Sri Aurobindo: It lacked the companion force of sea-power which is even more necessary than military superiority to the endeavour of world-domination, and by its geographical position and the encircling position of its enemies it was especially open to all the disadvantages which must accompany the mastery of the seas by its natural adversary. The combination of overwhelming sea-power with overwhelming land-power can alone bring so vast an enterprise into the domain of real possibility; Rome itself could only hope for something like a world-empire when it had destroyed the superior maritime force of Carthage. Yet so entirely did German statesmanship miscalculate the problem that it entered into the struggle with the predominant maritime Power of the world already ranked in the coalition of its enemies.  Instead of concentrating its efforts against this one natural adversary, instead of utilising the old hostility of Russia and France against England, its maladroit and brutal diplomacy had already leagued these former enemies against itself; instead of isolating England, it had succeeded only in isolating itself and the manner in which it began and conducted the war still farther separated it morally and gave an added force to the physical isolation effected by the British blockade. In its one-sided pursuit of a great military concentration of Central Europe and Turkey, it had even wantonly alienated the one maritime Power which might have been on its side.


Sri Aurobindo: It is conceivable that the imperial enterprise may be renewed at some future date in the world’s history by a nation or by statesmen better situated, better equipped, gifted with a subtler diplomatic genius, a nation as much favoured by circumstances, temperament and fortune as was Rome in the ancient world.  What then would be the necessary conditions for its success? In the ﬁrst place, its aim would have small chances of prospering if it could not repeat that extraordinary good luck by which Rome was enabled to meet its possible rivals and enemies one by one and avoid a successful coalition of hostile forces. What possibility is there of such a fortunate progress in a world so alert and instructed as the modern where everything is known, spied on, watched by jealous eyes and active minds under the conditions of modern publicity and swift world-wide communication? The mere possession of a dominant position is enough to set the whole world on its guard and concentrate its hostility against the Power whose secret ambitions it instinctively feels.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore such a fortunate succession would only seem to be possible if, in the ﬁrst place, it were carried out half unconsciously without any ﬁxed and visible ambition on the part of the advancing Power to awaken the general jealousy and, secondly, by a series of favouring occurrences which would lead so near to the desired end that it would be within the grasp before those who could still prevent it had awakened to its possibility.  If, for instance, there were a series of struggles between the four or ﬁve great Powers now dominating the world, each of which left the aggressor broken without hope of recovery and without any new Power arising to take its place, it is conceivable that at the end one of them would be left in a position of such natural predominance gained without any deliberate aggression, gained at least apparently in resisting the aggression of others as to put world-empire naturally into its grasp. But with the present conditions of life, especially with the ruinous nature of modern war, such a succession of struggles, quite natural and possible in former times, seems to be beyond the range of actual possibilities.  We must then assume that the Power moving towards world-domination would at some time ﬁnd inevitably a coalition formed against it by almost all the Powers capable of opposing it and this with the sympathy of the world at their back. Given even the happiest diplomacy, such a moment seems inevitable.


Sri Aurobindo: It must then possess such a combined and perfectly organised military and naval predominance as to succeed in this otherwise unequal struggle. But where is the modern empire that can hope to arrive at such a predominance? Of those that already exist Russia might well arrive one day at an overwhelming military power to which the present force of Germany would be a triﬂe; but that it should combine with this force by land a corresponding sea-power is unthinkable. England has enjoyed hitherto an overwhelming naval predominance which it might so increase under certain conditions as to defy the world in arms; but it could not even with conscription and the aid of all its colonies compass anything like a similar force by land, — unless indeed it created conditions under which it could utilise all the military possibilities of India. Even then we have only to think of the formidable masses and powerful empires that it must be prepared to meet and we shall see that the creation of this double predominance is a contingency which the facts themselves show to be, if not chimerical, at least highly improbable.


Sri Aurobindo: Given even largely superior numbers on the side of its possible enemies, a nation might conceivably prevail over the coalition of its opponents by a superior science and a more skilful use of its resources. Germany relied on its superior science for the successful issue of its enterprise; and the principle on which it proceeded was sound. But in the modern world Science is a common possession and even if one nation steals such a march on the others as to leave them in a position of great inferiority at the beginning, yet experience has shown that given a little time, — and a powerful coalition is not likely to be crushed at the ﬁrst blow, — the lost ground can be rapidly made up or at least methods of defence developed which will largely neutralise the advantage gained. For success, therefore, we should have to suppose the development by the ambitious nation or empire of a new science or new discoveries not shared by the rest which would place it in something like the position of superiority over greater numbers which Cortez and Pizarro enjoyed over the Aztecs and Peruvians.


Sri Aurobindo: The superiority of discipline and organisation which gave the advantage to the ancient Romans or to the Europeans in India is no longer sufﬁcient for so vast a purpose.  We see, therefore, that the conditions for the successful pursuit of world-empire are such that we need hardly take this mode of uniﬁcation as within the bounds of practical possibility. That it may again be attempted, is possible; that it will fail, may almost be prophesied. At the same time, we have to take into account the surprises of Nature, the large ﬁeld we have to allow to the unexpected in her dealings with us. Therefore we cannot pronounce this consummation an absolute impossibility.


Sri Aurobindo: On the contrary, if that be her intention, she will suddenly or gradually create the necessary means and conditions. But even if it were to come about, the empire so created would have so many forces to contend with that its maintenance would be more difﬁcult than its creation, and either its early collapse would bring the whole problem again into the ﬁeld for a better solution or else it would have, by stripping itself of the elements of force and domination which inspired its attempt, to contradict the essential aim of its great effort. That, however, belongs to another side of our subject which we must postpone for the moment. At present we may say that if the gradual uniﬁcation of the world by the growth of great heterogeneous empires forming true psychological unities is only a vague and nascent possibility, its uniﬁcation by a single forceful imperial domination has passed or is passing out of the range of possibilities and can only come about by a new development of the unexpected out of the inﬁnite surprises of Nature.  Chapter X E


Sri Aurobindo: HAVE had to dwell so long upon the possibilities of the Empire-group because the evolution of the imperial State is a dominating phenomenon of the modern world; it governs the political tendencies of the later part of the nineteenth and earlier part of the twentieth centuries very much as the evolution of the free democratised nation governed the age which preceded ours. The dominant idea of the French Revolution was the formula of the free and sovereign people and, in spite of the cosmopolitan element introduced into the revolutionary formula by the ideal of fraternity, this idea became in fact the assertion of the free, independent, democratically selfgoverned nation. That ideal had not at the time of the great war wholly worked itself out even in the occidental world; for central Europe was only partly democratised and Russia had only just begun to turn its face towards the common goal; and even now there are still subject European peoples or fragments of peoples.  Nevertheless, with whatever imperfections, the idea of the free democratic nation had practically triumphed in all America and Europe. The peoples of Asia have equally accepted this governing ideal of the nineteenth century, and though the movements of democratic nationalism in the eastern countries, Turkey, Persia, India, China, were not fortunate in their ﬁrst attempts at self-realisation, the profound and wide-spread working of the idea cannot be doubted


Sri Aurobindo: by any careful observer . Whatever modiﬁcations may arrive, whatever new tendencies intervene, whatever reactions oppose, it could hardly then be doubted that the principal gifts of the French Revolution must remain and be universalised as permanent acquisitions, indispensable elements in the future order of the world, — national self-consciousness and self-government, freedom and enlightenment for the people and so much social equality and justice at least as is indispensable to political liberty; for with any form of ﬁxed and rigid inequality democratic self-government is incompatible.  But before the great nineteenth-century impulse could work itself out everywhere, before even it could realise itself entirely in Europe, a new tendency has intervened and a new idea seized on the progressive mind of humanity. This is the ideal of the perfectly organised State.


Sri Aurobindo: Fundamentally, the ideal of the perfectly organised State is socialistic and it is based on the second word of the great revolutionary formula, equality, just as the movement of the nineteenth century centered round the ﬁrst, liberty.  The ﬁrst impulse given by the great European upheaval attained only to a certain kind of political equality. An incomplete social levelling still left untouched the one inequality and the one form of political preponderance which no competitive society can eliminate, the preponderance of the haves over the havenots, the inequality between the more successful in the struggle of life and the less successful which is rendered inevitable by difference of capacity, unequal opportunity and the handicap of circumstance and environment. Socialism seeks to get rid of this persistent inequality by destroying the competitive form of society and substituting the cooperative. A cooperative form of human society existed formerly in the shape of the commune; but the restoration of the commune as a unit would imply practically the return to the old city state, and as this is not now possible with the larger groupings and greater complexities of modern life, the socialistic idea could only be realised through the rigorously organised national State.


Sri Aurobindo: To eliminate poverty, not by the crude idea of equal distribution but by the holding of all property in common and its management through the organised State, to equalise opportunity and capacity as far as possible through universal education and training, again by means of the organised State, is the fundamental idea of modern Socialism.  It implies an abrogation or at least a rigorous diminution of all individual liberty. Democratic Socialism still clings indeed to the nineteenth-century ideal of political freedom; it insists on the equal right of all in the State to choose, judge and change their own governors, but all other liberty it is ready to sacriﬁce to its own central idea.  The progress of the socialistic idea would seem therefore to lead towards the evolution of a perfectly organised national State which would provide for and control the education and training, manage and govern all the economic activities and for that purpose as well as for the assurance of perfect efﬁciency, morality, well-being and social justice, order the whole or at any rate the greater part of the external and internal life of its component individuals. It would effect, in fact, by organised State control what earlier societies attempted by social pressure, rigorous rule of custom, minute code and Shastra.


