Sri Aurobindo: Yogins like Janaka, Ajatashatru and Kartavirya once more sit on the thrones of the world and govern the nations.  God’s Lila in man moves always in a circle, from Satyayuga to Kali and through Kali to the Satya, from the Age of Gold to the Age of Iron and back again through the Iron to the Gold. In modern language the Satyayuga is a period of the world in which a harmony, stable and sufﬁcient, is created and man realises for a time, under certain conditions and limitations, the perfection of his being. The harmony exists in its nature, by the force of a settled purity; but afterwards it begins to break down and man upholds it, in the Treta, by force of will, individual and collective; it breaks down further and he attempts to uphold it in the Dwapara by intellectual regulation and common consent and rule; then in the Kali it ﬁnally collapses and is destroyed.  But the Kali is not merely evil; in it the necessary conditions are progressively built up for a new Satya, another harmony, a more advanced perfection.


Sri Aurobindo: In the period of the Kali which has passed, still endures in its effects, but is now at an end, there has been a general destruction of the ancient knowledge and culture. Only a few fragments remain to us in the Vedas, Upanishads and other sacred works and in the world’s confused traditions. But the time is at hand for a ﬁrst movement upward, the ﬁrst attempt to build up a new harmony and perfection. That is the reason why so many ideas are abroad for the perfection of human society, knowledge, religion and morals. But the true harmony has not yet been found.


Sri Aurobindo: It is only India that can discover the harmony, because it is only by a change — not a mere readjustment — of man’s present nature that it can be developed, and such a change is not possible except by yoga. The nature of man and of things is at present a discord, a harmony that has got out of tune. The whole heart and action and mind of man must be changed, but from within, not from without, not by political and social institutions, not even by creeds and philosophies, but by realisation of God in ourselves and the world and a remoulding of life by that realisation. This can only be effected by Purnayoga, a yoga not devoted to a particular purpose, even though that purpose be Mukti or Ananda, but to the fulﬁlment of the divine humanity in ourselves and others. For this purpose the practices of Hatha and Raja Yoga are not sufﬁcient and even the Trimarga will not serve; we must go higher and resort to the Adhyatmayoga.


Sri Aurobindo: The principle of Adhyatmayoga is, in knowledge, the realisation of all things that we see or do not see but are aware of, — men, things, ourselves, events, gods, titans, angels, — as one divine Brahman, and in action and attitude, an absolute self-surrender to the Paratpara Purusha, the transcendent, inﬁnite and universal Personality who is at once personal and impersonal, ﬁnite and inﬁnite, self-limiting and illimitable, one and many, and informs with his being not only the Gods above, but man and the worm and the clod below.  The surrender must be complete. Nothing must be reserved, no desire, no demand, no opinion, no idea that this must be, that cannot be, that this should be and that should not be; — all must be given. The heart must be puriﬁed of all desire, the intellect of all self-will, every duality must be renounced, the whole world seen and unseen must be recognised as one supreme expression of concealed Wisdom, Power and Bliss, and the entire being given up, as an engine is passive in the hands of the driver, for the divine Love, Might and perfect Intelligence to do its work and fulﬁl its divine Lila. must be blotted out in order that we may have, as God intends us ultimately to have, the perfect bliss, the perfect calm and knowledge and the perfect activity of the divine existence.


Sri Aurobindo: If this attitude of perfect self-surrender can be even imperfectly established, all necessity of Yogic inevitably ceases. For then God himself in us becomes the sadhaka and the siddha and his divine power works in us, not by our artiﬁcial processes, but by a working of Nature which is perfectly informed, all-searching and infallibly efﬁcient. Even the most powerful Rajayogic, the most developed, the most strenuous meditation, the most ecstatic Bhakti, the most self-denying action, mighty as they are and efﬁcacious, are comparatively weak in their results when set beside this supreme working. For those are all limited to a certain extent by our capacity, but this is illimitable in potency because it is God’s capacity. It is only limited by his will which knows what is best for the world and for each of us in the world and apart from it.


Sri Aurobindo: The ﬁrst process of the yoga is to make the of . Put yourself with all your heart and all your strength into God’s hands. Make no conditions, ask for nothing, not even for in the yoga, for nothing at all except that in you and through you his will may be directly performed. To those who demand from him, God gives what they demand, but to those who give themselves and demand nothing, he gives everything that they might otherwise have asked or needed and in addition he gives himself and the spontaneous boons of his love.  The next process is to stand aside and watch the working of the divine power in yourself.


Sri Aurobindo: This working is often attended with disturbance and trouble in the system, therefore faith is necessary, though perfect faith is not always possible at once; for whatever impurity is in you, harboured openly or secretly lurking, is likely to rise at ﬁrst and be repeated so long as it is not exhaustively swept out, and doubt in this age is an almost universal impurity. But even when doubt assails, stand by and wait for it to pass, availing yourself if possible of the of those who are already advanced on the path, but when that is absent, still holding fast to the principle of the yoga, self-surrender.  When distressed within or assailed from without, remember the words of the Gita, “By giving thyself up in heart and mind to Me, thou shalt cross over all difﬁculties and perils by My grace,” and again,  “Abandon all (all law, rule, means and codes of every kind whether formed by previous habit and belief or imposed from outside) and take refuge in Me alone; I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, — do not grieve.” “I will deliver”, — you have not to be troubled or struggle yourself as if the responsibility were yours or the result depended on your efforts, a mightier than you is busy with the matter.


Sri Aurobindo: Neither disease nor calamity nor the rising of sin and impurity in you should cause any alarm.  Hold fast only to him. “I will deliver thee from all sin and evil.”  But the release does not come by a sudden miracle, it comes by a process of puriﬁcation and these things are a part of the process.  They are like the dust that rises in clouds when a room long uncleaned is at last swept out.


Sri Aurobindo: Though the dust seem to choke you, yet persevere,.  In order to stand aside, you must know yourself as the Purusha who merely watches, consents to God’s work, holds up the Adhar and enjoys the fruits that God gives. The work itself is done by God as Shakti, by Kali, and is offered up by her as a Yajna to Sri Krishna; you are the Yajamana who sees the sacriﬁce done, whose presence is necessary to every movement of the sacriﬁce and who tastes its results. This separation of yourself, this renunciation of the (the idea of yourself as the doer) is easier if you know what the Adhar is. Above the which is the highest function of mind is the higher, or, the seat of the, truth of knowledge, truth of, truth of action, and above


Sri Aurobindo: this ideal faculty is the or cosmic bliss in which the divine part of you dwells. It is of this and this that Christ spoke as the kingdom of God that is within you.  We at present are awake,, in the lower movements but , fast asleep, in the and; we have to awaken these levels of consciousness within us and their awakening and unmixed activity is the of the yoga. For when that happens, we gain the condition of being which is called in the Gita dwelling in God, of which Sri Krishna speaks when he says,, “Verily thou shalt dwell in Me.”  Once it is gained, we are free and blessed and have everything towards which we strive.


Sri Aurobindo: The third process of the yoga is to perceive all things as God.  First, as a rule, in the process of knowledge one comes to see pervading all space and time one divine impersonal Existence, Sad Atman, without movement, distinction or feature, , in which all names and forms seem to stand with a very doubtful or a very minor reality. In this realisation the One may seem to be the only reality and everything else Maya, a purposeless and inexplicable illusion. But afterwards, if you do not stop short and limit yourself by the impersonal realisation, you will come to see the same Atman not only containing and supporting all created things, but informing and ﬁlling them, and eventually you will be able to understand that even the names and forms are Brahman. You will then be able to live more and more in the knowledge which the Upanishads and the Gita hold up as the rule of life; you will see the Self in all existing things and all existing things in the Self, ; you will be aware of all things as Brahman,.


Sri Aurobindo: But the crowning realisation of this yoga is when you become aware of the whole world as the expression, play or Lila of an inﬁnite divine personality, when you see in all, not the impersonal Sad Atman which is the basis of manifest existence, — although you do not lose that knowledge, — but Sri Krishna who at once is, bases and transcends all manifest and unmanifest existence, . For behind the Sad Atman is the silence of the Asat which the Buddhist Nihilists realised as the and beyond that silence is the Paratpara Purusha ( ). It is he who has made this world out of his being and is immanent in and sustains it as the inﬁnite-ﬁnite Ishwara, and, Shiva and Narayana, Sri Krishna the Lilamaya who draws all of us to him by his love, compels all of us by his masteries and plays his eternal play of joy and strength and beauty in the manifold world.  The world is only a play of his being, knowledge and delight, , and. Matter itself, you will one day realise, is not material, it is not substance but form of consciousness,, the result of quality of being perceived by sense-knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: Solidity itself is only a combination of the, and, cohesion and permanence, a state of conscious being, nothing else. Matter, life, mind and what is beyond mind, it is all Sri Krishna the Ananta-guna Brahman playing in the world as the Sachchidananda. When we have this realisation, when we dwell in it securely and permanently, all possibilities of grief and sin, fear, delusion, internal strife and pain are driven puissantly from our being. We realise in our experience the truth of the Upanishads, “He who possesses the delight of the Brahman has no fear from anything in the world,”and that other in the Isha Upanishad, “When all created things become one with a man’s self by his getting the knowledge (), thereafter what bewilderment can he have or what grief, when in all things he sees their oneness?” The whole world then appears to us in a changed aspect, as an ocean of beauty, good, light, bliss, exultant movement on a basis of eternal strength and peace.


