Aristotle rightly believed that man is a social animal. The self owes the very knowledge of its existence to society. The self’s ideal is a product of its social relations; the ideal grows in perfection as the social contacts of the self widen. The self is attracted not only towards the ideal but also towards men having the same ideal. The self lives in the ideal, for the ideal and because of the ideal which is derived from society and achieved in society. For these reasons the self is social fundamentally and naturally.

 

The love of the ideal as well as the love of men having the same ideal creates for man the need to live in the form of organized societies or states. Men having the same ideal are attracted towards each other and form a group which may be called an ideal group. Moreover, since every ideal wants to develop its power indefinitely the self finds it an advantage to live in a group. Every self that becomes a member of an ideal group is a force which can help other selves in the group to achieve their common ideal and to develop its power more and more by crushing every resistance in its way.

 

To live in society thus comes to us by way of nature and not as an external imposition or an artificial contract as Hobbes or Rousseau would have us believe. Social life is not peculiar to man who alone can make artificial contracts; it is a characteristic of all species and the cause of it lies in the very nature of consciousness.

 

Since consciousness is one, since it is a whole, it has an urge to maintain its oneness or wholeness even when it has expressed itself in the form of a number of individuals of the same species. Owing to this tendency of life the members of every species that come into existence in the course of evolution exhibit an affinity for each other, which the psychologists have called by the various names of the group instinct, the herd instinct or the gregarious instinct. Whenever they come together—and they always try to come together—they form a group and display an inclination to behave socially and as parts of a single whole which is the group. Whenever this tendency is fully developed, or is able to operate perfectly and freely, that is, without the obstruction of other instinctive tendencies, the group behaves as a single organism of which the cells may be regarded the individuals that constitute the group. Although this tendency exists in all species, it has reached its perfect expression so far in bees and ants—the most highly-evolved species in this respect—and must reach its perfect expression in future in man at the highest stage of his evolution where all the qualities of consciousness will be displayed in their fullest harmony and splendour.

 

All life emanates from the same source, consciousness, but the feeling of oneness prevails particularly among the members of the species towards each other. This is so not merely because the animals are similar or because they hope to defend themselves better by living in the form of a group, but also, and more fundamentally, because every species is a distinct step in the evolution of life which cancels and takes the place of all the previous steps. Life is a whole, feels as a whole, and has the urge to maintain its wholeness, only at each fresh level at which it is able to emerge. It is for this reason that it will feel as a whole and maintain its wholeness also at that highest stage of its evolution in the human being which is its final objective. Life at higher stages of evolution has to rule and cannot feel one with life at lower and inferior stages which it has itself outgrown. It has at every step of its growth new aspirations and new powers to realise those aspirations which the lower forms of life cannot share.

 

The feeling of oneness among the individuals of the same species can be regarded, therefore, neither merely as Nature’s provision for self-defence in the animal nor as an outcome of the similarity of the animals’ forms and desires. It is fundamental, it is due to an essential characteristic of life to function as a whole, to co-operate with all its other parts, in order to produce an organized group life at each step of its evolution. At the highest stage of evolution, when life has reached the nearest to its source, this characteristic, we can expect, will manifest itself in the form of a group of highly self-conscious human beings co-operating with each other and with the Consciousness of the Universe itself to produce an organized group life. The same characteristic we find manifested in an organism which is a collective being like a hive or formicary. An organism is a group, a colony or a confederation of social individuals which are the cells in its case, co-operating with each other to produce its coordinated functioning. The group, too, is meant to function as an organism. A group is an organism, an individual, of which the cells are the members of the group, disseminated and dissociated more visibly and to a greater extent than in an organism, and yet bound together by a similar affinity.

 

We see that just as in the case of the cells the similarity of their functions is broken to the extent to which it is essential for the co-ordinated life of the organism, similarly in the case of individuals who are the members of an organised  group, the similarity of their forms and desires is broken to the extent to which it is essential for the coordinated functioning of the group. This is observed, for example, in a bee hive where the queen, the workers and the drones have different shapes and different functions. All the bees idolise the queen but perform their own separate duties as nurses, housemaids, masons, chemists, sweepers, wax-makers, guards, honey-collectors, princesses, professional males, etc. for the organized life of the group. But even the flights of birds and herds of wild animals like deers, antelopes, zebras and elephants choose the biggest or the most imposing bird or animal among them to serve as their leader owing to their nature to live an organized group life.

