The Human Cycle

The Ideal of Human Unity

War and Self-Determination

CONTENTS

	Pre-Content
	Post-Content

	THE HUMAN CYCLE
	Chapter I The Cycle of Society
	Chapter II The Age of Individualism and Reason
	Chapter III The Coming of the Subjective Age
	Chapter IV The Discovery of the Nation-Soul
	Chapter V True and False Subjectivism
	Chapter VI The Objective and Subjective Views of Life
	Chapter VII The Ideal Law of Social Development
	Chapter VIII Civilisation and Barbarism
	Chapter IX Civilisation and Culture
	Chapter X Aesthetic and Ethical Culture
	Chapter XI The Reason as Governor of Life
	Chapter XII The Office and Limitations of the Reason
	Chapter XIII Reason and Religion
	Chapter XIV The Suprarational Beauty
	Chapter XV The Suprarational Good
	Chapter XVI The Suprarational Ultimate of Life
	Chapter XVII Religion as the Law of Life
	Chapter XVIII The Infrarational Age of the Cycl
	Chapter XIX The Curve of the Rational Age
	Chapter XX The End of the Curve of Reason
	Chapter XXI The Spiritual Aim and Life
	Chapter XXII The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation
	Chapter XXIII Conditions for the Coming of a Spiritual Age
	Chapter XXIV The Advent and Progress of the Spiritual Age

	THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY
	PART - I
	Chapter I The Turn towards Unity: Its Necessity and Dangers
	Chapter II The Imperfection of Past Aggregates
	Chapter III The Group and the Individual
	Chapter IV The Inadequacy of the State Idea
	Chapter V Nation and Empire: Real and Political Unities
	Chapter VI Ancient and Modern Methods of Empire
	Chapter VII The Creation of the Heterogeneous Nation
	Chapter VIII The Problem of a Federated Heterogeneous Empire
	Chapter IX The Possibility of a World-Empire
	Chapter X The United States of Europe
	Chapter XI The Small Free Unit and the Larger Concentrated Unity
	Chapter XII The Ancient Cycle of Prenational Empire-Building — The Modern Cycle of Nation-Building
	Chapter XIII The Formation of the Nation-Unit — The Three Stages
	Chapter XIV The Possibility of a First Step towards International Unity — Its Enormous Difficulties
	Chapter XV Some Lines of Fulfilment
	Chapter XVI The Problem of Uniformity and Liberty

	THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY
	PART II
	Chapter XVII Nature's Law in Our Progress — Unity in Diversity, Law and Liberty
	Chapter XVIII The Ideal Solution — A Free Grouping of Mankind
	Chapter XIX The Drive towards Centralisation and Uniformity — Administration and Control of Foreign Affairs
	Chapter XX The Drive towards Economic Centralisation
	Chapter XXI The Drive towards Legislative and Social Centralisation and Uniformity
	Chapter XXII World-Union or World-State
	Chapter XXIII Forms of Government
	Chapter XXIV The Need of Military Unification
	Chapter XXV War and the Need of Economic Unity
	Chapter XXVI The Need of Administrative Unity
	Chapter XXVII The Peril of the World-State
	Chapter XXVIII Diversity in Oneness
	Chapter XXIX The Idea of a League of Nations
	Chapter XXX The Principle of Free Confederation
	Chapter XXXI The Conditions of a Free World-Union
	Chapter XXXII Internationalism
	Chapter XXXIII Internationalism and Human Unity
	Chapter XXXIV The Religion of Humanity
	Chapter XXXV Summary and Conclusion
	A Postscript Chapter

	WAR AND SELF-DETERMINATION
	The Passing of War?
	The Unseen Power
	Self-Determination
	A League of Nations
	1919
	After the War

APPENDIXES

Appendix I

Appendix II

Note on the Texts

Appendixes

The two pieces that follow are connected with The Ideal of Human Unity and War and Self-Determination. Appendix I is a note Sri Aurobindo wrote during the 1930s or 1940s with reference to a proposed solution of international problems on the basis of principles put forward in The Ideal of Human Unity. Appendix II consists of a fragment found in a notebook containing miscellaneous writings by Sri Aurobindo. It appears to be a draft for the opening of an essay like those included in War and Self-Determination. It is clear from its content that it was written not long after the end of World War I, perhaps in 1919.

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APPENDIX I

We seem at the present moment to be very far away from such a rational solution1 and indeed at the opposite pole of human possibility; we have swung back to an extreme of international disorder and to an entire application of the vital and animal principle of the struggle for survival, not of the humanly fittest, but of the strongest.

But the very intensity of this struggle and disorder may be the path Nature has chosen towards the true escape from it; for it is becoming more and more evident that a long continuance of the present international state of humanity will lead not to any survival, but to the destruction of civilisation and the relapse of the race towards barbarism, decadence, an evolutionary failure. The antipathy or hostility or distrust of nations, races, cultures, religions towards each other is due to the past habit of egoistic self-assertion, desire for domination, for encroachment upon the lebensraum one of another and the consequent sense of unfriendly pressure, the fear of subjugation or domination and the oppression of the individuality of one by the other. A state of things must be brought about in which mutual toleration is the law, an order in which many elements, racial, national, cultural, spiritual can exist side by side and form a multiple unity; in such an order all these antipathies, hostilities, distrusts would die from lack of nourishment. That would be a true state of perfectly developed human civilisation, a true basis for the higher progress of the race. In this new order India with her spiritual culture turned towards the highest aims of humanity would find her rightful place and would become one of the leaders of the human evolution by the greatness of her ideals and the capacity of her peoples for the spiritualisation of life.

¹The "rational solution" referred to was a proposal for solving international problems along the lines sketched by Sri Aurobindo in chapter 18 of The Ideal of Human Unity, "The Ideal Solution -A Free Grouping of Mankind".

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