Sri Aurobindo: We see all things as, ,,. We become one in soul with all beings,, and, having steadfastly this experience, are able by contact, by oneness, by the reaching out of love, to communicate it to others, so that we become a centre of the radiation of this divine state,, throughout our world.  It is not only in things animate but in things inanimate also that we must see Narayana, experience Shiva, throw our arms around Shakti. When our eyes, that are now blinded by the idea of Matter, open to the supreme Light, we shall ﬁnd that nothing is inanimate, but all contains, expressed or unexpressed, involved or evolved, secret or manifest or in course of manifestation, not only that state of involved consciousness which we call  or Matter, but also life, mind, knowledge, bliss, divine force and being, —,,,,,. In all things the self-conscious personality of God broods and takes the delight of his.


Sri Aurobindo: Flowers, fruits, earth, trees, metals, all things have a joy in them of which you will become aware, because in all Sri Krishna dwells,, having entered into them, not materially or physically, — because there is no such thing, Space and Time being only conventions and arrangements of perception, the perspective in God’s creative Art, — but by, the divine awareness in his transcendent being.  “All this world and every object in this world of Prakriti has been created as a habitation for the Lord.”  Nor is it enough to see him in all things and beings, ; you must see him in all events, actions, thoughts, feelings, in yourself and others, throughout the world. For this realisation two things are necessary: ﬁrst, that you should give up to him the fruit of all your actions, secondly, that you should give up to him the actions themselves. Giving up the fruits of action does not mean that you must have the for the fruits, turn away from them or refuse to act with a given end before you.


Sri Aurobindo: It means that you must act, not because you want this or that to happen or think it necessary that this or that should happen and your action needed to bring it about, but because it is, demanded by the Master of your being and must be done with whatever result God is pleased to give.  You must put aside what you want and wish to know what God wants; distrust what your heart, your passions or your habitual opinions prefer to hold as right and necessary, and passing beyond them, like Arjuna in the Gita, seek only to know what God has set down as right and necessary. Be strong in the faith that whatever is right and necessary will inevitably happen as the result of your due fulﬁlment of the, even if it is not the result that you preferred or expected. The power that governs the world is at least as wise as you and it is not absolutely necessary that you should be consulted or indulged in its management; God is seeing to it.  But what is the?


Sri Aurobindo: It is very difﬁcult to say, —. Most people would translate  by the English word and idea,; if asked to deﬁne it, they would say it is the right and moral action, what people understand by right and morality, what you yourself conscientiously think to be right or else what the good of society, the nation or mankind demands of you. But the man who remains bound by these personal or social ideas of duty, necessary as they are for the ignorant to restrain and tame their clamorous desires or their personal egoism, will be indeed what is called a good man, but he will never attain to the fulﬁlment of this yoga. He will only replace the desire for one kind of fruit by the desire for another kind; he will strive, even more passionately perhaps, for these higher results and be more bitterly grieved by not attaining them. There is no passion so terrible as the passion of the altruist, no egoism so hard to shake as the ﬁxed egoism of virtue, precisely because it is justiﬁed in its own eyes and justiﬁed in the sight of men and cannot see the necessity for yielding to a higher law.


Sri Aurobindo: Even if there is no grieving over the results, there will be the labour and strife of the rajasic, struggling and ﬁghting, getting eager and getting exhausted, not , always under bondage to the.  It was under the domination of these ideas of personal virtue and social duty that Arjuna refused to ﬁght. Against his reasonings Sri Krishna sets two different ideas, one inferior for the use of the man bound but seeking liberation, another superior for the liberated man, the Shastra and surrender not only of the fruits of the work but of the work itself to God. The virtue of the Shastra is that it sets up a standard outside ourselves, different from our personal desires, reasonings, passions and prejudices, outside our selﬁshness and self-will, by living up to which in the right spirit we can not only acquire self-control but by reducing even the sattwic to a minimum prepare ourselves for liberation. In the old days the Shastra was the Vedic Dharma based upon a profound knowledge of man’s psychology and the laws of the world, revealing man to himself and showing him how to live according to his nature; afterwards it was the law of the Smritis which tried to do the same thing more roughly by classifying men according to the general classes of which the Vedas speak, the; today it is little more than blind mechanical custom and habitual social observance, a thing not sattwic but tamasic, not a preparatory discipline for liberation, but a mere bondage.


Sri Aurobindo: Even the highest Shastra can be misused for the purposes of egoism, the egoism of virtue and the egoism of prejudice and personal opinion. At its best it is a great means towards the preparation of liberation. It is. But we must not be satisﬁed with mere preparation, we must, as soon as our eyes are opened, hasten on to actual freedom. The liberated soul and the sadhak of liberation who has surrendered even his actions to God, gets beyond the highest Shastra, .


Sri Aurobindo: The best foundation for the surrender of action is the realisation that Prakriti is doing all our actions at God’s command and God through our determines the action. From that moment the action belongs to him, it is not yours nor the responsibility yours; there is indeed no responsibility, no bondage of Karma, for God has no responsibility, but is in every way master and free. Our actions become not only like the Shastric man’s , regulated by nature and therefore, but the itself is controlled like a machine by God. It is not easy for us, full as we are of the Sanskaras of ignorance, to arrive at this stage of knowledge, but there are three stages by which it can be rapidly done. The ﬁrst is to live in the spirit of the, —


Sri Aurobindo: “According as I am appointed by Thee, O Hrishikesha! seated in my heart, so I act.” When this has entered into your daily life, it will be easier to accomplish the second stage and live in the knowledge of the Gita, “God stands in the heart of all beings, whirling round all, as on a wheel, by the Maya of the three.” You will then be able to perceive the action of the three in you and watch the machinery at its work, no longer saying,, I do, but , it is merely the that work. One great difﬁculty in these stages, especially before you can distinguish the action of the, is the perception of the impurity of the , the haunting idea of sin and virtue. You must always remember that, since you have put yourself in God’s hands, he will work out the impurities and you have only to be careful, as you cannot be attached either to or, sin or virtue.


Sri Aurobindo: For he has repeatedly given the, the assurance of safety. “,” he says in the Gita, “ , he who is devoted to Me cannot perish.”  The third stage comes out of the second, by full realisation of God, or of itself by the grace of God. Not only will the Purusha stand apart and be, beyond the three, but the Prakriti, though using the, will be free from their bondage. Sattwa, as we know it, will disappear into pure and, and the nature will live in a pure, free and inﬁnite self-existing illumination.


Sri Aurobindo: Tamas, as we know it, will disappear into pure or, and the nature will take its ﬁrm stand on an inﬁnite and ineffable rest and peace. Rajas, as we know it, will disappear into pure, and the nature will ﬂow in a free and inﬁnite ocean of divine force. On that foundation of calm and in that heaven of light, action will occur as the spontaneous objective expression of God’s knowledge, which is one with God’s will. This is the condition of inﬁnity,, in which this struggle of bound and limited sattwa, rajas and tamas is replaced by a mighty harmony of free, and. And even before you reach that condition, on the way to it, you will ﬁnd that some mighty force not your own, not situated in your body though possessing and occupying it, is thinking for you, feeling for you, acting for you, your very body as well as your mind and heart being moved by that force and not by yourself.


Sri Aurobindo: You will enjoy that thought, feeling, action, but will neither possess nor be possessed by it, —, your actions will disappear without leaving in you mark or trace, as a wave disappears from the surface of the sea, as water falls from the lotus leaf. Your mind, heart, body will not be yours, but God’s; you yourself will be only a centre of being, knowledge and bliss through which God works in that Adhar. This is the condition in which one is utterly, given up in all his conscious being to God, in which there is utter fulﬁlment of the description, “One whose state of being is free from egoism and whose understanding receives no stain.” This is the surrender of action to which Sri Krishna gives so much importance.  “Laying down all actions upon Me, with thy whole conscious being in, become free from desire and the sense of belongings; ﬁght, let the fever of thy soul pass from thee.”


Sri Aurobindo: For this great and complete liberation it is necessary that you should be, and, without the longing and reaching after things, free from the of the dualities and free from egoism; for these three things are the chief enemies of self-surrender. If you are, you can be, but hardly otherwise, for every creates in the mind by the very nature of the mind some form of, like and dislike, attraction and repulsion, whether they are the lowest dualities that appeal to the mind through the body, hunger and thirst, heat and cold, physical pleasure and pain, or the middle sorts that appeal to it through the feelings and desires, success and failure, victory and defeat, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and displeasure, joy and grief, hate and love, or the highest which appeal to the mind through the discriminating, virtue and sin, reason and unreason, error and truth. These things can only be put under our feet by complete knowledge, the knowledge that sees God in all things and thus comes to understand the relations of things to each other in his great cosmic purpose, by complete Bhakti which accepts all things with joy, — thus abolishing the, — because they come from the Beloved or by perfect action offering up all works as a sacriﬁce to God with an entire indifference to these dualities of success, failure, honour, disgrace, etc., which usually pursue all Karma.  Such knowledge, such Bhakti, such Karma come inevitably as the eventual result of the of self-surrender and the practice of it.  But it is that by making the relation and effect of things on ourselves or on things connected with us the standard of life, makes the a chain for our bondage.


Sri Aurobindo: in its action on our life and sadhana will be seen to be of three kinds, rajasic, tamasic and sattwic. Rajas binds by desire and the craving in the nature for occupation and activity, it is always reaching after action and the fruit of action; it is in order that we may be free from the rajasic that we have the command, “Do not do works from the desire of fruit,” , and the command to give up our actions to God. Tamas binds by weakness and the craving in the nature for ease and inaction; it is always sinking into idleness, depression, confusion of mind, fear, disappointment, despondency and despair; it is in order that we may get rid of the tamasic  that we are given the command, “Let there be no attachment to inaction,” and the instruction to pursue the yoga always, whether we seem to advance or seem to be standing still or seem even to be going back, always with a calm faith and patient and cheerful perseverance,. Sattwa binds by knowledge and pleasure; it is always attaching itself to some imperfect realisation, to the idea of one’s own virtue, the correctness of one’s own opinions and principles or at its highest, as in the case of Arjuna, opposing some personal idea of altruism, justice or virtue against the surrender of our will that God demands of us. It is for the escape from the sattwic  that we have to pass beyond the attachment to the duality of virtue and sin,.