 

Just as the life of an organism centres itself around the brain or the nervous system, so the life of a group centres itself around a leader, and just as the health and efficiency of the individual cells is the result as well as the cause of the health and efficiency of an organism as a whole, so the health and efficiency of the individuals in a group is the result as well as the cause of the health and efficiency of the group as a whole.

 

A group cannot function like an organism without the leader, as an organism cannot function without the brain. A leader is natural and essential to every organized group whether the group is of human beings or of animals and whatever the state of the evolution of consciousness to which it belongs. The leader in every group is the representative or the substitute of Consciousness towards which all life is struggling, consciously or unconsciously, and with the best of its powers of knowledge that it has come to possess at each step of its evolution; for Consciousness is at once the source and the destination of all life. In the animal stage the leader is a personification of the animals’ urge to live. In the human stage the leader is a personification of man’s urge to love, he is a personification, that is, of his ideal. Each group is an inferior, imperfect copy—the extent of its inferiority and imperfection depending upon the stage of its evolution—of the Final Group which is the aim of evolution. We can expect that the leader of the group that will reach the highest stage of evolution in future (and, of course, this group will consist of human beings, highly self-conscious human beings) will be a man of the highest self- consciousness. He will be a true representative of Consciousness because he will know and will enforce the purpose and the law of Consciousness on each with the consent and assistance of his highly devoted, highly self-conscious followers. He and his group together will function as a single individual, a single organism, displaying that splendour and beauty, latent in the nature of Consciousness, of which we can have no knowledge at present.

 

In so far as the animals feel attracted towards their own kind, they feel repelled from other animals which do not belong to their kind. Since each species that came into existence in the course of evolution had its sphere of affection and sympathy confined to its own members, it resulted in the mutual war of species in which the fittest as well as the most promising species alone survived. The natural attraction of the animal for animals of its own kind and repulsion from those not of its kind was intended by Nature also to serve the useful purpose of intensifying the struggle for existence which is an indispensable condition of the evolution of life.

 

The tendency of Consciousness for organisation and group life is expressed by it not only in the human and the animal stage but also in the material stage, for example, in the atoms, the molecules, the crystals, the snowflakes, the systems of heavenly bodies, etc.

 

In brief, the social instinct of the animal is an outcome of the essential nature of Consciousness. It is based on life’s quality of oneness and its consequent urge to maintain this oneness. It is a part of that fundamental urge of life to seek its wholeness which has been previously described as love or as the urge of consciousness. In the animal stage this urge is suppressed and appears only in the form of automatic and inflexible tendencies, the instincts, the object of which is to secure for the animal the preservation of its life or the completeness of its body. One of these tendencies takes the form of an automatic and compulsory attraction for the kind and is known as the herd instinct. But the urge of consciousness becomes free when consciousness obtains its freedom in man. In the human stage, therefore, it appears as a free desire for the ideal and its object is to secure for man the completeness of his self. An aspect of this free desire for an ideal is the attraction which a man feels for other men having the same ideal. In as much as this attraction is voluntary, being a part of the urge of consciousness, it must be distinguished from that involuntary tendency known as the herd instinct, which man possesses in common with other animals but which, in his case, is ruled by the urge of consciousness for the ideal. Fundamentally, however, this attraction is the same tendency of life which remains inflexible in the animal stage in the shape of the herd instinct only, it becomes free in the human being and, when it does so, it emerges as voluntary attachment for men loving the same ideal. Thus the herd instinct is common to man and animal but man’s attraction for other men of the same ideal, like his attraction for the ideal, is the privilege of man alone.

 

Since the unconscious urge of all human beings is the same, they have, in addition to their special love for men of the same ideal, a general love for all other human beings irrespective of their ideals. In the case of a group of men having the same ideal, these two forms of love support and reinforce each other. But the latter form of love cannot have its own way with respect to men whose ideal is different from our own, as long as we feel that they are opposing our ideal. It is overruled by our hatred for everything that is actually or potentially a source of danger to our ideal. The love of our ideal impels us to hate and oppose all other ideals and, in so far as these men become identified with the opposition of rival ideals, we are impelled to hate and oppose them too. In spite of it, however, our affinity for them as human beings is always there and shows itself whenever we are assured that their actual or potential opposition has ceased to exist. We are kind and generous to a vanquished enemy because his ideal no longer opposes our own and the love of man for man is free to have its way.