Sri Aurobindo: This was always an inherently inevitable development of the revolutionary ideal.  It started to the surface at ﬁrst under pressure of external danger in the government of France by the Jacobins during the Reign of Terror; it has been emerging and tending to realise itself under pressure of an inner necessity throughout the later part of the nineteenth century; it has emerged not completely but with a ﬁrst rudimentary sketch of completeness by the combination of the inner and the outer necessity during the present war. What was before only an ideal towards which some imperfect initial steps alone were immediately possible, has now become a realisable programme with its entire feasibility established by a convincing though necessarily hasty and imperfect practical demonstration.  It is true that in order to realise it even political liberty has had to be temporarily abolished; but this, it may be argued, is only an accident of the moment, a concession to temporary necessity.  In freer conditions what was done partly and for a time by governments which the people have consented to invest with an absolute and temporarily irresponsible authority, may be done, when there is no pressure of war, wholly and permanently by the self-governing democratic State.


Sri Aurobindo: In that case the near future of the human group would seem to be the nation, self-governing, politically free, but aiming at perfect social and economic organisation and ready for that purpose to hand over all individual liberty to the control of the organised national State. As France was in the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century the great propagandist and the experimental workshop of political liberty and equality, so Germany has been in the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century the chief propagandist and the experimental workshop of the idea of the organised State. There the theory of Socialism has taken rise and there its propaganda has been most effective, so that a large proportion of the nation committed itself to the new gospel; there also the great socialistic measures and those which have developed the control of the individual by the State for the common good and efﬁciency of the nation have been most thoroughly and admirably conceived and executed. It matters little that this was done by an anti-socialistic, militarist and aristocratic government; the very fact is a proof of the irresistible strength of the new tendency, and the inevitable transference of the administrative power from its past holders to the people was all that was needed to complete its triumph.  Throughout the recent decades we have seen the growth of German ideas and the increasing tendency to follow German methods of State interference and State control in other countries, even in England, the home of individualism.


Sri Aurobindo: The defeat of Germany in the European war no more spelt the defeat of her ideals than the defeat of revolutionary and Napoleonic France by the European coalition and even the temporary triumph of the monarchic and aristocratic system prevented the spread of her new ideas over all Europe. Even if German militarism and Junkerism were destroyed, the collapse of the imperial form of government can only hasten the more thorough development and victory of that which has been working behind them and forcing them to minister to it, the great modern tendency of the perfectly organised socialistic State, while the evident result of the war in the nations opposed to her has been to force them more rapidly towards the same ideal.  If this were all, the natural development of things aided by the frustration of the German form of imperialism would lead logically to a new ordering of the world on the basis of a system of independent but increasingly organised national States associated together more or less closely for international purposes while preserving their independent existence. Such is the ideal which has attracted the human mind as a yet distant possibility since the great revolutionary ferment set in; it is the idea of a federation of free nations, the parliament of man, the federation of the world. But the actual circumstances forbid any hope of such an ideal consummation in the near future.


Sri Aurobindo: For the nationalistic, democratic and socialistic ideas are not alone at work in the world; imperialism is equally in the ascendant. Only a few European peoples at the present moment are nations conﬁned to themselves; each is a nation free in itself but dominating over other human groupings who are not free or only partially free.  Even little Belgium has its Congo, little Portugal its colonies, little Holland its dependencies in the eastern Archipelago; even little Balkan States have aspired to revive an “empire” and to rule over others not of their own nationality or have cherished the idea of becoming predominant in the peninsula. Mazzini’s Italy has its imperialistic ventures and ambitions in Tripoli, Abyssinia, Albania, the Greek islands. This imperialistic tendency is likely to grow stronger for some time in the future rather than to weaken.


Sri Aurobindo: The idea of a remodelling even of Europe itself on the strict principle of nationality, which captivated liberal minds in England at the beginning of the war, has not yet been made practicable and, if it were effected, there would still remain the whole of Asia and Africa as a ﬁeld for the imperialistic ambitions of the Western nations and Japan. The disinterestedness that led a majority in America to decree the liberation of the Philippines and restrained the desire to take advantage of the troubles of Mexico is not possible to the mentality of the Old World, and it is doubtful how long it can stand even in America against the rising tide of imperialistic sentiment. National egoism, the pride of domination and the desire of expansion still govern the mind of humanity, however modiﬁed they may now be in their methods by the ﬁrst weak beginnings of higher motives and a better national morality, and until this spirit is radically changed, the union of the human race by a federation of free nations must remain a noble chimera.  Undoubtedly, a free association and unity must be the ultimate goal of our development and until it is realised the world must be subject to constant changes and revolutions. Every established order, because it is imperfect, because it insists on arrangements which come to be recognised as involving injustice or which stand in the way of new tendencies and forces, because it outlasts its utility and justiﬁcation, must end in, resistance and upheaval, must change itself or be changed or else lead to cataclysms such as periodically trouble our human advance.


Sri Aurobindo: But the time has not come when the true principle of order can replace those which are artiﬁcial and imperfect. It is idle to hope for a federation of free nations until either the present inequalities between nation and nation are removed or else the whole world rises to a common culture based upon a higher moral and spiritual status than is now actual or possible. The imperial instinct being alive and dominant and stronger at present than the principle of nationalism, the evolution of great empires can hardly fail to overshadow for a time at least the tendency to the development of free nationalities. All that can be hoped is that the old artiﬁcial, merely political empire may be replaced by a truer and more moral type, and that the existing empires, driven by the necessity of strengthening themselves and by an enlightened self-interest, may come to see that the recognition of national autonomy is a wise and necessary concession to the still vital instinct of nationalism and can be used so as to strengthen instead of weakening their imperial strength and unity. In this way, while a federation of free nations is for the present impossible, a system of federated empires and free nations drawn together in a closer association than the world has yet seen is not altogether impossible; and through this and other steps some form of political unity for mankind may at a more or less distant date be realisable.


Sri Aurobindo: The war brought up many suggestions for such a closer association, but as a rule they were limited to a better ordering of the international relations of Europe. One of these was the elimination of war by a stricter international law administered by an international Court and supported by the sanction of the nations which shall be enforced by all of them against any offender. Such a solution is chimerical unless it is immediately followed up by farther and far-reaching developments. For the law given by the Court must be enforced either by an alliance of some of the stronger Powers as, for instance, the coalition of the victorious allies dominating the rest of Europe, or by a concert of all the European Powers or else by a United States of Europe or some other form of European federation. A dominating alliance of great Powers would be simply a repetition in principle of the system of Metternich and would inevitably break down after some lapse of time, while a Concert of Europe must mean, as experience has shown, the uneasy attempt of rival groupings to maintain a precarious understanding which may postpone but cannot eventually prevent fresh struggles and collisions.


Sri Aurobindo: In such imperfect systems the law would only be obeyed so long as it was expedient, so long only as the Powers who desired new changes and readjustments not admitted by the others did not consider the moment opportune for resistance. The Law within a nation is only secure because there is a recognised authority empowered to determine it and to make the necessary changes and possessed of a sufﬁcient force to punish all violation of its statutes. An international or an inter-European law must have the same advantages if it is to exercise anything more than a merely moral force which can be set at nought by those who are strong enough to defy it and who ﬁnd an advantage in the violation. Some form of European federation, however loose, is therefore essential if the idea behind these suggestions of a new order is to be made practically effective, and once commenced, such a federation must necessarily be tightened and draw more and more towards the form of a United States of Europe.  Whether such a European unity can be formed or whether, if formed, it can be maintained and perfected against the many forces of dissolution, the many causes of quarrel which would for long try it to the breaking point, only experience can show.


Sri Aurobindo: But it is evident that in the present state of human egoism it would, if formed, become a tremendously powerful instrument for the domination and exploitation of the rest of the world by the group of nations which are at present in the forefront of human progress. It would inevitably awaken in antagonism to it an idea of Asiatic unity and an idea of American unity, and while such continental groupings replacing the present smaller national unities might well be an advance towards the ﬁnal union of all mankind, yet their realisation would mean cataclysms of a kind and scope which would dwarf the present catastrophe and in which the hopes of mankind might founder and fatally collapse rather than progress nearer to fulﬁlment. But the chief objection to the idea of a United States of Europe is that the general sense of humanity is already seeking to travel beyond its continental distinctions and make them subordinate to a larger human idea. A division on the continental basis might therefore be from this point of view a reactionary step of the gravest kind and might be attended with the most serious consequences to human progress.


Sri Aurobindo: Europe, indeed, is in this anomalous position that it is at once ripe for the Pan-European idea and at the same time under the necessity of overpassing it. The conﬂict of the two tendencies was curiously exempliﬁed not so long ago by certain speculations on the nature of the recent European struggle. It was suggested that the sin of Germany in this war was due to its exaggerated egoistic idea of the nation and its disregard of the larger idea of Europe to which the nation-idea must now be subjected and subordinated. The total life of Europe must now be the all-engrossing unity, its good the paramount consideration, and the egoism of the nation must consent to exist only as an organic part of this larger egoism. In effect, this is the acceptance after so many decades of the idea of Nietzsche who insisted that nationalism and war were anachronisms and the ideal of all enlightened minds must be not to be good patriots but good Europeans.