Sri Aurobindo: Each of the working on the has its particular danger for the sadhak who has made the of self-surrender, but has not yet attained to the full accomplishment of the surrender. The danger of the is when the sadhak is assailed by the pride that thinks, “I am a great sadhak, I have advanced so far, I am a great instrument in God’s hands,” and similar ideas, or when he attaches himself to the work as God’s work which must be carried out, putting himself into it and troubling himself about it as if he had more interest in God’s work than God himself and could manage it better. Many, while they are acting all the while in the spirit of rajasic, persuade themselves that God is working through them and they have no part in the action. This is because they are satisﬁed with the mere intellectual assent to the idea without waiting for the whole system and life to be full of it. A continual remembrance of God in others and renunciation of individual eagerness () are needed and a careful watching of our inner activities until God by the full light of self-knowledge,, dispels all further chance of self-delusion.


Sri Aurobindo: The danger of is twofold, ﬁrst, when the Purusha thinks, identifying himself with the tamas in him, “I am weak, sinful, miserable, ignorant, good-for-nothing, inferior to this man and inferior to that man,, what will God do through me?” — as if God were limited by the temporary capacities or incapacities of his instruments and it were not true that he can make the dumb to talk and the lame to cross the hills,, — and again when the sadhak tastes the relief, the tremendous relief of a negative and, feeling himself delivered from all troubles and in possession of peace, turns away from life and action and becomes attached to the peace and ease of inaction.  Remember always that you too are Brahman and the divine Shakti is working in you; reach out always to the realisation of God’s omnipotence and his delight in the Lila. He bids Arjuna work, for keeping the world together, for he does not wish the world to sink back into Prakriti, but insists on your acting as he acts, “These worlds would be overpowered by tamas and sink into Prakriti if I did not do actions.” To be attached to inaction is to give up our action not to God but to our tamasic.  The danger of the is when the sadhak becomes attached to any one-sided conclusion of his reason, to some particular or movement of the sadhana, to the joy of any particular of the yoga, perhaps the sense of purity or the possession of some particular power or the Ananda of the contact with God or the sense of freedom and hungers after it


Sri Aurobindo: , becomes attached to that only and would have nothing else.  Remember that the yoga is not for yourself; for these things, though they are part of the, are not the object of the, for you have decided at the beginning to make no claim upon God but take what he gives you freely and, as for the Ananda, the selﬂess soul will even forego the joy of God’s presence, when that is God’s will. You must be free even from the highest sattwic , even from the subtle ignorance of, the desire of liberation, and take all joy and delight without attachment. You will then be the or perfect man of the Gita.  These then are the processes of the yoga, (1) the of , (2) the standing apart from the Adhar by selfknowledge, (3) the vision of God everywhere and in all things and in all happenings, the surrender of the fruits of action and action itself to God, and the freedom thereby from ignorance, from, from the, from desire, so that you are ,,, full of Ananda, pure, free, perfect and blissful in your being.


Sri Aurobindo: But the processes will be worked out, once the is made, by God’s Shakti, by a mighty process of Nature. All that is indispensable on your part is the and . is consent, you must give a temporary consent to the movements of the yoga, to all that happens inside or outside you as part of the circumstances of the sadhana, not exulting at the good, not fretting at the evil, not struggling in your heart to keep the one or get rid of the other, but always keeping in mind and giving a permanent assent to that which has to be ﬁnally effected. The temporary consent is passive submission to the methods and not positive acceptance of the results. The permanent consent is an anticipatory acceptance of the results, a sort of effortless and desireless exercise of will.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the constant exercise of this desireless will, an intent aspiration and constant remembrance of the path and its goal which are the and needed, the necessary steadfastness and zeal of the sadhak; or excited, passionate eagerness is more intense, but less widely powerful, and it is disturbing and exhausting, giving intense pleasure and pain in the pursuit but not so vast a bliss in the acquisition. The followers of this path must be like the men of the early yugas,, the great word of praise in the Upanishads. In the remembrance, the or , you must be, free from negligence. It is by the loss of the owing to the rush and onset of the that the yogin becomes, falls from his ﬁrm seat, wanders from his path. But you need not be distressed when the comes and the state of fall or clouded condition seems to persist,


Sri Aurobindo: for there is no fear for you of a permanent fall since God himself has taken entire charge of you and if you stumble, it is because it is best for you to stumble, as a child by frequent stumbling and falling learns to walk. The necessity of disappears when you can replace the memory of the yoga and its objects by the continual remembrance of God in all things and happenings, the of the Gita. For those who can make the full surrender from the beginning there is no question; their path is utterly swift and easy.  It is said in the “Sanatsujatiya” that four things are necessary for —,, and — the teaching of the path, zeal in following it, the Guru and time. Your path is that which I am pointing out, the needed is this and this, the Guru is God himself and for the rest only time is needed.


Sri Aurobindo: That God himself is the Guru, you will ﬁnd when knowledge comes to you; you will see how every little circumstance within you and without you has been subtly planned and brought about by inﬁnite wisdom to carry out the natural process of the yoga, how the internal and external movements are arranged and brought together to work on each other, so as to work out the imperfection and work in the perfection.  An almighty love and wisdom are at work for your uplifting.  Therefore never be troubled by the time that is being taken, even if it seems very long, but when imperfections and obstructions arise, be,, have the, and leave God to do the rest. Time is necessary. It is a tremendous work that is being done in you, the alteration of your whole human nature into a divine nature, the crowding of centuries of evolution into a few years.


Sri Aurobindo: You ought not to grudge the time. There are other paths that offer more immediate results or at any rate, by offering you some deﬁnite you can work at yourself, give your the satisfaction of feeling that you are doing something, so many more today, so much longer a time for the, so many more repetitions of the, so much done, so much deﬁnite progress marked. But once you have chosen this path, you must cleave to it. Those are human methods, not the way that the inﬁnite Shakti works, which moves silently, sometimes imperceptibly to its goal, advances here, seems to pause there, then mightily and triumphantly reveals the grandiose thing that it has done. Artiﬁcial paths are like canals hewn by the intelligence of man; you travel easily, safely, surely, but from one given place to another.


Sri Aurobindo: This path is the broad and trackless ocean by which you can travel widely to all parts of the world and are admitted to the freedom of the inﬁnite. All that you need are the ship, the steering-wheel, the compass, the motive-power and a skilful captain. Your ship is the Brahmavidya, faith is your steering-wheel, self-surrender your compass, the motive-power is she who makes, directs and destroys the worlds at God’s command and God himself is your captain. But he has his own way of working and his own time for everything. Watch his way and wait for his time.


Sri Aurobindo: Understand also the importance of accepting the Shastra and submitting to the Guru and do not do like the Europeans who insist on the freedom of the individual intellect to follow its own fancies and preferences which it calls reasonings, even before it is trained to discern or ﬁt to reason. It is much the fashion nowadays to indulge in metaphysical discussions and philosophical subtleties about Maya and Adwaita and put them in the forefront, making them take the place of spiritual experience. Do not follow that fashion or confuse yourself and waste time on the way by questionings which will be amply and luminously answered when the divine knowledge of the awakes in you. Metaphysical knowledge has its place, but as a handmaid to spiritual experience, showing it the way sometimes but much more dependent on it and living upon its bounty. By itself it is mere, a dry and barren thing and more often a stumbling-block than a help.


Sri Aurobindo: Having accepted this path, follow its Shastra without unnecessary doubt and questioning, keeping the mind plastic to the light of the higher knowledge, gripping ﬁrmly what is experienced, waiting for light where things are dark to you, taking without pride what help you can from the living guides who have already trod the path, always patient, never hastening to narrow conclusions, but waiting for a more complete experience and a fuller light, relying on the Jagadguru who helps you from within.  It is necessary to say something about the Mayavada and the modern teachings about the Adwaita because they are much in the air at the present moment and, penetrated with ideas from European rationalism and agnosticism for which Shankara would have been astonished to ﬁnd himself made responsible, perplex many minds. Remember that one-sided philosophies are always a partial statement of truth. The world, as God has made it, is not a rigid exercise in logic but, like a strain of music, an inﬁnite harmony of many diversities, and his own existence, being free and absolute, cannot be logically deﬁned. Just as the best religion is that which admits the truth of all religions, so the best philosophy is that which admits the truth of all philosophies and gives each its right place.


Sri Aurobindo: Maya is one realisation, an important one which Shankara overstressed because it was most vivid to his own experience. For yourself leave the word for subordinate use and ﬁx rather on the idea of Lila, a deeper and more penetrating word than Maya. Lila includes the idea of Maya and exceeds it; nor has it that association of the vanity of all things, useless to you who have elected to remain and play with Sri Krishna in Mathura and Brindavan.  God is one but he is not bounded by his unity. We see him here as one who is always manifesting as many, not because he cannot help it, but because he so wills, and outside manifestation he is, indeﬁnable, and cannot be described as either one or many.