 

Since our love for other men is derived from the same source from which our love for the ideal is derived, it is at its best and highest towards human beings who have the same ideal as our own. The desire for social life in man, his altruism or his love of fellowmen is not due to the maternal instinct as McDougall has held or to the herd instinct as W.A. Trotter has believed, but it is due to the urge of consciousness itself. It is a part of the urge for the ideal. Both the maternal instinct and the herd instinct are compulsory, automatic tendencies fashioned out of the basic urge of consciousness to seek its oneness or wholeness. The urge of human consciousness wants to express itself, not only in the love of the Divine Self, but also in the love of the human selves. The latter type of love, no less than the former, has to be awakened or liberated from the rule of instincts and wrong ideals which dominate it; and because it has the same root as the former, the way in which it can be awakened or liberated is the same as that in which the former type of love can be awakened or liberated, that is, by strengthening the impulse for the Right Ideal and developing the consciousness of self through worship and ethical discipline.

 

Since it is only a self-conscious man who has a lofty ideal, he alone can love all human beings equally (in so far as the love of the ideal does not create a difference in his love in favour of men of his own ideal) sincerely and selflessly, irrespective of their race, nation, caste, country, class or colour. Such a person cannot really hate men, although there is no doubt that he must hate their ideals when they are wrong. But his hatred of men’s ideals is the natural, inevitable result of that love from which alone a sincere, disinterested love of all men can result. Every love has its antithesis. The disinterested love of all men is a part of the love of the Right Ideal. It is, therefore, subserved by the hatred of all wrong ideals. It may seem paradoxical, yet it is true that the hatred of a highly self-conscious man for wrong ideals is an indispensable part of that love without which the love of men as men and irrespective of their beliefs would be impossible. The hatred of such a man is confined strictly to men’s ideals and does not extend in the least to their caste, colour, country, race, class or nationality. Leaving aside the wrong ideals for which they stand and which he cannot but hate, he loves them wholly and completely. It is his misfortune in one respect no less than it is his good fortune in another respect that he has to hate them, to oppose them and fight them, sometimes desperately and ruthlessly, in so far as they represent and become identified with the resistance of wrong ideals and as such act as an impediment to the evolution of life.

 

The oneness of man is a corollary from the oneness of consciousness. The human selves are rushing out of consciousness as sparks from a bonfire or as drops from a huge fountain but unlike the sparks or the drops they want to go back to their source and the source also wants to come forward towards them. Every part of consciousness, we may imagine, wants to maintain its wholeness by rushing forward to all the other parts. Every human self wants to achieve its wholeness, not only by going forward to meet its source which itself goes forward to meet it, but also by taking other parts of Consciousness, that is, other human selves, along with it. The efforts of every self for the achievement of its ideal indeed become easier when they are made in a group, but the important point is that they are right only when they are made in a group. The reason is that it is then only that they are fully in accordance with, and fully expressive of, the nature of the self. We are right only when we are expressing our nature fully and freely. Every self is a part of a group and can, therefore, achieve its ideal as well as its own perfection only in a group. The prophet who ordered his followers to pray together in the form of a disciplined and organized group had really attained to and succeeded in expressing a very high knowledge of the self.

 

Lest the reader should fall into an error by the mention of parts of consciousness, it is necessary to repeat here, what has been mentioned already in the chapter on Ethics, that really there are no parts of consciousness. Consciousness is one and indivisible, unbegetting and unbegettable, without a peer or a partner. All creation is going on within consciousness and not outside it. It is the thought or the feeling of consciousness that is evolving and expressing itself in the form of creation.

 

Steps of evolution in the animal stage take the form of species but in the human stage they take the form of ideals. Just as a species forms a group by itself, so men having the same ideal form a group by themselves. So natural and essential is it for an individual to seek the company of other individuals who love his ideal that we cannot think of an ideal without a group. The consideration that the self gains in power for the achievement of its ideal by living in a group is not the fundamental cause of the formation of an ideal group. The attraction for men of the same ideal, like the attraction for the ideal, has its source in the urge of consciousness to seek its oneness or wholeness. Men loving the same ideal form a group, moreover, not only on account of their attraction for each other and for the ideal, but also on account of their natural and justified repulsion from other ideals. Their repulsion from other ideals arises, of course, in the service of the love that they feel for their own ideal. A man who does not hate other ideals does not love his own.

