF UNITY
The truth behind a credal religion is the
aspiration towards the realization of the
Divine, some ultimate reality that gives a
permanent meaning and value to the human
life, to the existence lodged in this 'sphere of
sorrow* here below. Credal paraphernalia
were necessary to express or buttress this core
of spiritual truth when mankind, in the mass,
had not attained a certain level of enlighten
ment in the mind and a certain degree of
development in its life relations. The modern
age is modern precisely because it has attained
to a necessary extent this mental enlighten
ment and this life development. So the scheme
or scaffolding that was required in the past is
no longer unavoidable and can have either
no reality at all or only a modified utility.
A modern people is a composite entity
especially with regard to its religious affilia
tion. Not religion, but culture is the basis of
modern collective life, national or social. Cul
ture includes in its grain that fineness of tem
perament which appreciates all ^
behind all forms, even ^vhen^hi^eis^p
allegiance to one particulareftMn.
103
r
THE COMING RACE
In India, it is well known, the diver
sity of affiliations is colossal, sui generis. Two
major affiliations have to-day almost cut the
country into two; and desperate remedies
are suggested which are worse than the
malady itself, as they may kill the patient
outright. If it is so, it is, I repeat, the
medieval spirit that is at the bottom of the
trouble.
The rise of this spirit in modern times and
conditions is a phenomenon that has to be
explained and faced : it is a ghost that has
come out of the past and has got to be laid
and laid for good. First of all, it is a reac
tion from modernism : it is a reaction from
the modernist denial of certain fundamental
and eternal truths, of God, Soul, and Immor-
talitv: it is a reaction from the modernist
4
affirmation of the mere economic man. And
it is also a defensive gesture of a particular
complex of consciousness that has grown and
lived powerfully and now apprehends expur
gation and elimination.
In Europe such a contingency did not
arise, because the religious spirit, rampant
104
THE BASIS OF UNITY
in the days of Inquisitions and St. Bartholo-.
mews, died away: it died, and for, because)
it was'replaced by a spirit that was felt as
being equally, if not more, au thentic and,
which for the moment, suffused the whole
consciousness with a large and high afflatus,
commensurate with the amplitude of mans
aspiration. I refer, of course, to the spirit
of the Renascence. It was a spirit
profane and secular, no doubt, but on that
level it brought a catholicity of temper and
a richness in varied interestsa humanistic
culture, as it is calledwhich constituted a
living and unifying ideal for Europe. That
spirit culminated in the great French Revo
lution which was the final coup de grace to all
that still remained of medievalism, even in its
outer structure, political and economical.
In India the spirit of Renascence came
very late, late almost by three centuries;
and even then it could not flood the whole
of the continent in all its nooks and corners,
psychological and physical. There were any
number of pockets (to use a current military
phrase) left behind which guarded the spirit
105
THE COMING RACE
of the past and offered persistent and obdu
rate resistance. Perhaps, such a dispensa
tion was needed in India and inevitable also;
inevitable, because the religious spirit is
closest to Indians soul and is its most direct
expression and cannot be uprooted so easily;
needed, because Indians and the worlds
future demands it and depends upon it.
Only, the religious spirit has to be bathed
and purified and enlightened by the
spirit of the Renascence : that is to say, one
must learn and understand and realize that
Spirit is the thing the one thing needful
iamevaikam janatka ; 'religions are its names
and forms, appliances and decorations. Let
us have by all means the religious spirit, the
fundamental experience that is the inmost
4
truth of all religions, that is the matter of
our soul; but in our mind and life and body
let there be a luminous catholicity, let these
organs and instruments be trained to see and
compare and appreciate the variety, the
numberless facets which the one Spirit natu
rally presents to the human consciousness.
Ekam sat viprah bahudha vadanti. It is an
106
THE BASIS OF UNITY
ancient truth that man discovered even in
his earliest seekings; but it still awaits an
adequate expression and application in life.