Sri Aurobindo: That is what the Upanishads and other sacred books consistently teach; he is, One and there is no other, but also and consequently he is “this man, yonder woman, that blue-winged bird, this scarlet-eyed.” He is, he is; the Jiva is he. “I am the tree,” says Sri Krishna in the Gita, “I am death, I am Agni Vaishwanara, I am the heat that digests food, I am Vyasa, I am Vasudeva, I am Arjuna.” All that is the play of his in his inﬁnite being, his manifestations, and therefore all are real. Maya means nothing more than the freedom of Brahman from the circumstances through which he expresses himself.


Sri Aurobindo: He is in no way limited by that which we see or think about him. That is the Maya from which we must escape, the Maya of ignorance which takes things as separately existent and not God, not, the illimitable for the really limited, the free for the bound. Do you remember the story of Sri Krishna and the Gopis, how Narada found him differently occupied in each house to which he went, present to each Gopi in a different body, yet always the same Sri Krishna? Apart from the devotional meaning of the story, which you know, it is a good image of his World-Lila. He is, everyone, each Purusha with his apparently different Prakriti and action is he, and yet at the same time he is the Purushottama who is with Radha, the Para Prakriti, and can withdraw all these into himself when he wills and put them out again when he wills.


Sri Aurobindo: From one point of view they are one with him, from another one yet different, from yet another always different because they always exist, latent in him or expressed at his pleasure. There is no proﬁt in disputing about these standpoints. Wait until you see God and know yourself and him and then debate and discussion will be unnecessary.  The goal marked out for us is not to speculate about these things, but to experience them. The call upon us is to grow into the image of God, to dwell in him and with him and be a channel of his joy and might and an instrument of his works.


Sri Aurobindo: Puriﬁed from all that is, transﬁgured in soul by his touch, we have to act in the world as dynamos of that divine electricity and send it thrilling and radiating through mankind, so that wherever one of us stands, hundreds around may become full of his light and force, full of God and full of Ananda. Churches, Orders, theologies, philosophies have failed to save mankind because they have busied themselves with intellectual creeds, dogmas, rites and institutions, with and, as if these could save mankind, and have neglected the one thing needful, the power and puriﬁcation of the soul. We must go back to the one thing needful, take up again Christ’s gospel of the purity and perfection of mankind, Mahomed’s gospel of perfect submission, self-surrender and servitude to God, Chaitanya’s gospel of the perfect love and joy of God in man, Ramakrishna’s gospel of the unity of all religions and the divinity of God in man, and, gathering all these streams into one mighty river, one purifying and redeeming Ganges, pour it over the death-in-life of a materialistic humanity as Bhagirath led down the Ganges and ﬂooded with it the ashes of his fathers, so that they may be a resurrection of the soul in mankind and the Satyayuga for a while return to the world. Nor is this the whole object of the Lila or the Yoga; the reason for which the Avatars descend is to raise up man again and again, developing in him a higher and ever higher humanity, a greater and yet greater development of divine being, bringing more and more of heaven again and again upon the earth until our toil is done, our work accomplished and Sachchidananda fulﬁlled in all even here, even in this material universe. Small is his work, even if he succeeds, who labours for his own salvation or the salvation of a few; inﬁnitely great is his, even if he fail or succeed only partially or for a season, who lives only to bring about peace of soul, joy, purity and perfection among all mankind.


Sri Aurobindo: APPENDIX  There is no need to put “the” before “quality” — in English that would alter the sense. Matter is not regarded in this passage as a quality of being perceived by sense; I don’t think that would have any meaning. It is regarded as a result of a certain power and action of consciousness which presents forms of itself to sense perception and it is this quality of sense-perceivedness, so to speak, that gives them the appearance of Matter, i.e. of a certain kind of substantiality inherent in themselves — but in fact they are not self-existent substantial objects but forms of consciousness. The point is that there is no such thing as the self-existent Matter posited by nineteenth-century Science.


Sri Aurobindo: Chitta is ordinarily used for the mental consciousness in general, thought, feeling, etc. taken together with a stress now on one side or another, sometimes on the feelings as in, sometimes on the thought-mind — that is why I translated it [on p. 75 ()] “heart and mind” in its wider sense. Chetas can be used in the same way, but it has a different shade of sense, properly speaking, and can include also the movements of the soul, covering the whole consciousness even; [on p. 82]  I take it in its most general sense. The translation is not meant to be literal but to render the thought in the line in its fullness. practically amounts to what in English we would describe as a spiritual consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a ﬁgure meaning to comprehend in our consciousness with love and Ananda.  Nature here means the parts of Prakriti in the human being: as it is the condition of the Prakriti that changes with shifting of the gunas and it is this condition of the Prakriti that will become illumined by the transformation of into.   No. It is in a more general sense the maintenance of the world order which may be a developing, not necessarily a stationary one, an order spiritual, moral etc. and not merely a social order.


Sri Aurobindo: HE “ARYA”, born by a coincidence which might well have been entirely disastrous to its existence in the very month when there broke out the greatest catastrophe that has overtaken the modern world, has yet, though carried on under serious difﬁculties, completed its ﬁrst year. We have been obliged unfortunately to discontinue the French edition from February last as our director M. Paul Richard was then recalled to join his class of the Reserve Army in France. We have to thank the indulgence of our French subscribers who have consented to receive the English edition in its stead.  We have been obliged in our ﬁrst year for reasons we shall indicate in the preface to our August number to devote the Review almost entirely to high philosophy and severe and difﬁcult thinking. But the object we had in view is now fulﬁlled and we recognise that we have no right to continue to subject our readers to the severe strain of almost 64 pages of such strenuous intellectual labour.


Sri Aurobindo: We shall therefore in the next year devote a greater part of our space to articles on less profound subjects written in a more popular style. Needless to say, our matter will always fall within the deﬁnition of a philosophical Review and centre around the fundamental thought which the “Arya” represents.  We shall continue the, the and the; but we intend to replace the  by a translation of the Hymns of the Atris (the ﬁfth Mandala of the Rig Veda) so conceived as to make the sense of the Vedic chants at once and easily intelligible without the aid of a  Arya commentary to the general reader. The same circumstance which obliged us to discontinue the French edition, will also prevent us from continuing the. Happily, we have been able to bring it to a point where the writer’s central idea appears, the new creation of our world by redeeming Love, — a ﬁtting point for the faith and reason of man to pause upon at the moment of the terrible ordeal which that world is now undergoing.


Sri Aurobindo: Without the divine Will which knows best what to use and what to throw aside, no human work can come to the completion hoped for by our limited vision. To that Will we entrust the continuance and the result of our labours and we conclude the ﬁrst year of the “Arya” with the aspiration that the second may see the speedy and fortunate issue of the great world-convulsion which still pursues us and that by the Power which brings always the greatest possible good out of apparent evil there may emerge from this disastrous but long-foreseen collapse of the old order a new and better marked by the triumph of higher principles of love, wisdom and unity and a sensible advance of the race towards our ultimate goal, — the conscious oneness of the Soul in humanity and the divinity of man.   APPENDIX


Sri Aurobindo: The “Arya” having completed its ﬁrst year and survived the ﬁrst perils of infancy, now offers itself a second time to the decisions of Time and the mind of the hour. We think it necessary to open our new year with a succinct statement of the idea this Review is intended to serve and the aim which it holds before it. For our Review has been conceived neither as a mirror of the ﬂeeting interests and surface thoughts of the period we live in, nor as the mouthpiece of a sect, school or already organised way of thinking. Its object is to feel out for the thought of the future, to help in shaping its foundations and to link it to the best and most vital thought of the past.


Sri Aurobindo: Our ﬁrst preoccupation in the “Arya” has therefore been with the deepest thought that we could command on the philosophical foundations of the problem; and we have been so profoundly convinced that without this basis nothing we could say would have any real, solid and permanent value that we have perhaps given too great a space to difﬁcult and abstruse thought whether in the shaping of our own ideas or in the study and restatement of the ancient Eastern knowledge.  Our excuse is that we come forward as ourselves learners and students and must begin at the roots to proceed forward safely.   Arya  Our second preoccupation has been with the psychological disciplines of Yoga; but here also we have been obliged to concern ourselves with a deep study of the principles underlying the methods rather than with a popular statement of methods and disciplines. But without this previous study of principles the statement of methods would have been unsound and not really helpful.


Sri Aurobindo: There are no short cuts to an integral perfection.  Other and more popular sides of our work we have been obliged hitherto to neglect; but now that we have advanced a little in the more difﬁcult part of it, we hope to turn increasingly to these more obvious and general subjects of interest. And if our readers are still willing to follow us, their recompense will be a more clear, sound and solid thought on these subjects than we could otherwise have given them.  E CLOSE this month the fourth year of the “Arya”, and bring to a conclusion at the same time the “Psychology of Social Development”, the “Ideal of Human Unity” and the ﬁrst series of the “Essays on the Gita”. A few more chapters will complete the “Life Divine”.


Sri Aurobindo: We are therefore well in view of the completion of the ﬁrst part of the work which we had proposed to ourselves in starting this philosophical monthly, and we take the opportunity to say a few words upon the principle which has governed our writing and which the difﬁculty of a serial exposition on several lines at a time, scattering and breaking up the total impression, may have prevented some of our readers from grasping in its entirety.  We had not in view at any time a review or magazine in the ordinary sense of the word, that is to say, a popular presentation or criticism of current information and current thought on philosophical questions. Nor was it, as in some philosophical and religious magazines in India, the restatement of an existing school or position of philosophical thought cut out in its lines and needing only to be popularised and supported. Our idea was the thinking out of a synthetic philosophy which might be a contribution to the thought of the new age that is coming upon us. We start from the idea that humanity is moving to a great change of its life which will even lead to a new life of the race, — in all countries where men think, there is now in various forms that idea and that hope, — and our aim has been to search for the spiritual, religious and other truth which can enlighten and guide the race in this movement and endeavour.