 

The love that a man feels for other men as human beings is due to the ultimate oneness of all human selves. Every human self is connected with every other human self through its unconscious mind. The conscious minds of the selves are different but their unconscious mind is the same and that is the Conscious Mind of the Universe. The selves are like innumerable bubbles on the same lake or like innumerable taps of water connected underground with the same reservoir, where the lake or the reservoir may be imagined to stand for the Consciousness of the Universe. But the selves become conscious of their fundamental oneness completely when they have the same ideal, that is, when their conscious mind (and not merely their unconscious mind) is one. Permanent unity will come to the human race, not only when their conscious mind is the same, but also when their conscious and unconscious mind is the same, that is, not only when they have the same ideal and form a single ideal group, but also when their ideal is the Right Ideal.

 

Like the gregarious and the herd instincts, the innate tendencies of imitation, suggestion, suggestibility, sympathy and sympathetic induction in the animals are fashioned out of the urge of consciousness to function as a whole or in a group. Naturally, all these tendencies persist in man but they also take a second birth in him or, rather, regain their freedom in him as some of the functions or qualities of his free consciousness. Man expresses these tendencies voluntarily for the sake of the ideal when the love of the ideal is strong enough to dominate him and also involuntarily like an animal when the instinct is dominating him and the love of the ideal is either weak or is allowed to be forgotten. Individuals who begin to act in a group often forget the demands of their ideal and do not stop to consider how far they can go with the group consistently with these demands. They are led away by what is known as a “mob psychology”. They may start acting in a group because the demands of the ideal and the demands of the group instincts agree with each other but as they proceed, their instincts, which function involuntarily, have the better of their ideal which requires voluntary action, with the result that they begin to act in the group almost entirely involuntarily. But the danger to the ideal involved in acting with a group can be avoided when the group is following a reliable leader. The love of a man living in a group, of which the ideal is different from his own, suffers from a huge disadvantage on account of the impulsion of his involuntary tendencies to act in a group. He is impelled to act not in accordance with the needs of his own ideal but in accordance with the needs of the ideal of men surrounding him. He has, therefore, a tendency to change over more and more to the ideal of these men. But when a man is living among men whose ideal is the same as his own, these tendencies of his nature aid his love and thereby fulfil the purpose for which they are meant. They no longer interfere with the urge of the self. On the other hand, they serve the ideal and favour his urge to act in a group in accordance with the demands of the ideal.

 

By living in a group the power of each self to achieve its ideal is enhanced only in proportion to the strength and internal harmony of the group. The amount of internal coherence and harmony of the group depends upon their love for the ideal. It increases as the love of the ideal increases and decreases as the love of the ideal decreases. When the ideal’s love decreases, it is due to the fact that other impulses, inimical to the ideal and encroaching upon the love claimed by the ideal, gain in strength. In extreme cases these impulses oust the ideal and form new ideals themselves so that we have quarrels, civil wars, rebellions and revolutions within the group. An ideal group or a society cannot live without an internal organisation or a government. Every ideal group must have its own government, otherwise it will not be able to serve its own ideal but the ideal of the rulers. Every government represents an ideal and serves an ideal group. All the activities of a government are controlled by the ideal that it stands for. Politics, like Ethics, is not a separate science. It is the image of our ideals. It is simply a reflection of our views on life generally. As every ideal has its own Ethics, so every ideal has its own Politics, its own ideas and theories of the constitution and management of human societies.

 

An ideal group or a group of men organized under an ideal of life is always a state. It is always politically sovereign and independent, or else it is only a group of slaves toiling for the ideal of their masters who have an ideal group of their own.