Sri Aurobindo: But immediately the question arose, what then of the increasing importance of America in world politics, what of Japan and China, what of the renewed stirrings of life in Asia? The writer had therefore to draw back from his ﬁrst formula and to explain that by Europe he meant not Europe but all nations that had accepted the principles of European civilisation as the basis of their polity and social organisation.  This more philosophical formula has the obvious or at least the specious advantage that it brings in America and Japan and thus recognises all the actually free or dominant nations in the circle of the proposed solidarity and holds out too the hope of admission into the circle to others whenever they can prove, after the forceful manner of Japan or otherwise, that they too have come up to the European standard.  Indeed, though Europe is still strongly separate in its own conception from the rest of the world, — as was shown by the often expressed resentment of the continual existence of Turkey in Europe and the desire to put an end to this government of Europeans by Asiatics, — yet as a matter of fact it is inextricably tangled up with America and Asia. Some of the European nations have colonies in America, all have possessions and ambitions in Asia, where Japan alone is outside the shadow cast by Europe, or in Northern Africa which is culturally one with Asia.


Sri Aurobindo: The United States of Europe would therefore mean a federation of free European nations dominant over a half-subject Asia and possessor of parts of America and there standing in uneasy proximity to nations still free and necessarily troubled, alarmed and overshadowed by this giant immiscence. The inevitable result would be in America to bring together more closely the Latin Centre and South and the English-speaking North and to emphasise immensely the Monroe Doctrine with consequences which cannot easily be foreseen, while in Asia there could be only one of two ﬁnal endings to the situation, either the disappearance of the remaining free Asiatic States or a vast Asiatic resurgence and the recoil of Europe from Asia. Such movements would be a prolongation of the old line of human development and set at nought the new cosmopolitan conditions created by modern culture and Science; but they are inevitable if the nation-idea in the West is to merge into the Europe-idea, that is to say, into the continental idea rather than into the wider consciousness of a common humanity.  If, therefore, any new supra-national order is to evolve sooner or later as a result of the present upheaval, it must be an association that will embrace Asia, Africa and America as well as Europe and it must be in its nature an organisation of international life constituted by a number of free nations such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the United States, the Latin republics and a number of imperial and colonising nations such as are most of the peoples of Europe. Either the latter would remain, as they now are, free in themselves but masters of subject peoples who, with the advance of time, would become more and more intolerant of the yoke imposed on them or else they would be, by an ethical advance which is as yet very far from accomplished, partly centres of free federal empires, partly nations holding in trust races yet backward and undeveloped until they arrived at the capacity of self-administration, as the United States have claimed to hold for a time the Philippines.


Sri Aurobindo: In the former case, the unity, the order, the common law established would perpetuate and be partly founded on an enormous system of injustice and exposed to the revolts and revolutions of Nature and the great revenges by which she ﬁnally vindicates the human spirit against wrongs which she tolerates for a time as necessary incidents of human development. In the latter, there would be some chance that the new order, however far in its beginnings from the ultimate ideal of a free association of free human aggregates, might lead peacefully and by a natural unfolding of the spiritual and ethical progress of the race to such a secure, just and healthy political, social and economic foundation as might enable mankind to turn from its preoccupation with these lower cares and begin at last that development of its higher self which is the nobler part of its potential destiny or, if not that, — for who knows whether Nature’s long experiment in the human type is foredoomed to success or failure, — at least the loftiest possibility of our future which the human mind can envisage.   Chapter XI


Sri Aurobindo: F WE consider the possibilities of a uniﬁcation of the human race on political, administrative and economic lines, we see that a certain sort of unity or ﬁrst step towards it appears not only to be possible, but to be more or less urgently demanded by an underlying spirit and sense of need in the race. This spirit has been created largely by increased mutual knowledge and close communication, partly by the development of wider and freer intellectual ideals and emotional sympathies in the progressive mind of the race. The sense of need is partly due to the demand for the satisfaction of these ideals and sympathies, partly to economic and other material changes which render the results of divided national life, war, commercial rivalry and consequent insecurity and peril to the complex and easily vulnerable modern social organisation more and more irksome both for the economic and political human animal and for the idealistic thinker.  Partly also the new turn is due to the desire of the successful nations to possess, enjoy and exploit the rest of the world at ease without the peril incurred by their own formidable rivalries and competitions and rather by some convenient understanding and compromise among themselves.


Sri Aurobindo: The real strength of this tendency is in its intellectual, idealistic and emotional parts. Its economic causes are partly permanent and therefore elements of strength and secure fulﬁlment, partly artiﬁcial and temporary and therefore elements of insecurity and weakness. The political incentives are the baser part in the amalgam; their presence may even vitiate the whole result and lead in the end to a necessary dissolution and reversal of whatever unity may be initially accomplished.  Still, a result of some kind is possible in the comparatively near or more distant future. We can see on what lines it is likely to work itself out, if at all, — at ﬁrst by a sort of understanding and initial union for the most pressing common needs, arrangements of commerce, arrangements of peace and war, arrangements for the common arbitration of disputes, arrangements for the policing of the world.


Sri Aurobindo: These crude initial arrangements, once accepted, will naturally develop by the pressure of the governing idea and the inherent need into a closer unity and even perhaps in the long end into a common supreme government which may endure till the defects of the system established and the rise of other ideals and tendencies inconsistent with its maintenance lead either to a new radical change or to its entire dissolution into its natural elements and constituents. We have seen also that such a union is likely to take place upon the basis of the present world somewhat modiﬁed by the changes that must now inevitably take place, — international changes that are likely to be adjustments rather than the introduction of a new radical principle and social changes within the nations themselves of a much more farreaching character. It will take place, that is to say, as between the present free nations and colonising empires, but with an internal arrangement of society and an administrative mould progressing rapidly towards a rigorous State socialism and equality by which the woman and the worker will chieﬂy proﬁt. For these are the master tendencies of the hour. Certainly, no one can conﬁdently predict that the hour will victoriously prevail over the whole future.


Sri Aurobindo: We know not what surprises of the great human drama, what violent resurgence of the old nation-idea, what collisions, failures, unexpected results in the working out of the new social tendencies, what revolt of the human spirit against a burdensome and mechanical State collectivism, what growth and power perhaps of a gospel of philosophic anarchism missioned to reassert man’s ineradicable yearning for individual liberty and free selffulﬁlment, what unforeseen religious and spiritual revolutions may not intervene in the very course of this present movement of mankind and divert it to quite another denouement. The human mind has not yet reached that illumination or that sure science by which it can forecast securely even its morrow.   Let us suppose, however, that no such unexpected factor intervenes. The political unity of mankind, of a sort, may then be realised.


Sri Aurobindo: The question still remains whether it is desirable that it should be realised thus and now, and if so, under what circumstances, with what necessary conditions in the absence of which the result gained can only be temporary as were former partial uniﬁcations of mankind. And ﬁrst let us remember at what cost humanity has gained the larger unities it has already achieved in the past. The immediate past has actually created for us the nation, the natural homogeneous empire of nations kin in race and culture or united by geographical necessity and mutual attractions, and the artiﬁcial heterogeneous empire secured by conquest, maintained by force, by yoke of law, by commercial and military colonisation, but not yet welded into true psychological unities. Each of these principles of aggregation has given some actual gain or some possibility of progress to mankind at large, but each has brought with it its temporary or inherent disadvantages and inﬂicted some wound on the complete human ideal.  The creation of a new unity, when it proceeds by external and mechanical processes, has usually and indeed almost by a practical necessity to go through a process of internal contraction before the unit can indulge again in a new and free expansion of its inner life; for its ﬁrst need and instinct is to form and secure its own existence.


Sri Aurobindo: To enforce its unity is its predominant impulse and to that paramount need it has to sacriﬁce the diversity, harmonious complexity, richness of various material, freedom of inner relations without which the true perfection of life is impossible. In order to enforce a strong and sure unity it has to create a paramount centre, a concentrated State power, whether of king or military aristocracy or plutocratic class or other governing contrivance, to which the liberty and free life of the individual, the commune, the city, the region or any other lesser unit has to be subordinated and sacriﬁced. At the same time, there is a tendency to create a ﬁrmly mechanised and rigid state of society, sometimes a hierarchy of classes or orders in which the lower is appointed to an inferior place and duty and bound down to a narrower life than the higher, such as the hierarchy of king, clergy, aristocracy, middle class, peasantry, servile class which replaced in Europe the rich and free existence of the city and the tribe or else a rigid caste system such as the one that replaced in India the open and natural existence of the vigorous Aryan clans. Moreover, as we have already seen, the active and stimulating participation of all or most in the full vigour of the common life, which was the great advantage of the small but free earlier communities, is much more difﬁcult in a larger aggregate and is at ﬁrst impossible. In its place, there is the concentration of the force of life into a dominant centre or at most a governing and directing class or classes, while the great mass of the community is left in a relative torpor and enjoys only a minimum and indirect share of that vitality in so far as it is allowed to ﬁlter down from above and indirectly affect the grosser, poorer and narrower life below.