II
Indians historical development is mar
ked by a special characteristic which is at
\
once the expression of her inmost nature
and the setting of a problem which she has
to solve for herself and for the whole human
race. I have spoken of the diversity and
divergence of affiliations in a modern social
unit. But what distinguishes India from all
other peoples is that the diversity and diver
gence have culminated here in contradic
toriness and mutual exclusion.
The first extremes that met in India and
fought and gradually coalesced to form a
single cultural and social whole were, as is
well known, the Aryan and the non-Aryan.
Indeed, the geologists tell us, the land itself
is divided into two parts structurally quite
different and distinct, the Deccan plateau
and the Himalayan ranges with the Indo-
Gangetic plain : the former is formed out
of the most ancient and stable and, on the
107
r *
X
*
A
THE COMING RACE
whole, horizontally bedded rocks of the
earth, while the latter is of comparatively
recent origin, formed out of a more flexible
and weaker belt (the Himalayan region
consisting of a colossal flexing and crumpling
of strata). The disparity is so much that a
certain group of geologists hold that the
Deccan plateau did not at all form part of the
original Asiatic continent, but had drifted
and dashed into it: in fact the Himalayas are
the result of this mighty impact. The usual
division of an Aryan and a Dravidian race
may be due to a memory of the clash of the
two continents and their races.
However, coming to historical times, we
see wave after wave of the most heteroge
neous and disparate elementsSakas and
Huns and Greekseach bringing its quota
of exotic material, enter into the oceanic
I J
Indian life and culture, lose their separate
foreign identity and become part and parcel
of the common whole. Even so, a single
unitary body was formed out of such varied
and shifting materialsnot in the political,
but in a socio-religious sense. For a catho-
108
THE BASIS OF UNITY
lie religious spirit, not being solely doctrinal
and personal, admitted and embraced in its
supple and wide texture almost an infinite
variety of approaches to the Divine, of forms
and norms of apprehending the Beyond, It
has been called Hinduism : it is a vast syn
thesis of multiple affiliations. It expresses
the characteristic genius of India and hence
Hinduism and Indianism came to be looked
upon as synonymous terms. And the same
could be defined also as Vedic religion and
culture, for its invariable basis the bed-rock
on which it stood firm and erectwas the
Vedas, the Knowledge seen by the sages.
But there had already risen a voice of dissi-
dence and discord that of Buddha, not so
much, perhaps, of Buddha as of Buddhism.
The Buddhistic enlightenment and discipline
did not admit the supreme authority of
the Vedas; it sought other bases of truth and
reality. It was a great denial; and it meant
and worked for a vital schism. The denial of
the Vedas by itself, perhaps, would not be
serious, but it became so, as it was symptom
atic of a deeper divergence. Denying the
109
l
*
THE COMING RACE
Vedas, the Buddhistic spirit denied life. It was
quite a new thing in the Indian conscious
ness and spiritual discipline. And it left such a
stamp there that even today it stands as
the dominant character of the Indian out
look. However, Indias synthetic genius rose
to the occasion and knew how to bridge the
chasm, close up the fissure, and present again
a body whole and entire. Buddha became
one of the Avataras: the discipline of
Nirvana and Maya was reserved as the last
duty to be performed at the end of life, as
the culmination of a full-length span of ac
tion and achievement; the way to Moksha lay
through Dharma and Artha and Kama,
Sannyasa had to be built upon Brahmacharya
and Garhasthya. The integral ideal was
epitomized by Kalidasa in his famous lines
about the character of the Raghus :
They devoted themselves to study in their boyhood, in
youth they pursued the objects of life when old they took
to spiritual austerities, and in the end they died united with
the higher consciousness,
Only this process of integration was not done
in a day, it took some centuries and had to pass
through some unpleasant intermediary stages.