 

But an ideal group may have a large number of groups within it organized for the sake of a host of specific ends subserving the ideal. Such groups are the political, literary, scientific, industrial, commercial, financial, legal, recreational, educational, municipal and other bodies, associations and societies within a state, like clubs, corporations, universities, schools, colleges, trade unions, banks, firms, factories, etc. Such groups are always subservient to the state and its ideal and that is why the state allows them to exist and flourish. Each of them is ultimately controlled by the state very strictly. The state gives each of them its particular form or constitution and particular policy, programme or  outlook. As the knowledge of mankind is growing their realisation of the various ends capable of subserving their ideals and of the importance of spontaneous, collective effort for the achievement of these ends is also growing. Hence the number and power of such bodies is daily increasing in every country. This has led some philosophers to imagine as if these bodies will ultimately replace the state. This is a mistake resulting from a gross ignorance of the laws of human nature. If ever the state ceases to exist on account of the growing number and power of such bodies, it will only split up into a number of different states. Each of these bodies consists of human beings who must have an ideal of life. Hence each of them can exist only as a body which is either subservient to the ideal of the state or which has its own ideal and is, therefore, politically sovereign. Unless each of them is subserving the same ideal, each will come into a clash with all the others, so that, ultimately, each will discover that it cannot function, unless it is able to control the entire life of its members, i.e. unless it becomes a state.

 

All human history is the history of ideals, of their emergence, rise, climax, decline and disappearance and the history of the race is repeated on a small scale in the life of the individual.

 

We have seen that the ideals of the individual continue to evolve from childhood onwards till the end of his life. In childhood the earliest form of the ideal is the pleasure derived from instinctive desires. Later on, it is parents or teachers or those persons in the social circle of the child whom he admires. Gradually his ideals, which are many in the beginning, rise higher and higher and become less and less in number till only one remains. Even this one ideal has a further course of evolution till it reaches the Right Ideal. The Right Ideal too has its own course of evolution which ends with the achievement of the highest self-consciousness. The cause of all this evolution is the self’s desire for Beauty which the individual continues to understand ever more and more. As his ideal rises higher and higher in the scale of Beauty, his sympathies become more and more universal and extend from his person to his family, his friends, his school, his country or tribe, his village or city, his nation and, finally, to the whole of humanity.

 

Generally the evolution of the ideals of an individual ends with the ideal of the society or the state of which he is a member, no matter how low that ideal may be. The whole psychological atmosphere of the individual which includes the home, the school, the street and the society at large is charged so heavily which educative influences calculated to engender, nourish and sustain a powerful belief in the ideal of the state that it is very rare that an individual is able to rise above that ideal. Every individual, who comes into the world as a member of this society imbibes the love of his ideal unconsciously by a direct psychological contact with them. This is how belief in an ideal is passed on from generation to generation and an ideal group is able to maintain its solidarity and continue its life for centuries. Whenever an individual comes to believe in an ideal which is a little different from the ideal of the society of which he is member, he is dubbed by the society as a rebel or a revolutionary.

 

The human society has been evolving its ideals more or less in the same way in which the individual does. The primitive man followed his own instinctive desires. Later on, his desires became complicated and modified by his sympathies for the family. Subsequently, he learnt to sacrifice some of his personal and family interests for the general good of the tribe which became his ideal in common with other members of the tribe. The tribes were many and they fought with one another till they discovered the truth that tribal warfare was suicidal and felt the need of combining under a king who, thereby, came to have a piece of land to rule. The king became the ideal of the subjects and was invested with a “divine right”. But shortly the greed and tyranny of the king drew attention to the fact that no ideal could be good enough which neglected the welfare of the common people, which, of course, meant the people in the country. This shifted the ideal from the king to the country and to the people in the country. It changed from the idea of the divine right of one person to the idea of the sanctity of the nation or to nationalism. The good of the nation required that it should rule itself; therefore, the ideal rose higher and came to be expressed by the words democracy, liberty, fraternity, equality, and freedom, which terms, however, had still a limited sense because they were applicable to the members of a limited group of people, a nation, living within definite geographical limits.

 

Till the end of the First World War societies were at this stage of evolution throughout the world. But since that war the ideals of the human society have taken an important step forward in their progress. From ideals they have become ideologies or philosophies of life, e.g. Fascism and Communism, each of which professes to be a complete explanation of existence. The sympathies of one of these ideologies, I mean Communism, are no longer confined to any particular race or nation but extend to the whole world. They are completely universal. Thus we have come a step nearer the final ideology which will be a complete philosophy of life with universal sympathies. Like the ideals of the individuals the ideals of human societies have advanced from the concrete to the abstract and from the less perfect and less universal to the more perfect and the more universal. On the whole, they have made a greater and greater approach to the qualities of Beauty. In the theory of Russian Communism in particular we see two aspects of the final ideology, those of economic equality and universality, revealing themselves already at this stage of our evolution. But since these aspects of Beauty are consistent only with the Right Ideal, it is impossible for Russian Communism to achieve them actually in practice.