Sri Aurobindo: This at least is the phenomenon we see in the historic period of human development which preceded and led up to the creation of the modern world. In the future also the need of a concentrating and formative rigidity may be felt for the ﬁrm formation and consolidation of the new political and social forms that are taking or will take its place.  The small human communities in which all can easily take an active part and in which ideas and movements are swiftly and vividly felt by all and can be worked out rapidly and thrown into form without the need of a large and difﬁcult organisation, turn naturally towards freedom as soon as they cease to be preoccupied with the ﬁrst absorbing necessity of self-preservation.  Such forms as absolute monarchy or a despotic oligarchy, an infallible Papacy or sacrosanct theocratic class cannot ﬂourish at ease in such an environment; they lack that advantage of distance from the mass and that remoteness from exposure to the daily criticism of the individual mind on which their prestige depends and they have not, to justify them, the pressing need of uniformity among large multitudes and over vast areas which they elsewhere serve to establish and maintain. Therefore we ﬁnd in Rome the monarchical regime unable to maintain itself and in Greece looked upon as an unnatural and brief usurpation, while the oligarchical form of government, though more vigorous, could not assure to itself, except in a purely military community like Sparta, either a high and exclusive supremacy or a ﬁrm duration.


Sri Aurobindo: The tendency to a democratic freedom in which every man had a natural part in the civic life as well as in the cultural institutions of the State, an equal voice in the determination of law and policy and as much share in their execution as could be assured to him by his right as a citizen and his capacity as an individual, — this democratic tendency was inborn in the spirit and inherent in the form of the city state. In Rome the tendency was equally present but could not develop so rapidly or fulﬁl itself so entirely as in Greece because of the necessities of a military and conquering State which needed either an absolute head, an, or a small oligarchic body to direct its foreign policy and its military conduct; but even so, the democratic element was always present and the democratic tendency was so strong that it began to work and grow from almost prehistoric times even in the midst of Rome’s constant struggle for self-preservation and expansion and was only suspended by such supreme struggles as the great duel with Carthage for the empire of the Mediterranean. In India the early communities were free societies in which the king was only a military head or civic chief; we ﬁnd the democratic element persisting in the days of Buddha and surviving in small States in the days of Chandragupta and Megasthenes even when great bureaucratically governed monarchies and empires were ﬁnally replacing the free earlier polity. It was only in proportion as the need for a large organisation of Indian life over the whole peninsula or at least the northern part of it made itself increasingly felt that the form of absolute monarchy grew upon the country and the learned and sacerdotal caste imposed its theocratic domination over the communal mind and its rigid Shastra as the binding chain of social unity and the binding link of a national culture.  As in the political and civic, so in the social life.


Sri Aurobindo: A certain democratic equality is almost inevitable in a small community; the opposite phenomenon of strong class distinctions and superiorities may establish itself during the military period of the clan or tribe, but cannot long be maintained in the close intimacy of a settled city state except by artiﬁcial means such as were employed by Sparta and Venice. Even when the distinction remains, its exclusiveness is blunted and cannot deepen and intensify itself into the nature of a ﬁxed hierarchy. The natural social type of the small community is such as we see in Athens, where not only Cleon, the tanner, exercised as strong a political inﬂuence as the highborn and wealthy Nicias and the highest ofﬁces and civic functions were open to men of all classes, but in social functions and connections also there was a free association and equality.  We see a similar democratic equality, though of a different type, in the earlier records of Indian civilisation. The rigid hierarchy of castes with the pretensions and arrogance of the caste spirit was a later development; in the simpler life of old, difference or even superiority of function did not carry with it a sense of personal or class superiority: at the beginning, the most sacred religious and social function, that of the Rishi and sacriﬁcer, seems to have been open to men of all classes and occupations.


Sri Aurobindo: Theocracy, caste and absolute kingship grew in force like the Church and the monarchical power in mediaeval Europe under the compulsion of the new circumstances created by the growth of large social and political aggregates.  Societies advancing in culture under these conditions of the early Greek, Roman and Indian city states and clan-nations were bound to develop a general vividness of life and dynamic force of culture and creation which the later national aggregates were obliged to forego and could only recover after a long period of self-formation in which the difﬁculties attending the development of a new organism had to be met and overcome. The cultural and civic life of the Greek city, of which Athens was the supreme achievement, a life in which living itself was an education, where the poorest as well as the richest sat together in the theatre to see and judge the dramas of Sophocles and Euripides and the Athenian trader and shopkeeper took part in the subtle philosophical conversations of Socrates, created for Europe not only its fundamental political types and ideals but practically all its basic forms of intellectual, philosophical, literary and artistic culture. The equally vivid political, juridical and military life of the single city of Rome created for Europe its types of political activity, military discipline and science, jurisprudence of law and equity and even its ideals of empire and colonisation. And in India it was that early vivacity of spiritual life of which we catch glimpses in the Vedic, Upanishadic and Buddhistic literature, which created the religions, philosophies, spiritual disciplines that have since by direct or indirect inﬂuence spread something of their spirit and knowledge over Asia and Europe.


Sri Aurobindo: And everywhere the root of this free, generalised and widely pulsating vital and dynamic force, which the modern world is only now in some sort recovering, was amid all differences the same; it was the complete participation not of a limited class, but of the individual generally in the many-sided life of the community, the sense each had of being full of the energy of all and of a certain freedom to grow, to be himself, to achieve, to think, to create in the undammed ﬂood of that universal energy. It is this condition, this relation between the individual and the aggregate which modern life has tried to some extent to restore in a cumbrous, clumsy and imperfect fashion but with much vaster forces of life and thought at its disposal than early humanity could command.  It is possible that, if the old city states and clan-nations could have endured and modiﬁed themselves so as to create larger free aggregates without losing their own life in the new mass, many problems might have been solved with a greater simplicity, direct vision and truth to Nature which we have now to settle in a very complex and cumbrous fashion and under peril of enormous dangers and wide-spread convulsions. But that was not to be. That early life had vital defects which it could not cure.


Sri Aurobindo: In the case of the Mediterranean nations, two most important exceptions have to be made to the general participation of all individuals in the full civic and cultural life of the community; for that participation was denied to the slave and hardly granted at all in the narrow life conceded to the woman. In India the institution of slavery was practically absent and the woman had at ﬁrst a freer and more digniﬁed position than in Greece and Rome; but the slave was soon replaced by the proletariate, called in India the Shudra, and the increasing tendency to deny the highest beneﬁts of the common life and culture to the Shudra and the woman brought down Indian society to the level of its Western congeners. It is possible that these two great problems of economic serfdom and the subjection of woman might have been attacked and solved in the early community if it had lived longer, as it has now been attacked and is in process of solution in the modern State. But it is doubtful; only in Rome do we glimpse certain initial tendencies which might have turned in that direction and they never went farther than faint hints of a future possibility.  More vital was the entire failure of this early form of human society to solve the question of the interrelations between community and community.


Sri Aurobindo: War remained their normal relation.  All attempts at free federation failed, and military conquest was left as the sole means of uniﬁcation. The attachment to the small aggregate in which each man felt himself to be most alive had generated a sort of mental and vital insularity which could not accommodate itself to the new and wider ideas which philosophy and political thought, moved by the urge of larger needs and tendencies, brought into the ﬁeld of life. Therefore the old States had to dissolve and disappear, in India into the huge bureaucratic empires of the Gupta and the Maurya to which the Pathan, the Moghul and the Englishman succeeded, in the West into the vast military and commercial expansions achieved by Alexander, by the Carthaginian oligarchy and by the Roman republic and empire. The latter were not national but supranational unities, premature attempts at too large uniﬁcations of mankind that could not really be accomplished with any ﬁnality until the intermediate nation-unit had been fully and healthily developed.


Sri Aurobindo: The creation of the national aggregate was therefore reserved for the millennium that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire; and in order to solve this problem left to it, the world during that period had to recoil from many and indeed most of the gains which had been achieved for mankind by the city states. Only after this problem was solved could there be any real effort to develop not only a ﬁrmly organised but a progressive and increasingly perfected community, not only a strong mould of social life but the free growth and completeness of life itself within that mould. This cycle we must brieﬂy study before we can consider whether the intervention of a new effort at a larger aggregation is likely to be free from the danger of a new recoil in which the inner progress of the race will have, at least temporarily, to be sacriﬁced in order to concentrate effort on the development and afﬁrmation of a massive external unity.  Chapter XII


Sri Aurobindo: E HAVE seen that the building of the true national unit was a problem of human aggregation left over by the ancient world to the mediaeval. The ancient world started from the tribe, the city state, the clan, the small regional state — all of them minor units living in the midst of other like units which were similar to them in general type, kin usually in language and most often or very largely in race, marked off at least from other divisions of humanity by a tendency towards a common civilisation and protected in that community with each other and in their diversity from others by favourable geographical circumstances. Thus Greece, Italy, Gaul, Egypt, China, Medo-Persia, India, Arabia, Israel, all began with a loose cultural and geographical aggregation which made them separate and distinct culture-units before they could become nation-units.  Within that loose unity the tribe, clan or city or regional states formed in the vague mass so many points of distinct, vigorous and compact unity which felt indeed more and more powerfully the divergence and opposition of their larger cultural oneness to the outside world but could feel also and often much more nearly and acutely their own divergences, contrasts and oppositions.  Where this sense of local distinctness was most acute, there the problem of national uniﬁcation was necessarily more difﬁcult and its solution, when made, tended to be more illusory.