Sri Aurobindo: The spiritual experience and the general truths on which such an attempt could be based, were already present to us, otherwise we should have had no right to make the endeavour at all; but the complete intellectual statement of them and their results and  Arya issues had to be found. This meant a continuous thinking, a high and subtle and difﬁcult thinking on several lines, and this strain, which we had to impose on ourselves, we were obliged to impose also on our readers. This too is the reason why we have adopted the serial form which in a subject like philosophy has its very obvious disadvantages, but was the only one possible.  Our original intention was to approach the synthesis from the starting-point of the two lines of culture which divide human thought and are now meeting at its apex, the knowledge of the West and the knowledge of the East; but owing to the exigencies of the war this could not be fulﬁlled. The “Arya” except for one unﬁnished series has been an approach to the highest reconciling truth from the point of view of the Indian mentality and Indian spiritual experience, and Western knowledge has been viewed from that standpoint.


Sri Aurobindo: Here the main idea which has governed our writing, was imposed on us by the very conditions of the problem. All philosophy is concerned with the relations between two things, the fundamental truth of existence and the forms in which existence presents itself to our experience. The deepest experience shows that the fundamental truth is truth of the Spirit; the other is the truth of life, truth of form and shaping force and living idea and action. Here the West and East have followed divergent lines. The West has laid most emphasis on truth of life and for a time come to stake its whole existence upon truth of life alone, to deny the existence of spirit or to relegate it to the domain of the unknown and unknowable; from that exaggeration it is now beginning to return.


Sri Aurobindo: The East has laid most emphasis on truth of the Spirit and for a time came, at least in India, to stake its whole existence upon that truth alone, to neglect the possibilities of life or to limit it to a narrow development or a ﬁxed status; the East too is beginning to return from this exaggeration. The West is reawaking to the truth of the Spirit and the spiritual possibilities of life, the East is reawaking to the truth of Life and tends towards a new application to it of its spiritual knowledge. Our view is that the antinomy created between them is an unreal one. Spirit being the fundamental truth of existence, life can be only its manifestation; Spirit must be not only the origin of life but its basis, its pervading reality and its highest and total result. But the forms of life as they appear to us are at once its disguises and its instruments of selfmanifestation.


Sri Aurobindo: Man has to grow in knowledge till they cease to be disguises and grow in spiritual power and quality till they become in him its perfect instruments. To grow into the fullness of the divine is the true law of human life and to shape his earthly existence into its image is the meaning of his evolution. This is the fundamental tenet of the philosophy of the “Arya”.  This truth had to be worked out ﬁrst of all from the metaphysical point of view; for in philosophy metaphysical truth is the nucleus of the rest, it is the statement of the last and most general truths on which all the others depend or in which they are gathered up. Therefore we gave the ﬁrst place to the “Life Divine”.


Sri Aurobindo: Here we start from the Vedantic position, its ideas of the Self and mind and life, of Sachchidananda and the world, of Knowledge and Ignorance, of rebirth and the Spirit. But Vedanta is popularly supposed to be a denial of life, and this is no doubt a dominant trend it has taken. Though starting from the original truth that all is the Brahman, the Self, it has insisted in the end that the world is simply not-Brahman, not-Self; it has ended in a paradox. We have attempted on the contrary to establish from its data a comprehensive Adwaita. We have shown that mind and life and matter are derivations from the Self through a spiritual mind or supermind which is the real support of cosmic existence and by developing mind into that, man can arrive at the real truth of the spirit in the world and the real truth and highest law of life.


Sri Aurobindo: The Self is Sachchidananda and there is no incurable antinomy between that and the world; only we see the world through the eyes of the Ignorance and we have to see it through the eyes of the Knowledge. Our ignorance itself is only knowledge developing out of its involution in the apparent nescience of Matter and on its way to a return to its conscious integrality. To accomplish that return and manifest the spiritual life in the human existence is the opportunity given by the successions of rebirth. We accept the truth of evolution, not so much in the physical form given to it by the West as  Arya in its philosophical truth, the involution of life and mind and spirit here in matter and their progressive manifestation. At the summit of this evolution is the spiritual life, the life divine.


Sri Aurobindo: It was necessary to show that these truths were not inconsistent with the old Vedantic truth, therefore we included explanations from this point of view of the Veda, two of the Upanishads and the Gita. But the Veda has been obscured by the ritualists and the scholiasts. Therefore we showed in a series of articles, initially only as yet, the way of writing of the Vedic mystics, their system of symbols and the truths they ﬁgure. Among the Upanishads we took the Isha and the Kena; to be full we should have added the Taittiriya, but it is a long one and for it we had no space. The Gita we are treating as a powerful application of truth of spirit to the largest and most difﬁcult part of the truth of life, to action, and a way by which action can lead us to birth into the Spirit and can be harmonised with the spiritual life.


Sri Aurobindo: Truth of philosophy is of a merely theoretical value unless it can be lived, and we have therefore tried in the “Synthesis of Yoga” to arrive at a synthetical view of the principles and methods of the various lines of spiritual self-discipline and the way in which they can lead to an integral divine life in the human existence. But this is an individual self-development, and therefore it was necessary to show too how our ideal can work out in the social life of mankind. In the “Psychology of Social Development” we have indicated how these truths affect the evolution of human society.  In the “Ideal of Human Unity” we have taken the present trend of mankind towards a closer uniﬁcation and tried to appreciate its tendencies and show what is wanting to them in order that real human unity may be achieved.  Our plan has compelled us to deal mainly with ﬁrst principles and work them out in their fullness.


Sri Aurobindo: In future we do not propose to start any other long series of this kind, but to have more short articles with a broader, more direct and, as far as possible, more popular treatment. We shall also permit ourselves a freer range and diversity, so far as that is permissible in a philosophical review.  DEALS are truths that have not yet effected themselves for man, the realities of a higher plane of existence which have yet to fulﬁl themselves on this lower plane of life and matter, our present ﬁeld of operation. To the pragmatical intellect which takes its stand upon the ever-changing present, ideals are not truths, not realities, they are at most potentialities of future truth and only become real when they are visible in the external fact as work of force accomplished. But to the mind which is able to draw back from the ﬂux of force in the material universe, to the consciousness which is not imprisoned in its own workings or carried along in their ﬂood but is able to envelop, hold and comprehend them, to the soul that is not merely the subject and instrument of the world-force but can reﬂect something of that Master-Consciousness which controls and uses it, the ideal present to its inner vision is a greater reality than the changing fact obvious to its outer senses.


Sri Aurobindo: The Idea is not a reﬂection of the external fact which it so much exceeds; rather the fact is only a partial reﬂection of the Idea which has created it.  Certainly, ideals are not the ultimate Reality, for that is too high and vast for any ideal to envisage; they are aspects of it thrown out in the world-consciousness as a basis for the workings of the world-power. But they are primary, the actual workings secondary. They are nearer to the Reality and therefore always more real, forcible and complete than the facts which are their partial reﬂection. Reﬂections themselves of the Real, they again are reﬂected in the more concrete workings of our existence.


Sri Aurobindo: The human intellect in proportion as it limits itself by the phenomena of self-realising Force fails to catch the creative Idea until after we have seen the external fact it has created; but this order of our sense-enslaved consciousness is not the real order of the universe. God pre-exists before the world can come into being, but to our experience in which the senses act ﬁrst and only then the ﬁner workings of consciousness, the world seems to come ﬁrst and God to emerge out of it, so much so that it costs us an effort to rise out of the mechanical, pluralistic and pantheistic conceptions of Him to a truer and higher idea of the Divine Reality. That which to us is the ultimate, is in truth the primary reality. So too the Idea which seems to us to rise out of the fact, really precedes it and out of it the fact has arisen. Our vulgar contrast of the ideal and the real is therefore a sensuous error, for that which we call real is only a phenomenon of force working out something that stands behind the phenomenon and that is pre-existent and greater than it.


Sri Aurobindo: The Real, the Idea, the phenomenon, this is the true order of the creative Divinity.  The pragmatic intellect is only sure of a thing when it ﬁnds it realised in Power; therefore it has a certain contempt for the ideal, for the vision, because it drives always at execution and material realisation. But Power is not the only term of the Godhead; Knowledge is the elder sister of Power: Force and Consciousness are twin aspects of being both in the eternal foundation of things and in their evolutionary realisation. The idea is the realisation of a truth in Consciousness as the fact is its realisation in Power, both indispensable, both justiﬁed in themselves and in each other, neither warranted in ignoring or despising its complement. For the idealist and visionary to despise the pragmatist or for the pragmatist to depreciate the idealist and visionary is a deplorable result of our intellectual limitations and the mutual misunderstandings by which the arrogance of our imperfect temperament and mentality shuts itself out from perfection.


Sri Aurobindo: It is as if we were to think that God the Seer and Knower must despise God the Master of works and energies or the Lord of action and sacriﬁce ignore the divine Witness and Originator. But these two are one and the division in us a limitation that mankind has yet to conquer.  The human being advances in proportion as he becomes more and more capable of knowing before he realises in action. This is indeed the order of evolution. It begins with a material working in which the Prakriti, the executive Power, is veiled by its works, by the facts it produces, and itself veils the consciousness which originates and supports all its workings.