 

The evolution of social ideals is again due to our desire for Beauty which is internal and which we understand ever more and more with our advancing experience and knowledge. Unfortunately, the knowledge of Beauty comes too often through bitter experience. We get a fresh glimpse of Beauty only when action, experience and long mutual relationship of the self and the ideal have proved the futility of the ideal. Our inner criterion of Beauty never fails, but we learn to apply it only gradually by experience. Every ideal which cannot come up to our inner standard of Beauty breaks up in the long run. Every state of society is unstable and waits for its inevitable dissolution, if it is not a state determined and created by the Right Ideal.

 

But the inner weakness of a wrong ideal is not the only cause of its disruption. An ideal is being continually opposed by other ideals and is involved in a struggle for existence which it can survive only if it is the best and the fittest of them.

 

The ideal groups in which humanity is divided at present take the place of species in which the animal world was divided before the appearance of man. An ideal group behaves like a living organism and is subject to laws which are similar to the laws of Biology. Every ideal group has the will to live and to grow indefinitely. Like an organism it has a purpose which is the ideal, meets with resistance in its efforts to achieve that purpose, exerts itself to overcome resistance, increases and enlarges its powers through exertion and becomes weak when it fails to exert itself or gives up effort. Like an organism, it can die owing to an internal disease which, in its case, is caused by the elements of imperfection in the ideal or can be overpowered and annihilated by other ideal groups in their mutual struggle for existence. Just as an organism gains in health and strength when there is a perfect co-ordination of its various parts and their functions, so an ideal group gains in strength and efficiency when it is able to achieve a unity of purpose and a measure of internal organisation among its members. Like an organism, it is attracted by objects that help it or support its life and growth and is repelled by objects that have the contrary effect. As the life of an organism is centred around the brain, so the life of an ideal group is centred around a leader.

 

Every ideal is a challenge to every other ideal and aims at getting power, extending the sphere of its influence and increasing the number of its helpers and adherents at the expense of all other ideals. Thus, ever since man has become conscious of himself, there has proceeded an unending war of ideal groups in the human society. The whole of the history of our race is nothing but a record of the struggle of ideals.

 

Just as an ideal group resembles an organism, the war of ideals in the human world resembles the war of species which we had in the animal world before the appearance of man. If an ideal group fails to prove its strength in the mutual war of ideals, it is defeated in the struggle for existence, is enslaved by other ideals and is thus wiped out entirely. The moment an ideal reconciles itself to slavery, it dies. When an ideal is enslaved completely, it no longer exists for itself; it becomes subservient to the enslaving ideal and it is, therefore, the ruling ideal that exists by itself and not the serving ideal. When slavery is accepted by an ideal rather than opposed by it, as much as it is possible to oppose it, it is literally the complete obliteration of the ideal. But if the opposition continues, even to a small extent, the ideal is alive.

 

The internal elements of imperfection or the weaknesses of an ideal, which are latent and hidden in the beginning, become manifest at a time when the ideal is passing through a crisis of its external struggle, that is, when the ideal is faced with the necessity of exerting the whole of its strength in order to overcome a danger to its life. It is like a man feeling some of his worst weaknesses, never realised before, at a time when he is required to put up a hard effort. If the ideal is internally strong, it can withstand the struggle much better.

 

As soon as an ideal has come into existence, its conflict with all the other ideals has begun. The conflict is a life-and-death struggle which continues, for centuries if necessary, so long as the ideal itself is not wiped out or until it has wiped out all the other ideals. Every ideal group is always either actually attacking other ideal groups or preparing for an attack. The object of attack is the destruction or the enslavement of the rival ideal or ideals and it must, therefore, take a form that is most effective for the speedy achievement of this object. As such, it must make use of violence as soon as it is both necessary and possible. Violence is possible only when the ideal has reached a definite stage in the growth of its power in relation to other ideals; it is necessary only when it feels that its purposes are meeting with resistance, which can be overcome by violence alone. Since every ideal wants to grow in strength at the expense of all other ideals, a stage must come in its history, sooner or later, when the use of violence becomes both possible and necessary.