110
THE BASIS OF UNITY
n
And still this was not the lastit
could not be the lastanti thesis that had to
be synthetized. The dialectical movement
led to a more serious and fiercer contradic
tion. The Buddhistic schism was after all
a division brought about from within : it
could be said that the two terms of the anti
nomy belonged to the same genus and were
commensurable. The idea or experience of
Asat and Maya was not unknown to the Upa-
nishads, only it had not there the exclusive
stress which the later developments gave it.
Hence quite a different, an altogether foreign
body was imported into what was or had
come to be a homogeneous entity, and in a
considerable mass. Unlike the previous irrup
tions that merged and were lost in the
general life and consciousness, Islam entered
as a leaven that maintained its integrity and
revolutionized Indian life and culture by
infusing into its tone a Semitic accent. After
the Islamic impact India could not be what
she was beforea change became inevitable
even in the major note. It was a psycholo
gical cataclysm almost on a par with the
111
THE COMING RACE
geological one that formed her body; but
the spirit behind which created the body
was working automatically, inexorably
towards the greater and more difficult syn
thesis demanded by the situation. Only the
thing is to be done now consciously, not
through an unconscious process of laissez-
faire as in the inferior stages of evolution in
the past. And that is the true genesis of the
present conflict.
History abounds in instances of racial
and cultural immixture. Indeed all major
human groupings of today are invariably
composite formations. Excepting, perhaps,
some primitive aboriginal tribes there are no
pure races existent. The Briton, the Dane,
*
the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman have
combined to form the British ; a Frenchman
has a Gaul, a Roman, a Frank in him ; and
a Spaniards blood would show an Iberian,
a Latin, a Gothic, a Moorish element in it.
And much more than a people, a culture in
modern times has been a veritable cockpit of
multifarious and even incongruous elements.
There are instances also in which a perfect
112
THE BASIS OF UNITY
fusion could not be accomplished, and one
element had to be rejected or crushed out.
The complete disappearance of the Aztecs
and Mayas in South America, the decadence
of the Red Indians in North America, of
the Negroes in Africa as a result of a fierce
clash with European peoples and European
culture illustrate the point.
Nature, on the whole, has solved the
problem of blood fusion and mental fusion of
different peoples, although on a smaller scale,
India to-day presents the problem on a
larger scale and on a higher or deeper level.
The demand is for a spiritual fusion and
unity. Strange to say, although the Spirit is
the true bed-rock of unitysince, at bottom,
it means identityit is on this plane that
mankind has not yet been able to really
meet and coalesce. India's genius has
been precisely working in the line of a
perfect solution of this supreme problem.
Islam comes with a full-fledged spiritual
soul and a mental and vital formation com
mensurable with that inner being and con
sciousness. It comes with a dynamic spirit,
113
c 8
THE COMING RACE
a warrior mood, that aims at conquering the
physical world for the Lord, a temperament
which Indian spirituality had not, or had lost
long before, if she had anything of it. This
was, perhaps, what Vivekananda meant
when he spoke graphically of a Hindu soul
with a Muslim body. The Islamic dispensa
tion, however, brings with it not only some
thing complementary, but also something
contradictory, if not for anything else, at
least for the strong individuality which does
not easily yield to assimilation. Still, in
spite of great odds, the process of assimilation
was going on slowly and surely. But of late
it appears to have come to a dead halt;
difficulties have been* presented which seem
insuperable.
If religious toleration were enough, if
that made up mans highest and largest
achievement, then Nature need not have
attempted to go beyond cultural fusion; a
liberal culture is the surest basis for a catho
lic religious spirit. But such a spirit of tole
ration and catholicity, although it bespeaks
a widened consciousness, does not always
114
THE BASIS OF UNITY
-enshrine a profundity of being. Nobody is
more tolerant and catholic than a dilettante,
but an ardent spiritual soul is different.
To be loyal to one's line of self-fulfil
ment, to follow ones self-law ( Swadharma)
wholly and absolutely without this no spiri
tual life is possible and yet not to come into
clash with other lines and loyalties, nay more,
to be in positive harmony with them, is a
problem which has not been really solved.