Sri Aurobindo: The solution was in most cases attempted. In Egypt and Judaea it was successfully found even in that ancient cycle of historical evolution; but in the latter instance certainly, in the former probably, the full result came only by the hard discipline of subjection to a foreign yoke. Where this discipline was lacking, where the nation-unity was in some sort achieved from within, — usually through the conquest of all the rest by one strong clan, city, regional unit such as Rome, Macedon, the mountain clans of Persia, — the new State, instead of waiting to base ﬁrmly its achievement and lay the foundations of the national unity deep and strong, proceeded at once to overshoot its immediate necessity and embark on a career of conquest. Before the psychological roots of the national unity had been driven deep, before the nation was ﬁrmly self-conscious, irresistibly possessed of its oneness and invincibly attached to it, the governing State impelled by the military impulsion which had carried it so far attempted immediately to form by the same means a larger empire-aggregate. Assyria, Macedon, Rome, Persia, later on Arabia followed all the same tendency and the same cycle.


Sri Aurobindo: The great invasion of Europe and Western Asia by the Gaelic race and the subsequent disunion and decline of Gaul were probably due to the same phenomenon and proceeded from a still more immature and ill-formed uniﬁcation than the Macedonian.  All became the starting-point of great empire-movements before they had become the keystone of securely built national unities.  These empires, therefore, could not endure. Some lasted longer than others because they had laid down ﬁrmer foundations in the central nation-unity, as did Rome in Italy.


Sri Aurobindo: In Greece Philip, the ﬁrst uniﬁer, made a rapid but imperfect sketch of uniﬁcation, the celerity of which had been made possible by the previous and yet looser Spartan domination; and had he been followed by successors of a patient talent rather than by a man of vast imagination and supreme genius, this ﬁrst rough practical outline might have been ﬁlled in, strengthened and an enduring work achieved. One who ﬁrst founds on a large scale and rapidly, needs always as his successor a man with the talent or the genius for organisation rather than an impetus for expansion. A Caesar followed by an Augustus meant a work of massive durability; a Philip followed by an Alexander an achievement of great importance to the world by its results, but in itself a mere splendour of short-lived brilliance. Rome, to whom careful Nature denied any man of commanding genius until she had ﬁrmly uniﬁed Italy and laid the basis of her empire, was able to build much more ﬁrmly; nevertheless, she founded that empire not as the centre and head of a great nation, but still as a dominant city using a subject Italy for the springing-board to leap upon and subjugate the surrounding world. Therefore she had to face a much more difﬁcult problem of assimilation, that of nation-nebulae and formed or inchoate cultures different from her own, before she had achieved and learned to apply to the new problem the art of complete and absolute uniﬁcation on a smaller and easier scale, before she had welded into one living national organism, no longer Roman but Italian, the elements of difference and community offered by the Gallic, Latin, Umbrian, Oscan and Graeco-Apulian factors in ancient Italy.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore, although her empire endured for several centuries, it achieved temporary conservation at the cost of energy of vitality and inner vigour; it accomplished neither the nation-unit nor the durable empire-unity, and like other ancient empires it had to collapse and make room for a new era of true nation-building.   It is necessary to emphasise where the error lay. The administrative, political, economic organisation of mankind in aggregates of smaller or greater size is a work which belongs at its basis to the same order of phenomena as the creation of vital organisms in physical Nature. It uses, that is to say, primarily external and physical methods governed by the principles of physical life-energy intent on the creation of living forms, although its inner object is to deliver, to manifest and to bring into secure working a supraphysical, a psychological principle latent behind the operations of the life and the body.


Sri Aurobindo: To build a strong and durable body and vital functioning for a distinct, powerful, well-centred and well-diffused corporate ego is its whole aim and method. In this process, as we have seen, ﬁrst smaller distinct units in a larger loose unity are formed; these have a strong psychological existence and a well-developed body and vital functioning, but in the larger mass the psychological sense and the vital energy are present but unorganised and without power of deﬁnite functioning, and the body is a ﬂuid quantity or a half-nebulous or at most a half-ﬂuid, half-solidiﬁed mass, a plasm rather than a body. This has in its turn to be formed and organised; a ﬁrm physical shape has to be made for it, a well-deﬁned vital functioning and a clear psychological reality, self-consciousness and mental will-to-be.  Thus a new larger unity is formed; and this again ﬁnds itself among a number of similar unities which it looks on ﬁrst as hostile and quite different from itself, then enters into a sort of community in difference with them, till again we ﬁnd repeated the original phenomenon of a number of smaller distinct units in a wider loose unity. The contained units are larger and more complex than before, the containing unity is also larger and more complex than before, but the essential position is the same and a similar problem presents itself for solution.


Sri Aurobindo: Thus in the beginning there was the phenomenon of city states and regional peoples coexisting as disunited parts of a loose geographical and cultural unity, Italy or Hellas, and there was the problem of creating the Hellenic or Italian nation. Afterwards there came instead the phenomenon of nation-units formed or in formation coexisting as disunited parts of the loose geographical and cultural unity, ﬁrst, of Christendom, then, of Europe, and with it the problem of the union of this Christendom or of this Europe which, though more than once conceived by individual statesmen or political thinkers, was never achieved nor even the ﬁrst steps attempted. Before its difﬁculties could be solved, the modern movement with its unifying forces has presented to us the new and more complex phenomenon of a number of nationunits and empire-units embedded in the loose, but growing lifeinterdependence and commercial close-connection of mankind, and the attendant problem of the uniﬁcation of mankind already overshadows the unfulﬁlled dream of the uniﬁcation of Europe.  In physical Nature vital organisms cannot live entirely on themselves; they live either by interchange with other vital organisms or partly by that interchange and partly by devouring others; for these are the processes of assimilation common to separated physical life. In uniﬁcation of life, on the other hand, an assimilation is possible which goes beyond this alternative of either the devouring of one by another or a continued separate distinctness which limits assimilation to a mutual reception of the energies discharged by one life upon another.


Sri Aurobindo: There can be instead an association of units consciously subordinating themselves to a general unity which is developed in the process of their coming together. Some of these, indeed, are killed and used as material for new elements, but all cannot be so treated, all cannot be devoured by one dominant unit; for in that case there is no uniﬁcation, no creation of a larger unity, no continued greater life, but only a temporary survival of the devourer by the digestion and utilisation of the energy of the devoured. In the uniﬁcation of human aggregates, this then is the problem, how the component units shall be subordinated to a new unity without their death and disappearance.  The weakness of the old empire-unities created by conquest was that they tended to destroy the smaller units they assimilated, as did imperial Rome, and to turn them into food for the life of the dominant organ. Gaul, Spain, Africa, Egypt were thus killed, turned into dead matter and their energy drawn into the centre, Rome; thus the empire became a great dying mass on which the life of Rome fed for several centuries.


Sri Aurobindo: In such a method, however, the exhaustion of the life in the subject parts must end by leaving the dominant voracious centre without any source for new storage of energy. At ﬁrst the best intellectual force of the conquered provinces ﬂowed to Rome and their vital energy poured into it a great supply of military force and governing ability, but eventually both failed and ﬁrst the intellectual energy of Rome and then its military and political ability died away in the midst of the general death. Nor would Roman civilisation have lived even for so long but for the new ideas and motives it received from the East. This interchange, however, had neither the vividness nor the constant ﬂow which marks the incoming and the return of ever new tides of thought and motives of life in the modern world and it could not really revivify the low vitality of the imperial body nor even arrest very long the process of its decay. When the Roman grasp loosened, the world which it had held so ﬁrmly constricted had been for long a huge, decorous, magniﬁcently organised death-in-life incapable of new origination or self-regeneration; vitality could only be restored through the inrush of the vigorous barbarian world from the plains of Germany, the steppes beyond the Danube and the deserts of Arabia.


Sri Aurobindo: Dissolution had to precede a movement of sounder construction.  In the mediaeval period of nation-building, we see Nature mending this earlier error. When we speak indeed of the errors of Nature, we use a ﬁgure illegitimately borrowed from our human psychology and experience; for in Nature there are no errors but only the deliberate measure of her paces traced and retraced in a preﬁgured rhythm, of which each step has a meaning and its place in the action and reaction of her gradual advance. The crushing domination of Roman uniformity was a device, not to kill out permanently, but to discourage in their excessive separative vitality the old smaller units, so that when they revived again they might not present an insuperable obstacle to the growth of a true national unity. What the mere nation-unity may lose by not passing through this cruel discipline, — we leave aside the danger it brings of an actual death like the Assyrian or Chaldean as well as the spiritual and other gains that may accrue by avoiding it, — is shown in the example of India where the Maurya, Gupta, Andhra, Moghul empires, huge and powerful and wellorganised as they were, never succeeded in passing a steam-roller over the too strongly independent life of the subordinate unities from the village community to the regional or linguistic area.