Sri Aurobindo: In Life the force emerges and becomes vibrant in the very surface of its works; last, in Mind the underlying consciousness reveals itself. So too man is at ﬁrst subject in his mentality to the facts which his senses envisage, cannot go behind and beyond them, knows only the impressions they make on his receptive mind. The animal is executive, not creative; a passive tool of Matter and Life he does not seek in his thought and will to react upon and use them: the human being too in his less developed state is executive rather than creative; he limits his view to the present and to his environment, works so as to live from day to day, accepts what he is without reaching forward in thought to what he may be, has no ideals. In proportion as he goes beyond the fact and seeks to anticipate Nature, to catch the ideas and principles behind her workings and ﬁnally to seize the idea that is not yet realised in fact and himself preside over its execution, he becomes originative and creative and no longer merely executive. He begins thus his passage from subjection to mastery.


Sri Aurobindo: In thus progressing humanity falls apart after its fashion into classes; it divides itself between the practical man and the idealist and makes numerous compromises between the two extremes. In reality the division is artiﬁcial; for every man who does anything in the world, works by virtue of an idea and in the force given to him by ideals, either his own or others’ ideals, which he may or may not recognise but in whose absence nevertheless he would be impotent to move a single step. The smaller the ideals, the fewer they are and the less recognised and insisted on, the less also is the work done and the progress realised; on the other hand, when ideals enlarge themselves, when they become forceful, widely recognised, when different ideals enter into the ﬁeld, clash and communicate their thought and force to each other, then the race rises to its great periods of activity and creation. And it is when the Ideal arisen, vehement, energetic, refuses to be debarred from possession and throws itself with all the gigantic force of the higher planes of existence on this reluctant and rebellious stuff of life and matter to conquer it that we have the great eras which change the world by carrying out the potentialities of several centuries in the action of a few decades.  Therefore wherever and whenever the mere practical man abounds and excludes or discourages by his domination the idealist, there is the least work and the least valuable work done in that age or country for humanity; at most some preliminary spade-work, some labour of conservation and hardly perceptible motion, some repression of creative energies preparing for a great future outburst.


Sri Aurobindo: On the other hand, when the idealist is liberated, when the visionary abounds, the executive worker also is uplifted, ﬁnds at once an orientation and tenfold energy and accomplishes things which he would otherwise have rejected as a dream and chimera, which to his ordinary capacity would be impossible and which often leave the world wondering how work so great could have been done by men who were in themselves so little. The union of the great idealist with the great executive personality who receives and obeys the idea is always the sign of a coming realisation which will be more or less deep and extensive in proportion as they are united or as the executive man seizes more or less profoundly and completely the idea he serves and is able to make permanent in force what the other has impressed upon the consciousness of his age.  Often enough, even when these two different types of men work in the same cause and one more or less fulﬁls the other, they are widely separated in their accessory ideas, distrust, dislike and repudiate each other. For ordinarily the idealist is full of anticipations which reach beyond the actual possibilities or exceed the work that is destined to be immediately fulﬁlled; the executive man on the other hand is unable to grasp either all the meaning of the work he does or all its diviner possibilities which to him are illusion and vanity while to the other they are all that is supremely valuable in his great endeavour. To the practical worker limiting himself by patent forces and actual possibilities the idealist who made his work possible seems an idle dreamer or a troublesome fanatic; to the idealist the practical man who realises the ﬁrst steps towards his idea seems a coarse spoiler of the divine work and almost its enemy: for by attaching too much importance to what is immediately possible he removes the greater possibilities which he does not see, seems to prevent and often does prevent a larger and nobler realisation.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the gulf between a Cavour and a Mazzini, between the prophet of an ideal and the statesman of a realisable idea. The latter seems always to be justiﬁed by the event, but the former has a deeper justiﬁcation in the shortcomings of the event. The successes of the executive man hiding away the ideal under the accomplished fact are often the tragedies of the human spirit and are responsible for the great reactions and disappointments it undergoes when it ﬁnds how poor and soulless is the accomplished fact compared with the glory of the vision and the ardour of the effort.  It cannot be doubted which of these two opposites and complementaries is the most essential to success. Not only is the upheaval and fertilising of the general consciousness by the thinker and the idealist essential to the practical realisation of great changes, but in the realisation itself the idealist who will not compromise is an indispensable element.


Sri Aurobindo: Show me a movement without a force of uncompromising idealism working somewhere in its sum of energies and you have shown me a movement which is doomed to failure and abortion or to petty and inconsiderable results. The age or the country which is entirely composed of reasonable, statesmanlike workers ever ready for concession and compromise is a country which will never be great until it has added to itself what is lacking to it and bathed itself in pure and divine fountains and an age which will accomplish nothing of supreme importance for the progress of humanity. There is a difference however between the fanatic of an idea and the true idealist: the former is simply the materialistic, executive man possessed by the idea of another, not himself the possessor of it; he is haunted in his will and driven by the force of the idea, not really illumined by its light.  He does harm as well as good and his chief use is to prevent the man of compromise from pausing at a paltry or abortive result; but his excesses also bring about great reactions. Incapable of taking his stand on the ideal itself, he puts all his emphasis on particular means and forms and overstrains the springs of action till they become dulled and incapable of responding to farther excitation.


Sri Aurobindo: But the true idealist is not the servant of the letter or the form; it is the idea which he loves and the spirit behind the idea which he serves.  Man approaches nearer his perfection when he combines in himself the idealist and the pragmatist, the originative soul and the executive power. Great executive personalities have usually been men of a considerable idealism. Some indeed have served a purpose rather than an ideal; even in the idea that guided or moved them they have leaned to its executive rather than its inspiring and originative aspect; they have sought their driving force in the interest, passion and emotion attached to it rather than in the idea itself. Others have served consciously a great single thought or moral aim which they have laboured to execute in their lives.


Sri Aurobindo: But the greatest men of action who were endowed by Nature with the most extraordinary force of accomplishment, have owed it to the combination in them of active power with an immense drift of originative thought devoted to practical realisation. They have been great executive thinkers, great practical dreamers. Such were Napoleon and Alexander. Napoleon with his violent prejudice against ideologues and dreamers was himself a colossal dreamer, an incurable if unconscious ideologist; his teeming brain was the cause of his gigantic force and accomplishment. The immense if shapeless ideas of Alexander threw themselves into the form of conquests, cities, cultures; they broke down the barriers of Greek and Asiatic prejudice and narrow self-imprisonment and created an age of civilisation and soul-interchange.


Sri Aurobindo: But these great personalities do not contain in themselves the combination which humanity most needs; not the man of action driven by ideas, the pragmatist stirred by a half-conscious exaltation from the idealistic, almost the mystic side of his nature, but the seer who is able to execute his vision is the higher term of human power and knowledge. The one takes his stand in the Prakriti, the executive Force, and is therefore rather driven than leads himself even when he most successfully leads others; the other takes his stand in the Purusha, the Knower who controls executive force, and he possesses the power that he uses. He draws nearer to the type of the divine Seer-Will that has created and governs the universe. But such a combination is rare and difﬁcult; for in order to grasp the Ideal the human soul has to draw back so far from the limitations, pettinesses, denials of the world of phenomenal fact that the temperament and mentality become inapt for executive action upon the concrete phenomena of life and matter. The mastery of the fact is usually possible to the idealist mind only when its idealism is of no great depth or power and can therefore accommodate itself more easily to the actual life-environment.


Sri Aurobindo: Until this difﬁculty is overcome and the Seer-Will becomes more common in man and more the master of life, the ideal works at a disadvantage, by a silent pressure upon the reluctant world, by occasional attacks and sudden upheavals; a little is accomplished in a long time or by a great and sudden effort, a little that is poor enough, coarse enough, material enough compared with the thing seen and attempted, but which still makes a farther advance possible though often after a period of quiescence and reaction. And times there are, ages of stupendous effort and initiative when the gods seem no longer satisﬁed with this tardy and fragmentary working, when the ideal breaks constantly through the dull walls of the material practical life, incalculable forces clash in its ﬁeld, innumerable ideas meet and wrestle in the arena of the world and through the constant storm and ﬂash, agitation of force and agitation of light the possibility of the victoriously fulﬁlled ideal, the hope of the Messiah, the expectation of the Avatar takes possession of the hearts and thoughts of men. Such an age seems now to be coming upon the world. But whether that hope and expectation and possibility are to come to anything depends upon whether men prepare their souls for the advent and rise in the effort of their faith, life and thought to the height and purity of a clearly-grasped ideal.  The Messiah or Avatar is nothing but this, the divine Seer-Will descending upon the human consciousness to reveal to it the divine meaning behind our half-blind action and to give along with the vision the exalted will that is faithful and performs and the ideal force that executes according to the vision.


Sri Aurobindo: OGA, says the Gita, is skill in works, and by this phrase the ancient Scripture meant that the transformation of mind and being to which it gave the name of Yoga brought with it a perfect inner state and faculty out of which the right principle of action and the right spiritual and divine result of works emerged naturally like a tree out of its seed. Certainly, it did not mean that the clever general or politician or lawyer or shoemaker deserves the name of a Yogin; it did not mean that any kind of skill in works was Yoga, but by Yoga it signiﬁed a spiritual condition of universal equality and God-union and by the skill of the Yogic worker it intended a perfect adaptation of the soul and its instruments to the rhythm of the divine and universal Spirit in a nature liberated from the shackles of egoism and the limitations of the sense-mind.  Essentially, Yoga is a generic name for the processes and the result of processes by which we transcend or shred off our present modes of being and rise to a new, a higher, a wider mode of consciousness which is not that of the ordinary animal and intellectual man. Yoga is the exchange of an egoistic for a universal or cosmic consciousness lifted towards or informed by the supra-cosmic, transcendent Unnameable who is the source and support of all things. Yoga is the passage of the human thinking animal towards the God-consciousness from which he has descended.