It was solved, perhaps, in the consciousness
of a Ramakrishna, a few individuals here and
there, but it has always remained a source
of conflict and disharmony in the general
mind even in the field of spirituality. The
clash of spiritual or religious loyalties has
taken such an acute form in India to-day,
they have been carried to the bitter
extreme, in order, we venture to say, that
the final synthesis might be absolute and
irrevocable. This is Indias mission to work
out, and this is the lesson which she brings
to the world.
The solution can come, first, by going
-.to the true religion of the Spirit, by being
*
115
THE COMING RACE
truly spiritual and not merely religious, for,,
as we have said, real unity lies only in and
through the Spirit, since Spirit is one and
indivisible; secondly, by bringing down
somethinga great part, indeed, if not
the wholeof this puissant and marvellous
Spirit into our life of emotions and sensations-
and activities.
If it is said that this is an ideal for the
few only, not for the mass, our answer to
that is the answer of the Gita -yad yad
acharati shreshthah. Let the few then practise'
and achieve the ideal: the mass will have to-j
follow as far as it is possible and necessary.J
It is the very character of the evolutionary
system of Nature, as expressed in the
principle of symbi osi s, that any considerable
change in one place (in one species) is accom
panied by a corresponding change in the
same direction in other contiguous places
(in other associated species) in order that
the poise and balance of the system may be
maintained.
It is precisely strong nuclei that are
needed (even, perhaps, one strong nucleus is-
116
THE BASIS OF UNITY
sufficient) where the single and integrated
spiritual consciousness is an accomplished
and established fact: that acts inevitably as
a solvent drawing in and assimilating or
transforming and recreating as much of the
surroundings as its own degree and nature
of achievement inevitably demand.
India did not and could not stop at
mere cultural fusionwhich was a supreme
gift of the Moguls. She did not and could
not stop at another momentous cultural
fusion brought about by the European
impact. She aimed at something more.
Nature demanded of her that she should
discover a greater secret of human unity and
through progressive experiments apply and
establish it in fact. Christianity did not raise
this problem of the greater synthesis, for the
Christian peoples were more culture-minded
than religious-minded. It was left for an
Asiatic people to set the problem and for
India to work out the solution.
1L7
THREE DEGREES OF SOCIAL
ORGANISATION
Declaration of Rights is a characteristic
modern phenomenon. It is a message of
liberty and freedom,no doubt of secular
liberty and freedomthings not very com
mon in the old world ; and yet at the same
time it is a clarion that calls for and pre
pares strife and battle. If the conception of
Right has sanctified the individual or a
unit collectivity, it has also pari passu deve
loped a fissiparous tendency in human
organisation. Society based on or living by
the principle of Right becomes naturally and
inevitably a competitive society. Where
man is regarded as nothing moreand, of
course, nothing lessthan a bundle of rights,
human aggregation is bound to be an exact
image of Darwinian Naturered in tooth
and claw.
But Right is not the only term on which
an ideal or even a decent society can be
based. There is another term which can
118
THREE DEGREES OF SOCIAL ORGANISATION
serve equally well, if not better. X am obvi
ously referring to the conception of duty.
It is an old world conception; it is a concep-
tion particularly familiar to the East. The
Indian term for Right is also the term for
duty adhikara means both. In Europe too,
in more recent times, when after the frustra-
tion of the dream of a new world envisaged
*
by the French Revolution, man was called
upon again to rise and hope, it was Mazzini
who brought forward the new or discarded
principle as a mantra replacing the other
more dangerous one. A hierarchy of duties
was given by him as the pattern of a fulfilled
ideal life. In India, in our days the distinc
tion between the two attitudes was very
strongly insisted upon by the great Viveka-
nanda.