 

The preparation for the final attack continues so long as the attack is not able to take the most effective form for the achievement of its object. In the meantime the attack assumes non-violent shapes like propaganda and criticism in the form of speeches, articles, pamphlets, public statements, radio programmes, processions, meetings and resolutions or non-co-operation, diplomatic missions, conferences, compromises, treaties, sanctions, appeals, aids, bribes, temptations, threats and persuasions. The object of all these devices and activities is to put the rival ideal under a disadvantage and to gain an advantage for one’s own ideal on which further advantages may be built. The preparation for the final attack is embodied in all those activities the object of which is to increase the internal solidarity and cohesion of the group, the numerical, moral and material power of its members and their love or attachment to the ideal. These include the physical, mental and moral training of the individual. With the increase of knowledge the methods of attack and preparation have gradually evolved in efficiency and have now reached an astonishing degree of refinement. The success of every non-violent attack adds to the group’s strength and to its preparation for the final violent attack intended to win the final victory and weakens the rival ideal in the same proportion.

 

Non-violent methods of attack have to be resorted to by the ideal as long as it is weak and pending the development of a sufficient power; but when non-violence is part of the ideal itself, the ideal has no chance of gaining or maintaining its freedom. If it is enslaved and gains its freedom by the automatic break-up of the enslaving wrong ideal, it will not be able to maintain it and another ideal must enslave it again.

 

Defensive opposition, as a principle to be observed for all time, is no more compatible with the ideal’s will to live than non-violent opposition is. In fact, it is not possible to make any distinction between offence and defence as long as the object of both is victory. As long as your motive is to overpower the enemy or to see him weaker than yourself, it is all the same whether you ward off an attack before it is delivered or after it is delivered.

 

Whether you fight in defence or offence you cannot succeed unless you maintain your strength at a level far above that of the enemy. Every war begins long before it develops into an armed clash. Before every war there is a war of preparations which you must win if you are to succeed in your armed defence of the future. If you permit the enemy to prepare himself and grow stronger than yourself, you have failed in your defence. If your own preparations do not excel those of the enemy, your defence will certainly fail ; you have, therefore, lost the struggle already. If, on the other hand, they excel those of the enemy and you refuse to deliver the attack, as a matter of principle, and wait for the attack of the enemy, you permit him to carry on his preparations till they exceed your own. As such, you have already offered yourself to be defeated in the battle of defence that you are expecting to give. It follows that offence is simply the most effective form of defence. Like non-violent opposition the so-called defensive opposition is only an indication that the group is yet preparing for the final violent attack. Non-violent opposition only precedes violent opposition when the latter has to be delayed on account of weakness or necessity. No ideal that has the will to live can stick to non-violent or defensive methods of opposition permanently.

 

The struggle of ideals, whether it is open or concealed, warlike or peaceful, violent or non-violent, whether for a time it takes the form of a battlefield or a conference, continues for ever without stopping. Sometimes two or more ideals, hostile to each other, may combine against another ideal or a similar combination of other ideals. But the allies are, all the time, the secret enemies of each other and as soon as their common enemies are defeated, their mutual animosities which were concealed for a time as a matter of expediency, are allowed to come to the surface again.

 

Just as the struggle of species in the animal stage of evolution resulted in the appearance of man, the perfect animal, similarly the struggle of ideal groups will result in the appearance of the Final Ideal Group or the Group of the Perfect Ideal. Every wrong ideal is being smashed from without and being disrupted from within and every wrong ideal that breaks up is succeeded by an ideal which is a step nearer to the Final Ideal in some respects. We are never absolutely wrong, but we advance from a lower to a higher truth, from a less Perfect Ideal to a more Perfect Ideal. A time must, therefore, come when the most Perfect Ideal makes its appearance. From the moment it does so, it will continue to grow in power and influence at the expense of all other ideals, which will become less and less in number, till it has spread to the whole world and brought the whole of humanity within its fold.