Sri Aurobindo: It has needed the pressure of a rule neither indigenous in origin nor locally centred, the dominance of a foreign nation entirely alien in culture and morally armoured against the sympathies and attractions of India’s cultural atmosphere to do in a century this work which two thousand years of a looser imperialism had failed to accomplish. Such a process implies necessarily a cruel and often dangerous pressure and breaking up of old institutions; for Nature tired of the obstinate immobility of an age-long resistance seems to care little how many beautiful and valuable things are destroyed so long as her main end is accomplished: but we may be sure that if destruction is done, it is because for that end the destruction was indispensable.  In Europe, after the Roman pressure was removed, the city state and regional nation revived as elements of a new construction; but except in one country and curiously enough in Italy itself the city state offered no real resistance to the process of national uniﬁcation. We may ascribe its strong resuscitation in Italy to two circumstances, ﬁrst, to the premature Roman oppression of the ancient free city-life of Italy before it had realised its full potentialities and, secondly, to its survival in seed both by the prolonged civil life of Rome itself and by the persistence in the Italian of a sense of separate life, oppressed but never quite ground out of existence as was the separate clan-life of Gaul and Spain or the separate city-life of Greece.  Thus psychologically the Italian city state neither died satisﬁed and fulﬁlled nor was broken up beyond recall; it revived in new incarnations.


Sri Aurobindo: And this revival was disastrous to the nation-life of Italy, though an incalculable boon and advantage to the culture and civilisation of the world; for as the city-life of Greece had originally created, so the city-life of Italy recovered, renewed and gave in a new form to our modern times the art, literature, thought and science of the Graeco-Roman world. Elsewhere, the city-unit revived only in the shape of the free or half-free municipalities of mediaeval France, Flanders and Germany; and these were at no time an obstacle to uniﬁcation, but rather helped to form a subconscious basis for it and in the meanwhile to prevent by rich impulses and free movement of thought and art the mediaeval tendency to intellectual uniformity, stagnation and obscuration.  The old clan-nation perished, except in countries like Ireland and Northern and Western Scotland which had not undergone the Roman pressure, and there it was as fatal to uniﬁcation as the city state in Italy; it prevented Ireland from evolving an organised unity and the Highland Celts from amalgamating with the Anglo-Celtic Scotch nation until the yoke of England passed over them and did what the Roman rule would have done if it had not been stayed in its expansion by the Grampians and the Irish seas. In the rest of Western Europe, the work done by the Roman rule was so sound that even the domination of the Western countries by the tribal nations of Germany failed to revive the old strongly marked and obstinately separative clannation. It created in its stead the regional kingdoms of Germany and the feudal and provincial divisions of France and Spain; but it was only in Germany, which like Ireland and the Scotch highlands had not endured the Roman yoke, that this regional life proved a serious obstacle to uniﬁcation.


Sri Aurobindo: In France it seemed for a time to prevent it, but in reality it resisted only long enough to make itself of value as an element of richness and variation in the ﬁnal French unity. The unexampled perfection of that unity is a sign of the secret wisdom concealed in the prolonged process we watch through the history of France which seems to a superﬁcial glance so miserable and distracted, so long an alternation of anarchy with feudal or monarchic despotism, so different from the gradual, steady and much more orderly development of the national life of England. But in England the necessary variation and richness of the ultimate organism was otherwise provided for by the great difference of the races that formed the new nation and by the persistence of Wales, Ireland and Scotland as separate cultural units with a subordinate self-consciousness of their own in the larger unity.  The European cycle of nation-building differs therefore from the ancient cycle which led from the regional and city state to the empire, ﬁrst, in its not overshooting itself by proceeding towards a larger uniﬁcation to the neglect of the necessary intermediate aggregate, secondly, in its slow and ripening progression through three successive stages by which unity was secured and yet the constituent elements not killed nor prematurely nor unduly oppressed by the instruments of uniﬁcation. The ﬁrst stage progressed through a long balancing of centripetal and centrifugal tendencies in which the feudal system provided a principle of order and of a loose but still organic unity.


Sri Aurobindo: The second was a movement of uniﬁcation and increasing uniformity in which certain features of the ancient imperial system of Rome were repeated, but with a less crushing force and exhausting tendency. It was marked ﬁrst by the creation of a metropolitan centre which began to draw to it, like Rome, the best lifeenergies of all the other parts. A second feature was the growth of an absolute sovereign authority whose function was to impose a legal, administrative, political and linguistic uniformity and centralisation on the national life. A third sign of this movement was the establishment of a governing spiritual head and body which served to impose a similar uniformity of religious thought and intellectual education and opinion. This unifying pressure too far pursued might have ended disastrously like the Roman but for a third stage of revolt and diffusion which broke or subordinated these instruments, feudalism, monarchy, Church authority as soon as their work had been done and substituted a new movement directed towards the diffusion of the national life through a strong and well-organised political, legal, social and cultural freedom and equality.


Sri Aurobindo: Its trend has been to endeavour that as in the ancient city, so in the modern nation, all classes and all individuals should enjoy the beneﬁts and participate in the free energy of the released national existence.  This third stage of national life enjoys the advantages of unity and sufﬁcient uniformity created by the second and is able to safely utilise anew the possibilities of regional and city-life saved from entire destruction by the ﬁrst. By these gradations of national progress, it has been made increasingly possible for our modern times to envisage, if and where it is willed or needed, the idea of a federated nation or federal empire based securely upon a fundamental and well-realised psychological unity: this indeed was already achieved in a simple type in Germany and in America. Also we can move now safely, if we will, towards a partial decentralisation through subordinate governments, communes and provincial cities which may help to cure the malady of an excessive metropolitan absorption of the best national energies and facilitate their free circulation through many centres and plexuses. At the same time, we contemplate the organised use of a State intelligently representative of the whole conscious, active, vitalised nation as a means for the perfection of the life of the individual and the community.


Sri Aurobindo: This is the point which the development of the nation-aggregate has reached at the moment when we are again confronted either, according to future trends, with the wider problem of the imperial aggregate or the still vaster problems created by the growing cultural unity and commercial and political interdependence of all mankind.  Chapter XIII  HE THREE stages of development which have marked the mediaeval and modern evolution of the nation-type may be regarded as the natural process where a new form of unity has to be created out of complex conditions and heterogeneous materials by an external rather than an internal process. The external method tries always to mould the psychological condition of men into changed forms and habits under the pressure of circumstances and institutions rather than by the direct creation of a new psychological condition which would, on the contrary, develop freely and ﬂexibly its own appropriate and serviceable social forms. In such a process there must be in the nature of things, ﬁrst, some kind of looser yet sufﬁciently compelling order of society and common type of civilisation to serve as a framework or scaffolding within which the new ediﬁce shall arise.


Sri Aurobindo: Next, there must come naturally a period of stringent organisation directed towards unity and centrality of control and perhaps a general levelling and uniformity under that central direction. Last, if the new organism is not to fossilise and stereotype its life, if it is to be still a living and vigorous creation of Nature , there must come a period of free internal development as soon as the formation is assured and unity has become a mental and vital habit. This freer internal activity assured in its heart and at its basis by the formed needs, ideas and instincts of the community will no longer bring with it the peril of disorder, disruption or arrest of the secure growth and formation of the organism.  The form and principle of the ﬁrst looser system must depend upon the past history and present conditions of the elements that have to be welded into the new unity.


Sri Aurobindo: But it is noticeable that both in Europe and Asia there was a common tendency, which we cannot trace to any close interchange of ideas and must therefore attribute to the operation of the same natural cause and necessity, towards the evolution of a social hierarchy based on a division according to four different social activities, — spiritual function, political domination and the double economic function of mercantile production and interchange and dependent labour or service. The spirit, form and equipoise worked out were very different in different parts of the world according to the bent of the community and its circumstances, but the initial principle was almost identical.  The motive-force everywhere was the necessity of a large effective form of common social life marked by ﬁxity of status through which individual and small communal interests might be brought under the yoke of a sufﬁcient religious, political and economic unity and likeness. It is notable that Islamic civilisation, with its dominant principle of equality and brotherhood in the faith and its curious institution of a slavery which did not prevent the slave from rising even to the throne, was never able to evolve such a form of society and failed, in spite of its close contact with political and progressive Europe, to develop strong and living, well-organised and conscious nation-units even after the disruption of the empire of the Caliphs; it is only now under the pressure of modern ideas and conditions that this is being done.  But even where this preparatory stage was effectively brought into existence, the subsequent stages did not necessarily follow.


Sri Aurobindo: The feudal period of Europe with its four orders of the clergy, the king and nobles, the bourgeoisie and the proletariate has a sufﬁciently close resemblance to the Indian fourfold order of the sacerdotal, military and mercantile classes and the Shudras. The Indian system took its characteristic stamp from a different order of ideas more prominently religious and ethical than political, social or economic; but still, practically, the dominant function of the system was social and economic and there seems at ﬁrst sight to be no reason why it should not have followed, with whatever differences of detail, the common evolution. Japan with its great feudal order under the spiritual and secular headship of the Mikado and afterwards the double headship of the Mikado and the Shogun evolved one of the most vigorous and self-conscious nation-units the world has seen.  China with its great learned class uniting in one the Brahmin and Kshatriya functions of spiritual and secular knowledge and executive rule and its Emperor and Son of Heaven for head and type of the national unity succeeded in becoming a united nation.  The different result in India, apart from other causes, was due to the different evolution of the social order.