Vivekananda said that if human society
is to be remodelled, one must first of all learn
not to think and act in terms of claims and
rights but in terms of duties and obligations.
u
Fulfil your duties conscientiously, the rights
will take care of themselves; it is such an
attitude that can give man the right
119
THE COMING RACE
poise, the right impetus, the right outlook
with regard to a collective living. If instead
of each one demanding what one considers
as ones dues and consequently scrambling
and battling for them, and most often not
getting them or getting at a ruinous price
what made Arjuna cry, What,shall I do
with all this kingdom if in regaining it I
lose all my kith and kin dear to me ?if,
indeed, instead of claiming ones right, one
were content to know ones duty and do it
as it should be done, then not only there
would be peace and amity upon earth, but
also each one far fromdosing anvthing would
o > o
find miraculously all that one most
needs and must have,the necessary, the
right rights and all.
It might be objected here however that
actually in the history of humanity the con
ception of Duty has been no less pugnacious
than that of Right. In certain ages and
among certain peoples, for example, it was
considered the imperative duty of the
faithful to kill or convert by force or other
wise as
many as possible belonging to other
120
THREE DEGREES OF SOCIAL ORGANISATION
faiths : it was the mission of the good shep
herd to burn the. impious and the heretic.
In recent times, it was a sense of high and
solemn duty that perpetrated what has been
termed
it appears, to purify and preserve the inte
grity of a particular ideological, social or
racial aggregate. But the real name of such
a spirit is not duty but fanaticism. And there
is a considerable difference between the two.
Fanaticism may be defined as duty running
away with itself; but what we are concerned
with here is not the aberration of duty, but
duty proper self-poised.
One might claim also on behalf of the
doctrine of Right that the right kind of Right
brings no harm, it is as already stated another
name for liberty, for the privilege of living
and it includes the obligation to let live.
One can do what one likes provided one
does not infringe on an equal right of others
to do the same. The measure of ones liberty
is equal to the measure of others liberty.
Here is the crux of the question. The
dictum of utilitarian philosophers is a golden
121
TI1E COMING RACE
rule which is easy to formulate but not so
*
to execute. For the line of demarcation
between ones own rights and the equal rights
of others is so undelinablc and variable that
a title suit is inevitable in each case. In
asserting and establishing and even maintain
ing one's rights there is always the possibility
almost the eeitaintyof encroaching upon
(.tillers' rights.
What is required is not therefore an
external delimitation of frontiers between
unit and unit, but an inner outlook of
nature and a poise of character. And this
can be rulti\ated and brought into action bv
*
learning to live b\ the sense of duty. Even
* * #
then, e\en the sense ol dutv, we have to
*
admit, is not enough. For if it leads or is
capable 0} leading into an aberration, wc must
have Mmiething ebe to check and control it,
some other higher and more potent principle.
Indeed, both the conceptions of Duty and
Right belong to the domain of mental ideal,
although one is usually more aggressive and
militant rajasic ) and the other tends to be
more tolerant and considerate ( satlwic ): neither
122
THREE DEGREES OF SOCIAL ORGANISATION
can give an absolute certainty of poise, a
clear guarantee of perfect harmony.
Indian wisdom has found this other, a
fairer terma tcrtium quid ,-the mystic factor,
sought for by so many philosophers on so
many counts. That is the very well-known,
the very familiar termDharma. What is
Dharma then ? How does it accomplish the
miracle which to others seems to have proved
an impossibility ? Dharma is self-law, that
is to say, the law of the Self; it is the rhythm j
and movement of our inner or inmost being,
the spontaneous working out of our truth
conscious nature.
We may perhaps view the three terms
Right, Duty and Dharma as degrees of an
ascending consciousness. Consciousness at
its origin and in its primitive formulation is
dominated by the principle of inertia (tamas
in that state things have mostly an undiffe
rentiated collective existence, they helplessly
move about acted upon by* forces outside them.
A rise in growth and evolution brings about
differentiation, specialisation, organisation.