Sri Aurobindo: In that ascent we ﬁnd many levels and stages, plateau after plateau of the hill whose summit touches the Truth of things; but at every stage the saying of the Gita applies in an ever higher degree. Even a little of this new law and inner order delivers the soul out of the great peril by which it had been overtaken in its worldward descent, the peril of the ignorance by which the unillumined intellect, even when it is keenest or sagest, must ever be bound and limited, of the sorrow and sin from which the unpuriﬁed heart, even when it wears the richest purple of aspiration and feeling, must ever suffer soil and wound and poverty, and of the vanity of its works to which the undivinised will of man, even when it is most vehement and powerful or Olympian and victorious, must eternally be subject.  It is the utility of Yoga that it opens to us a gate of escape out of the vicious circle of our ordinary human existence.  The idea of works, in the thought of the Gita, is the widest possible. All action of Nature in man is included, whether it be internal or external, operate in the mind or use the body, seem great or seem little.


Sri Aurobindo: From the toil of the hero to the toil of the cobbler, from the labour of the sage to the simple physical act of eating, all is included. The seeking of the Self by thought, the adoration of the Highest by the emotions of the heart, the gathering of means and material and capacity and the use of them for the service of God and man stand here on an equal footing. Buddha sitting under the Bo-tree and conquering the illumination, the ascetic silent and motionless in his cave, Shankara storming through India, debating with all men and preaching most actively the gospel of inaction are all from this point of view doing great and forceful work. But while the outward action may be the same, there is a great internal difference between the working of the ordinary man and the working of the Yogin, — a difference in the state of the being, a difference in the power and the faculty, a difference in the will and temperament.  What we do, arises out of what we are.


Sri Aurobindo: The existent is conscious of what he is; that consciousness formulates itself as knowledge and power; works are the result of this twofold force of being in action. Mind, life and body can only operate out of that which is contained in the being of which they are forces.  This is what we mean when we say that all things act according to their nature. The divine Existence is pure and unlimited being in possession of all itself, it is; whatever it puts forth in its limitless purity of self-awareness is truth of itself,; the divine knowledge is knowledge of the Truth, the divine Will is power of the Truth, the divine workings are words and ideas of the Truth realising themselves in manifold forms and through many stages and in inﬁnite relations. But God is not limited or bound by any particular working or any moment of time or any ﬁeld of space or any law of relation, because He is universal and inﬁnite.


Sri Aurobindo: Nor is He limited by the universe; for His inﬁnity is not cosmic, but supracosmic.  But the individualised being is or acts as if he were so bound and limited, because he treats the particular working of existence that he is and the particular moment of time and ﬁeld of space in which it is actually operating and the particular conditions which reign in the working and in the moment and in the ﬁeld as if they were self-existent realities and the binding truth of things.   Himself, his knowledge, his force and will, his relations with the world and his fellows, his need in it and his desire from them he treats as the sufﬁcient truth and reality, the point of departure of all his works, the central fact and law of his universe. And from this egoistic error arises an all-vitiating falsehood.


Sri Aurobindo: For the particular, the individual can have no self-existence, no truth, no valid force except in so far as it reﬂects rightly and relates and conforms itself justly to the universal, to the all-being, the all-knowledge, the all-will and follows its true drift towards selfrealisation and vast delight in itself. Therefore the salvation of the individual lies in his universalising himself; and this is the lesson which life tries always to teach him but the obstinate ego is always unwilling to learn; for the universal is not any group or extended ego, not the family, community, nation or even all mankind, but an inﬁnite far surpassing all these littlenesses.  Nor is the universalising of himself sufﬁcient for liberation, although certainly it will make him practically more free and in his being nearer to the true freedom. To put himself in tune with the universal is a step, but beyond the universal and directing and determining it is the supracosmic Inﬁnity; for the universe also has no self-existence, truth or validity except as it expresses the divine Being, Knowledge, Will, Power, Delight of Him who surpasses all universe, so much that it can be said ﬁguratively that with a petty fragment of His being and a single ray of His consciousness He has created all these worlds. Therefore the universalised mind must look up from its cosmic consciousness to the Supernal and derive from that all its sense of being and movement of works.


Sri Aurobindo: This is the fundamental truth from which the Yogic consciousness starts; it helps the individual to universalise himself and then to transcend the cosmic formula. And this transformation acts not only on his status of being but on his active consciousness in works.  The Gita tells us that equality of soul and mind is Yoga and that this equality is the foundation of the Brahman-state, that high inﬁnite consciousness to which the Yogin aspires. Now equality of mind means universality; for without universality of soul there may be a state of indifference or an impartial self-control or a well-governed equality of temperament, but these are not the thing that is meant. The equality spoken of is not indifference or impartiality or equability, but a fundamental oneness of attitude to all persons and all things and happenings because of the perception of all as the One.


Sri Aurobindo: Such equality, it is erroneously thought, is incompatible with action. By no means; this is the error of the animal and the intellectual man who thinks that action is solely possible when dictated by his hopes, fears and passions or by the self-willed preferences of the emotion and the intellect justifying themselves by the illusions of the reason.  That might be the fact if the individual were the real actor and not merely an instrument or secondary agent; but we know well enough, for Science and Philosophy assure us of the same truth, that the universal is the Force which acts through the simulacrum of our individuality. The individual mind, pretending to choose for itself with a sublime ignorance and disregard of the universal, is obviously working on the basis of a falsehood and by means of an error and not in the knowledge and the will of the Truth. It cannot have any real skill in works; for to start from a falsehood or half-truth and work by means of blunders and arrive at another falsehood or half-truth which we have immediately to change, and all the while to weep and struggle and suffer and have no sure resting-place, cannot surely be called skill in works.


Sri Aurobindo: But the universal is equal in all and therefore its determinations are not self-willed preferences but are guided by the truth of the divine will and knowledge which is unlimited and not subject to incapacity or error.  Therefore that state of the being by which the Yogin differs from the ordinary man, is that by which he rises from the foundation of a perfect equality to the consciousness of the one existence in all and embracing all and lives in that existence and not in the walls of his body or personal temperament or limited mind. Mind and life and body he sees as small enough things which happen and change and develop in his being. Nay, the whole universe is seen by him as happening within himself, not in his small ego or mind, but within this vast and inﬁnite self with which he is now constantly identiﬁed. All action in the universe he sees as arising in this being, out of the divine Existence and under the stress of the divine Truth, Knowledge, Will and Power.


Sri Aurobindo: He begins to participate consciously in its working and to see all things in the light of that divine truth and governance; and even when his own actions move on certain lines rather than others, he is not bound by them or shut to the truth of all the rest by his own passions and preferences, gropings and seekings and revolts. It is evident that such an increasing wideness of vision must mean an increasing knowledge. And if it be true that knowledge is power, it must mean also an increasing force for works. Certainly, it would not be so, if the Yogin continued to act by the light of his individual reason and imagination and will; for the intellect and all that depends on it can only work by virtue of rigid limitations and exclusive determinations.  Accordingly, the continued activity of the unillumined intellect and its servants conﬂicts with the new state of consciousness and knowledge which arises out of this larger existence, and so long as they remain active, it cannot be perfect or assured


Sri Aurobindo: ; for the consciousness is being continually pulled down to the lower ﬁeld of ego-habit by the claim of their narrow workings. But the Yogin ceases, progressively, to act by the choice of his intellectual or emotional nature. Another light dawns, another power and presence intervenes, other faculties awake in the place of the old human-animal combination.  As the state of being changes, the will and temperament must necessarily be modiﬁed. Even from an early stage the Yogin begins to subordinate his personal will or it becomes naturally subordinate to the sense of the supreme Will which is attracting him upward.


Sri Aurobindo: Ignorantly, imperfectly, blunderingly it moves at ﬁrst, with many recoils and relapses into personal living and personal action, but in time it becomes more in tune with its Source and eventually the personal will merges upward and all ways into the universal and inﬁnite and obeys implicitly the transcendent. Nor does this change and ascension and expanding mean any annihilation of the will-power working in the individual, as the intellectual man might imagine; but rather it increases it to an immense forcefulness while giving it an inﬁnite calm and an eternal patience. The temperament also is delivered from all leash of straining and desire, from all urge of passion and pain of wilful self-delusion. Desire, even the best, turns always to limitation and obscuration, to some eager exclusive choice and pressure, to some insistent exclusion of what should not be excluded and impatient revolt against the divine denials and withholdings. It generates anger and grief and passion and obstinacy, and these bring about the soul’s loss of its divine memory or steadfast consciousness of itself and its selfknowledge and its equal vision of the truth of things.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore desire and its brood are incompatible with skill in works and their persistence is the sign of an imperfect Yoga.  Not only must the will and fundamental knowledge-view of things change, but a new combination of faculties take the place of the old. For if the intellect is not to do all our mental work for us or to work at all in its unillumined state and if the will in the form of desires, wishes, intellectual preferences is not to determine and enforce our action, then it is clear that other powers of knowledge and will must awaken and either replace the intellect and the mental preference or illumine and guide the one and transform and dominate the other. Otherwise either the action may be nil or else its impulses mechanical and chaotic, even if the static being is blissfully enlarged; for they will well up indeed out of the universal and not the personal, but out of the universal in its lower formula which permits the erratic action of the heart and mind, while the old personal will and reason will not be there to impose some light and order on their ill-connected impulsions. Such faculties and new combination of faculties can and do emerge and they are illuminations and powers that are in direct touch and harmony with the light and power of the Truth; therefore in proportion as they manifest and take hold of their functions, they must increase the force, subtlety and perfection of the Yogin’s skill in works.