Sri Aurobindo: Elsewhere that evolution turned in the direction of a secular organisation and headship; it created within the nation itself a clear political selfconsciousness and, as a consequence, either the subordination of the sacerdotal class to the military and administrative or else their equality or even their fusion under a common spiritual and secular head. In mediaeval India, on the contrary, it turned towards the social dominance of the sacerdotal class and the substitution of a common spiritual for a common political consciousness as the basis of the national feeling. No lasting secular centre was evolved, no great imperial or kingly head which by its prestige, power, antiquity and claim to general reverence and obedience could over-balance or even merely balance this sacerdotal prestige and predominance and create a sense of political as well as spiritual and cultural oneness.  The struggle between the Church and the monarchical State is one of the most important and vital features of the history of Europe. Had that conﬂict ended in an opposite result, the whole future of humanity would have been in jeopardy.


Sri Aurobindo: As it was, the Church was obliged to renounce its claim to independence and dominance over the temporal power. Even in the nations which remained Catholic, a real independence and dominance of the temporal authority was successfully vindicated; for the King of France exercised a control over the Gallican Church and clergy which rendered all effective interference of the Pope in French affairs impossible. In Spain, in spite of the close alliance between Pope and King and the theoretical admission of the former’s complete spiritual authority, it was really the temporal head who decided the ecclesiastical policy and commanded the terrors of the Inquisition. In Italy, the immediate presence of the spiritual head of Catholicism in Rome was a great moral obstacle to the development of a politically united nation; the passionate determination of the liberated Italian people to establish its King in Rome was really a symbol of the law that a self-conscious and politically organised nation can have only one supreme and central authority admitted in its midst and that must be the secular power. The nation which has reached or is reaching this stage must either separate the religious and spiritual claim from its common secular and political life by individualising religion or else it must unite the two by the alliance of the State and the Church to uphold the single authority of the temporal head or combine the spiritual and temporal headship in one authority as was done in Japan and China and in England of the Reformation.


Sri Aurobindo: Even in India the people which ﬁrst developed some national self-consciousness not of a predominantly spiritual character were the Rajputs, especially of Mewar, to whom the Raja was in every way the head of society and of the nation; and the peoples which having achieved national selfconsciousness came nearest to achieving also organised political unity were the Sikhs for whom Guru Govind Singh deliberately devised a common secular and spiritual centre in the Khalsa, and the Mahrattas who not only established a secular head, representative of the conscious nation, but so secularised themselves that, as it were, the whole people indiscriminately, Brahmin and Shudra, became for a time potentially a people of soldiers, politicians and administrators.  In other words, the institution of a ﬁxed social hierarchy, while it seems to have been a necessary stage for the ﬁrst tendencies of national formation, needed to modify itself and prepare its own dissolution if the later stages were to be rendered possible. An instrument good for a certain work and set of conditions, if it is still retained when other work has to be done and conditions change, becomes necessarily an obstacle. The direction needed was a change from the spiritual authority of one class and the political authority of another to a centralisation of the common life of the evolving nation under a secular rather than a religious head or, if the religious tendency in the people be too strong to separate things spiritual and temporal, under a national head who shall be the fountain of authority in both departments. Especially was it necessary for the creation of a political self-consciousness, without which no separate nationunit can be successfully formed, that the sentiments, activities, instruments proper to its creation should for a time take the lead and all others stand behind and support them.


Sri Aurobindo: A Church or a dominant sacerdotal caste remaining within its own function cannot form the organised political unity of a nation; for it is governed by other than political and administrative considerations and cannot be expected to subordinate to them its own characteristic feelings and interests. It can only be otherwise if the religious caste or sacerdotal class become also as in Tibet the actually ruling political class of the country. In India, the dominance of a caste governed by sacerdotal, religious and partly by spiritual interests and considerations, a caste which dominated thought and society and determined the principles of the national life but did not actually rule and administer, has always stood in the way of the development followed by the more secular-minded European and Mongolian peoples. It is only now after the advent of European civilisation when the Brahmin caste has not only lost the best part of its exclusive hold on the national life but has largely secularised itself, that political and secular considerations have come into the forefront, a pervading political self-consciousness has been awakened and the organised unity of the nation, as distinct from a spiritual and cultural oneness, made possible in fact and not only as an unshaped subconscious tendency.  The second stage of the development of the nation-unit has been, then, the modiﬁcation of the social structure so as to make room for a powerful and visible centre of political and administrative unity.


Sri Aurobindo: This stage is necessarily attended by a strong tendency to the abrogation of even such liberties as a ﬁxed social hierarchy provides and the concentration of power in the hands, usually, of a dominant if not always an absolute monarchical government. By modern democratic ideas kingship is only tolerated either as an inoperative ﬁgure-head or a servant of the State life or a convenient centre of the executive administration, it is no longer indispensable as a real control; but the historical importance of a powerful kingship in the evolution of the nationtype, as it actually developed in mediaeval times, cannot be exaggerated. Even in liberty-loving, insular and individualistic England, the Plantagenets and Tudors were the real and active nucleus round which the nation grew into ﬁrm form and into adult strength; and in Continental countries the part played by the Capets and their successors in France, by the House of Castile in Spain and by the Romanoffs and their predecessors in Russia is still more prominent. In the last of these instances, one might almost say that without the Ivans, Peters and Catherines there would have been no Russia. And even in modern times, the almost mediaeval role played by the Hohenzollerns in the uniﬁcation and growth of Germany was watched with an uneasy astonishment by the democratic peoples to whom such a phenomenon was no longer intelligible and seemed hardly to be serious.


Sri Aurobindo: But we may note also the same phenomenon in the ﬁrst period of formation of the new nations of the Balkans. The seeking for a king to centralise and assist their growth, despite all the strange comedies and tragedies which have accompanied it, becomes perfectly intelligible as a manifestation of the sense of the old necessity, not so truly necessary now but felt in the subconscious minds of these peoples. In the new formation of Japan into a nation of the modern type the Mikado played a similar role; the instinct of the renovators brought him out of his helpless seclusion to meet this inner need. The attempt of a brief dictatorship in revolutionary China to convert itself into a new national monarchy may be attributed quite as much to the same feeling in a practical mind as to mere personal ambition. It is a sense of this great role played by the kingship in centralising and shaping national life at the most critical stage of its growth which explains the tendency common in the East and not altogether absent from the history of the West to invest it with an almost sacred character; it explains also the passionate loyalty with which great national dynasties or their successors have been served even in the moment of their degeneration and downfall.


Sri Aurobindo: But this movement of national development, however salutary in its peculiar role, is almost fatally attended with that suppression of the internal liberties of the people which makes the modern mind so naturally though unscientiﬁcally harsh in its judgment of the old monarchical absolutism and its tendencies. For always this is a movement of concentration, stringency, uniformity, strong control and one-pointed direction; to universalise one law, one rule, one central authority is the need it has to meet, and therefore its spirit must be to enforce and centralise authority, to narrow or quite suppress liberty and free variation.  In England the period of the New Monarchy from Edward IV to Elizabeth, in France the great Bourbon period from Henry IV to Louis XIV, in Spain the epoch which extends from Ferdinand to Philip II, in Russia the rule of Peter the Great and Catherine were the time in which these nations reached their maturity, formed fully and conﬁrmed their spirit and attained to a robust organisation. And all these were periods of absolutism or of movement to absolutism and a certain foundation of uniformity or attempt to found it. This absolutism clothed already in its more primitive garb the reviving idea of the State and its right to impose its will on the life and thought and conscience of the people so as to make it one single, undivided, perfectly efﬁcient and perfectly directed mind and body.


Sri Aurobindo: It is from this point of view that we shall most intelligently understand the attempt of the Tudors and the Stuarts to impose both monarchical authority and religious uniformity on the people and seize the real sense of the religious wars in France, the Catholic monarchical rule in Spain with its atrocious method of the Inquisition and the oppressive will of the absolute Czars in Russia to impose also an absolute national Church. The effort failed in England because after Elizabeth it no longer answered to any genuine need; for the nation was already well-formed, strong and secure against disruption from without. Elsewhere it succeeded both in Protestant and Catholic countries, or in the rare cases as in Poland where this movement could not take place or failed, the result was disastrous. Certainly, it was everywhere an outrage on the human soul, but it was not merely due to any natural wickedness of the rulers; it was an inevitable stage in the formation of the nation-unit by political and mechanical means.  If it left England the sole country in Europe where liberty could progress by natural gradations, that was due, no doubt, largely to the strong qualities of the people but still more to its fortunate history and insular circumstances.


Sri Aurobindo: The monarchical State in this evolution crushed or subordinated the religious liberties of men and made a subservient or conciliated ecclesiastical order the priest of its divine right, Religion the handmaid of a secular throne. It destroyed the liberties of the aristocracy and left it its privileges, and these even were allowed only that it might support and buttress the power of the king. After using the bourgeoisie against the nobles, it destroyed, where it could, its real and living civic liberties and permitted only some outward forms and its parts of special right and privilege. As for the people, they had no liberties to be destroyed.  Thus the monarchical State concentrated in its own activities the whole national life.