And this means consciousness of oneself, of
123
THE COMING RACE
the distinct and separate existence of each
and everyone, in other words, self-assertion,
the claim, the right of each individual unit
to be itself, to become itself first and fore
most. It is a necessary development; for it
signifies the growth of self-consciousness in
the units out of a mass unconsciousness or
semi-consciousness. It is the expression of rajas,
the mode of dynamism, of strife and struggle,
it is the corrective of tamos .
In the earliest and primitive society men
lived totally in a mass consciousness. Their
life was a blind obedienceobedience to the
chief the patriarch or pater familias obe
dience to the laws and customs of the collec-
*
tivity to which one belonged. It was called
duty, it was called even dharma, but evidently
on a lower level, in an inferior formulation.
In reality it was more of the nature of the
mechanical functioning of an automaton
than the exercise of conscious will and deli
berate choice, which is the very soul of the
conception of duty.
The conception of Right had to appear
in order to bring out the principle of indivi-
124
THREE DEGREES OF SOCIAL ORGANISATION
duality, of personal freedom and fulfilment.
For, a true healthy collectivity is the associa
tion and organisation of free and self-determi
nate units. The growth of independent
individuality naturally means at first clash
and rivalry, and a violently competitive
society is the result. It is only at this stage
that the conception of duty can fruitfully
come in and develop in man and his society
the mode of sattwa, which is that of light and
wisdom, of toleration and harmony. Then
only a society is sought to be moulded on the
principle of co-ordination and co-opera
tion.
Still, the conception of duty cannot
finally and definitively solve the problem.
It cannot arrive at a perfect harmonisation
of the conflicting claims of individual units;
for, duty, as I have already said, is a child
of mental idealism, and although the mind
can exercise some kind of control over life-
forces, it cannot altogether eliminate the
seeds of conflict that lie imbedded in the
very nature of life. It is for this reason that
there is an element of constraint in duty ; it
125
THE COMING RACE
is. as the poet says, the "stern daughter of the
Voice of God. One has to compel oneself,
one has to use force on oneself to carrv out
0
ones duty there is a feeling somehow of its
being a bitter pill. The cult of duty means
rajas controlled and coerced by saitwa, not the
transcendence of rajas. This leads us to the
high and supreme conception of Dharma,
which is a transcendence of the gunas. Dharma
is not an ideal, a standard or a rule that one
has to obev : it is the law of self-nature that
one inevitably follows, it is easy, spontane
ous, delightful. The path of duty is heroic,
the path of Dharma is of the gods, godly (cf.
Yirabhava and Diryabhava of the Tantras).
The principle of Dharma then inculcates
that each individual must, in order to act
find out his truth ol being, his true soul and
inmost consciousness : one must entirely and
integrally merge oneself into that, be identi
fied with it in such a manner that all acts
and feelings and thoughts, in fact all move
ments, inner and outerspontaneously and
irrepressibly well out of that fount and
origin. The individual souls, being made of
126
THREE DEGREES OF SOCIAL ORGANISATION
one truth-nature in its multiple modalities,
when they live, move and have their being in
its essential law and dynamism, there cannot
but be absolute harmony and perfect syn the
sis between all the units, even as the sun and
moon and stars, as the Veda says, each
following its specific orbit according to its
specific nature, never collide or halt na
me thate na tas thatuh but weave out a faultless
pattern of symphony.
The future society of man is envisaged
as something of like nature. When the
mortal being will have found his immortal
soul and divine self, then each one will be
able to give full and free expression to his
self-nature (swabhava)', then indeed the utmost
sweep of dynamism in each and all will not
cause clash or conflict; on the contrary, each
will increase the other and there will be a
global increment and fulfilment parasparam
bhavayantah. The division and conflict, the
stress and strain that belong to the very
nature of the inferior level of being and con
sciousness will then have been transcended.
It is only thus that a diviner humanity can
127
THE COMING RACE
be born and replace all the other moulds
and types that can never lead to anything,
final and absolutely satisfactory.
128
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