Sri Aurobindo: But the greatest skill in works of Yoga is that which to the animal man seems its greatest ineptitude. For all this difﬁcult attainment, the latter will say, may lead to anything you please, but we have to lose our personal life, abandon our personal objects, annul our personal will and pleasure and without these life cannot be worth living. Now the object of all skill in works must be evidently to secure the best welfare either of ourselves or of others or of all. The ordinary man calls it welfare to secure momentarily some transient object, to wade for it through a sea of grief and suffering and painful labour and to fall from it again still deeper into the same distressful element in search of a new transient object. The greatest cunning of Yoga is to have detected this cheat of the mind and its desires and dualities and to have found the way to an abiding peace, a universal delight and an all-embracing satisfaction, which can not only be enjoyed for oneself but communicated to others.


Sri Aurobindo: That too arises out of the change of our being; for the pure truth of existence carries also in it the unalloyed delight of existence, they are inseparable in the status of the inﬁnite. To use the ﬁgures of the Vedic seers, by Yoga Varuna is born in us, a vast sky of spiritual living, the divine in his wide existence and inﬁnite truth; into that wideness Mitra rises up, Lord of Light and Love who takes all our activities of thought and feeling and will, links them into a divine harmony, charioteers our movement and dictates our works; called by this wideness and this harmony Aryaman appears in us, the Divine in its illumined power, uplifted force of being and all-judging effective will; and by the three comes the indwelling Bhaga, the Divine in its pure bliss and all-seizing joy who dispels the evil dream of our jarring and divided existence and possesses all things in the light and glory of Aryaman’s power, Mitra’s love and light, Varuna’s unity. This divine Birth shall be the son of our works; and than creating this what greater skill can there be or what more practical and sovereign cunning?  ANKIND thinks naturally in extremes or else reconciles by a patchwork and compromise. Whether he makes a fetish of moderation or surrenders himself to the enthusiasm of the single idea, the human being misses always truth of vision and the right pitch of action because instead of seeing, feeling and becoming in obedience to his nature like other animate existences he tries always to measure things by a standard he has set up in his intelligence.


Sri Aurobindo: But it is the character of his intelligence that it ﬁnds it an easy task to distinguish and separate but is clumsy in combining. When it combines, it tends to artiﬁcialise and falsify. It feels at ease in pursuing a single idea to its logical consequences and in viewing things from a single standpoint; but to harmonise different ideas in action and to view the facts from different standpoints is contrary to its native impulse; therefore it does that badly, with an ill grace and without mastery. Oftenest it makes an incongruous patchwork rather than a harmony. The human mind is strong and swift in analysis; it synthesises with labour and imperfectly and does not feel at home in its syntheses.


Sri Aurobindo: It divides, opposes and, placed between the oppositions it creates, becomes an eager partisan of one side or another; but to think wisely and impartially and with a certain totality is irksome and disgusting to the normal human being.  All human action as all human thought suffers from these disabilities. For it is seduced by a trenchant idea which it follows without proper attention to collateral issues, to necessary companion ideas, to the contrary forces in operation, or else it regards these merely as enemies, brands them as pure falsehood and evil and strives with more or less violence to crush them out of existence. Then it sees other ideas which it attempts to realise in turn, either adding them to its past notions and possessions or else rejecting these entirely for the new light; it makes a fresh war and a new clearance and denies its past work in the interest of a future attainment. But it has also its repentances, its returns, its recalls and re-enthronings of banished gods and even of lifeless ghosts and phantoms to which it gives a temporary and false appearance of life.


Sri Aurobindo: And on the way it has continually its doubts, scruples, hesitations, its portentous assumptions of a sage moderation and a gradual and cautious advance. But human moderation is usually a wiseacre and a botcher; it sews a patch of new velvet on old fustian or of new fustian on old velvet and admires its deplorable handiwork. And its cautious advance means an accumulation of shams, ﬁctions and dead conventions till the burden of falsehood becomes too great for life to bear and a violent revolution is necessary to deliver the soul of humanity out of the immobilising cerements of the past. Such is the type of our progress; it is the advance of an ignorant and purblind but always light-attracted spirit, a being half-animal, half-god, stumbling forward through the bewildering jungle of its own errors.  This characteristic of human mentality shows itself in the opposition we create between conservation and progress.


Sri Aurobindo: Nothing in the universe can really stand still because everything there is a mould of Time and the very essence of Time is change by a movement forward. It is true that the world’s movement is not in a straight line; there are cycles, there are spirals; but still it circles, not round the same point always, but round an ever advancing centre, and therefore it never returns exactly upon its old path and never goes really backward. As for standing still, it is an impossibility, a delusion, a ﬁction. Only the spirit is stable; the soul and body of things are in eternal motion. And in this motion there are the three determining powers of the past, future and present, — the present a horizontal and constantly shifting line without breadth between a vast realised inﬁnity that both holds back and impels and a vast unrealised inﬁnity that both repels and attracts.


Sri Aurobindo: The past is both a drag and a force for progress. It is all that has created the present and a great part of the force that is creating the future. For the past is not dead; its forms are gone and had to go, otherwise the present would not have come into being: but its soul, its power, its essence lives veiled in the present and ever-accumulating, growing, deepening will live on in the future. Every human being holds in and behind him all the past of his own race, of humanity and of himself; these three things determine his starting-point and pursue him through his life’s progress. It is in the force of this past, in the strength which its huge conservations give to him that he confronts the unillumined abysses of the future and plunges forward into the depths of its unrealised inﬁnities.


Sri Aurobindo: But also it is a drag, partly because man afraid of the unknown clings to the old forms of which he is sure, the old foundations which feel so safe under his feet, the old props round which so many of his attachments and associations cast their tenacious tendrils, but also partly because the forces of the past keep their careful hold on him so as to restrain him in his uncertain course and prevent the progress from becoming a precipitation.   The future repels us even while it irresistibly attracts. The repulsion lies partly in our own natural recoil from the unknown, because every step into this unknown is a wager between life and death; every decision we make may mean either the destruction or the greater fulﬁlment of what we now are, of the name and form to which we are attached. But also it lies in the future itself; for there, governing that future, there are not only powers which call us to fulﬁl them and attract us with an irresistible force but other powers which have to be conquered and do not desire to yield themselves.


Sri Aurobindo: The future is a sphinx with two minds, an energy which offers itself and denies, gives itself and resists, seeks to enthrone us and seeks to slay. But the conquest has to be attempted, the wager has to be accepted. We have to face the future’s offer of death as well as its offer of life, and it need not alarm us, for it is by constant death to our old names and forms that we shall live most vitally in greater and newer forms and names. Go on we must; for if we do not, Time itself will force us forward in spite of our fancied immobility. And this is the most pitiable and dangerous movement of all.


Sri Aurobindo: For what can be more pitiable than to be borne helplessly forward clinging to the old that disintegrates in spite of our efforts and shrieking frantically to the dead ghosts and dissolving fragments of the past to save us alive? And what can be more dangerous than to impose immobility on that which is in its nature mobile?  This means an increasing and horrible rottenness; it means an attempt to persist on as a putrid and stinking corpse instead of a living and self-renewing energetic creature. The greatest spirits are therefore those who have no fear of the future, who accept its challenge and its wager; they have that sublime trust in the God or Power that guides the world, that high audacity of the human soul to wrestle with the inﬁnite and realise the impossible, that wise and warrior conﬁdence in its ultimate destiny which mark the Avatars and prophets and great innovators and renovators.  If we consider carefully we shall see that the past is indeed a huge force of conservation, but of conservation that is not immobile, but on the contrary offers itself as material for change and new realisation; that the present is the constant change and new actual realisation which the past desires and compels; and that the future is that force of new realisation not yet actual towards which the past was moving and for the sake of which it lived.


Sri Aurobindo: Then we perceive that there is no real opposition between these three; we see that they are parts of a single movement, a sort of Trinity of Vishnu-Brahma-Maheshwara fulﬁlling by an inseparable action the one Deity. Yet the human mind in its mania of division and opposition seeks to set them at strife and ranges humanity into various camps, the partisans of the past, the partisans of the present, the partisans of the future, the partisans of all sorts of compromises between the three forces.  Nature makes good use of the struggle between these partisans and her method is necessary in our present state of passionate ignorance and egoistic obstinacy; but none the less is it from the point of view of a higher knowledge a pitiably ignorant struggle.   The partisans of the future call themselves the party of progress, the children of light and denounce the past as ignorant, evil, a mass of errors and abuses; their view alone has the monopoly of the light, the truth, the good — a light, good and truth which will equally be denounced as error and evil by succeeding generations.


Sri Aurobindo: The partisans of the present look with horror upon all progress as an impious and abominable plunge into error and evil and degeneration and ruin; for them the present is the culmination of humanity, — as previous “present” times were for all the preceding generations and as the future which they abhor will be for these unprogressive souls if they should then reincarnate; they will then defend it with the same passion and asperity against another future as they now attack it in the interests of the present. The partisans of the past are of two kinds. The ﬁrst admit the defects of the present but support it in so far as it still cherishes the principles of the high, perfect, faultless, adorable past, that golden age of the race or community, and because even if somewhat degenerate, its forms are a bulwark against the impiety of progress; if they admit any change, it is in the direction of the past that they seek it. A second kind condemn the present root and branch as degenerate, hateful, horrible, vicious, accursed; they erect a past form as the hope of a humanity returning to the wisdom of its forefathers.  And to such quarrels of children the intellectuals and the leaders of thought and faith lend the power of the specious or moving word and the striking idea and the emotional fervour or religious ardour which they conceive to be the very voice and light and force of Truth itself in its utter self-revelation.