Sri Aurobindo: The Church served it with its moral inﬂuence, the nobles with their military traditions and ability, the bourgeoisie with the talent or chicane of its lawyers and the literary genius or administrative power of its scholars, thinkers and men of inborn business capacity; the people gave taxes and served with their blood the personal and national ambitions of the monarchy. But all this powerful structure and closely-knit order of things was doomed by its very triumph and predestined to come down either with a crash or by a more or less unwilling gradual abdication before new necessities and agencies. It was tolerated and supported so long as the nation felt consciously or subconsciously its need and justiﬁcation; once that was fulﬁlled and ceased, there came inevitably the old questioning which, now grown fully self-conscious, could no longer be suppressed or permanently resisted. By changing the old order into a mere simulacrum the monarchy had destroyed its own base. The sacerdotal authority of the Church, once questioned on spiritual grounds, could not be long maintained by temporal means, by the sword and the law; the aristocracy keeping its privileges but losing its real functions became odious and questionable to the classes below it; the bourgeoisie conscious of its talent, irritated by its social and political inferiority, awakened by the voice of its thinkers, led the movement of revolt and appealed to the help of the populace; the masses — dumb, oppressed, suffering — rose with this new support which had been denied to them before and overturned the whole social hierarchy.


Sri Aurobindo: Hence the collapse of the old world and the birth of a new age.  We have already seen the inner justiﬁcation of this great revolutionary movement. The nation-unit is not formed and does not exist merely for the sake of existing; its purpose is to provide a larger mould of human aggregation in which the race, and not only classes and individuals, may move towards its full human development. So long as the labour of formation continues, this larger development may be held back and authority and order be accepted as the ﬁrst consideration, but not when the aggregate is sure of its existence and feels the need of an inner expansion. Then the old bonds have to be burst; the means of formation have to be discarded as obstacles to growth.


Sri Aurobindo: Liberty then becomes the watchword of the race. The ecclesiastical order which suppressed liberty of thought and new ethical and social development, has to be dispossessed of its despotic authority, so that man may be mentally and spiritually free. The monopolies and privileges of the king and aristocracy have to be destroyed, so that all may take their share of the national power, prosperity and activity. Finally, bourgeois capitalism has to be induced or forced to consent to an economic order in which suffering, poverty and exploitation shall be eliminated and the wealth of the community be more equally shared by all who help to create it. In all directions, men have to come into their own, realise the dignity and freedom of the manhood within them and give play to their utmost capacity.


Sri Aurobindo: For liberty is insufﬁcient, justice also is necessary and becomes a pressing demand; the cry for equality arises. Certainly, absolute equality is non-existent in this world; but the word was  aimed against the unjust and unnecessary inequalities of the old social order. Under a just social order, there must be an equal opportunity, an equal training for all to develop their faculties and to use them, and, so far as may be, an equal share in the advantages of the aggregate life as the right of all who contribute to the existence, vigour and development of that life by the use of their capacities. As we have noted, this need might have taken the form of an ideal of free cooperation guided and helped by a wise and liberal central authority expressing the common will, but it has actually reverted to the old notion of an absolute and efﬁcient State — no longer monarchical, ecclesiastical, aristocratic but secular, democratic and socialistic — with liberty sacriﬁced to the need of equality and aggregate efﬁciency.


Sri Aurobindo: The psychological causes of this reversion we shall not now consider.  Perhaps liberty and equality, liberty and authority, liberty and organised efﬁciency can never be quite satisfactorily reconciled so long as man individual and aggregate lives by egoism, so long as he cannot undergo a great spiritual and psychological change and rise beyond mere communal association to that third ideal which some vague inner sense made the revolutionary thinkers of France add to their watchwords of liberty and equality, — the greatest of all the three, though till now only an empty word on man’s lips, the ideal of fraternity or, less sentimentally and more truly expressed, an inner oneness. That no mechanism social, political, religious has ever created or can create; it must take birth in the soul and rise from hidden and divine depths within.   Chapter XIV


Sri Aurobindo: HE STUDY of the growth of the nation-unit under the pressure indeed of a growing inner need and idea but by the agency of political, economic and social forces, forms and instruments shows us a progress that began from a loose formation in which various elements were gathered together for uniﬁcation, proceeded through a period of strong concentration and coercion in which the conscious national ego was developed, fortiﬁed and provided with a centre and instruments of its organic life, and passed on to a ﬁnal period of assured separate existence and internal unity as against outside pressure in which liberty and an active and more and more equal share of all in the beneﬁts of the national life became possible. If the unity of the human race is to be brought about by the same means and agents and in a similar fashion to that of the nation, we should expect it to follow a similar course. That is at least the most visible probability and it seems to be consistent with the natural law of all creation which starts from the loose mass, the more or less amorphous vague of forces and materials and proceeds by contraction, constriction, solidiﬁcation into a ﬁrm mould in which the rich evolution of various forms of life is at last securely possible.  If we consider the actual state of the world and its immediate possibilities, we shall see that a ﬁrst period of loose formation and imperfect order is inevitable.


Sri Aurobindo: Neither the intellectual preparation of the human race nor the development of its sentiments nor the economic and political forces and conditions by which it is moved and preoccupied have reached to such a point of inner stress or external pressure as would warrant us in expecting a total change of the basis of our life or the establishment of a complete or a real unity. There cannot as yet be even a real external unity, far less a psychological oneness. It is true that the vague sense and need of something of the kind has been growing rapidly and the object lesson of the war brought the master idea of the future out of the nascent condition in which it was no more than the generous chimera of a few paciﬁsts or internationalist idealists. It came to be recognised that it contains in itself some force of eventual reality, and the voice of those who would cry it down as the pet notion of intellectual cranks and faddists had no longer the same volume and conﬁdence, because it was no longer so solidly supported by the common sense of the average man, that short-sighted common sense of the material mind which consists in a strong feeling for immediate actualities and an entire blindness to the possibilities of the future. But there has as yet been no long intellectual preparation of a more and more dominant thought cast out by the intellectuals of the age to remould the ideas of common men, nor has there been any such gathering to a head of the growing revolt against present conditions as would make it possible for vast masses of men seized by the passion for an ideal and by the hope of a new happiness for mankind to break up the present basis of things and construct a new scheme of collective life.


Sri Aurobindo: In another direction, the replacing of the individualistic basis of society by an increasing collectivism, there has been to a large extent such an intellectual preparation and gathering force of revolt; there the war has acted as a precipitative force and brought us much nearer to the possibility of a realised — not necessarily a democratic — State socialism. But there have been no such favourable preconditions for a strong movement of international uniﬁcation. No great effective outburst of a massed and dynamic idealism in this direction can be reasonably predicted. The preparation may have begun, it may have been greatly facilitated and hastened by recent events, but it is still only in its ﬁrst stages.  Under such conditions the ideas and schemes of the world’s intellectuals who would replan the whole status of international life altogether and from its roots in the light of general principles, are not likely to ﬁnd any immediate realisation.


Sri Aurobindo: In the absence of a general idealistic outburst of creative human hope which would make such changes possible, the future will be shaped not by the ideas of the thinker but by the practical mind of the politician which represents the average reason and temperament of the time and effects usually something much nearer the minimum than the maximum of what is possible. The average general mind of a great mass of men, while it is ready to listen to such ideas as it has been prepared to receive and is accustomed to seize on this or that notion with a partisan avidity, is yet ruled in its action not so much by its thought as by its interests, passions and prejudices. The politician and the statesman — and the world is now full of politicians but very empty of statesmen — act in accordance with this average general mind of the mass; the one is governed by it, the other has always to take it into chief account and cannot lead it where he will, unless he is one of those great geniuses and powerful personalities who unite a large mind and dynamic force of conception with an enormous power or inﬂuence over men. Moreover, the political mind has limitations of its own beyond those of the general average mind of the mass; it is even more respectful of the, more disinclined to great adventures in which the safe footing of the past has to be abandoned, more incapable of launching out into the uncertain and the new. To do that it must either be forced by general opinion or a powerful interest or else itself fall under the spell of a great new enthusiasm diffused in the mental atmosphere of the times.


Sri Aurobindo: If the politician mind is left entirely to itself, we could expect no better tangible result of the greatest international convulsion on record than a rearrangement of frontiers, a redistribution of power and possessions and a few desirable or undesirable developments of international, commercial and other relations.  That is one disastrous possibility leading to more disastrous convulsions — so long as the problem is not solved — against which the future of the world is by no means secure. Still, since the mind of humanity has been greatly moved and its sentiments powerfully awakened, since the sense is becoming fairly widespread that the old status of things is no longer tolerable and the undesirability of an international balance reposing on a ring of national egoisms held in check only by mutual fear and hesitation, by ineffective arbitration treaties and Hague tribunals and the blundering discords of a European Concert must be now fairly clear even to the politician mind, we might expect that some serious attempt towards the beginning of a new order should be the result of the moral collapse of the old. The passions and hatreds and selﬁsh national hopes raised by the war must certainly be a great obstacle in the way and may easily render futile or of a momentary stability any such beginning.  But, if nothing else, the mere exhaustion and internal reaction produced after the relaxing of the tensity of the struggle, might give time for new ideas, feelings, forces, events to emerge which will counteract this pernicious inﬂuence.