 

We have seen that every ideal group behaves like a living organism. The group of the Right Ideal will be no exception to this rule. It will also behave like an organism. All the laws of Nature that apply to other ideal groups must apply to it. Resistance will be ready for it when it comes into the world. It will struggle for its life, it will meet resistance and overcome it and, thereby, enlarge its powers more and more. It will ultimately overpower all other ideal groups and break all their resistance because:

 

(1)      It will be a higher and a more powerful form of life than all other ideal groups;

(2)      It will accord with our innermost nature and give us a perfect satisfaction;

(3)      Every other ideal competing with it will contain within itself the principle of its own annihilation.

(4)      All the forces of evolution including the advancement of knowledge will be in its favour.

 

The history of evolution reveals to us the fact that, throughout in the past, the highest form of life was always able to have the better of the lower forms, which were weak intrinsically and unable to compete with it in the long run. Whenever life jumps to a higher level, it does so in order to rise still higher. Whenever life wins a victory or gains an advantage, it maintains it, builds upon it and extends it further. Life achieved a great victory at the appearance of the first living cell and it was maintained till the world was filled with innumerable species of animals. It gained another great victory at the appearance of the first man and it was maintained till man was able to fill the whole world, overpowering and enslaving all other forms of life. The emergence of the Final Ideology will be similarly another major victory of life which it will continue to extend till the ideology is able to spread to the whole world, overpowering the opposition of all other ideologies. The progress of man will enter a new era when that ideology has conquered finally. Resistance to life will end in the form of ideal groups but will take another form and our efforts to overcome it will enable us to discover in us powers of which we can hardly dream at present. As long as we live in this world, we shall continue to meet resistance which is the direct result of the tendency of consciousness to move forward and forward always like a swiftly running stream. If resistance does not come to meet consciousness, consciousness must go forward to meet resistance on account of its very nature to press on. It conquers resistance and thereby develops itself. Resistance is created by consciousness because it must have new purposes to achieve. Resistance would have no meaning if consciousness did not take it as resistance to itself, to its purposes. It is possible that one day we shall meet resistance from the stars and feel the necessity to conquer them.

 

Thus a study of the nature of consciousness leads us to the conclusion that the Right Ideology will emerge and expand as a result of struggle. Struggle will be essential, not only for its emergence and expansion, but also for its survival and maintenance, after it has once conquered all other ideals and ideologies. Like an organism it must struggle as long as it has the will to live and grow and must die when it gives up the struggle. Whether the struggle will be at any time violent or non-violent will be determined entirely by the circumstances. The object of struggle is victory achieved as quickly and as completely as possible. Therefore, the struggle is bound to assume a form which is most effective for the achievement of this object. One can assume that it would take the form of an attack as violent and as destructive for the opposing ideal as possible, so that all opposition is finished once for all and the ideal has a perfectly smooth way for itself. But although it must happen ultimately, it will not be possible in the beginning. It will require time and preparation. In the meantime non-violent methods of attack will have to be relied upon out of a necessity. But the object of attack will be secured ultimately by violence to which the ideal will have to resort sooner or later.

 

Supposing, on account of the internal disruption of all wrong ideals, the Right Ideal, pledged to non-violence, spreads automatically throughout the world at any time without striking a blow. Then, if it fails to defend itself, it must break up into innumerable ideal groups again. It will be impossible for it to live and grow without struggle. The moment it will give up struggle it will stop its progress. It can achieve no victory without struggle and, if it does achieve it, it cannot maintain it without struggle.

 

War can be stopped only by war. War, when fought in the service of truth and virtue, is not a sin. Peace can be secured only through war and in no other way. We can bring about peace by fighting and not by writing or talking. Humanity will be united only by the Right Ideal. So long as it does not emerge and until it spreads to the whole world, the bloody struggle of ideals will continue. It will go on increasing in force and vehemence making use of ever more and more efficient weapons of war, till one day the eyes of a section of humanity, who will be surely the most advanced section of it and perhaps the greatest to suffer from the hardships of a prolonged warfare, will be opened to the great idea of the future. Self-Consciousness and slavery are terms incompatible with each other and, since this section of humanity will become self-conscious, their first concern will be to free themselves from the bondage of the ruling ideal. Their victory will, however, be neither sudden nor easy. It will come naturally at the end of a considerable period of struggle or preparation, during which they will wait for a suitable opportunity to strike the final blow. The preparation will aim at educating and training the largest possible number of men for courage, co-operation, discipline (depending upon absolute obedience to a leader once chosen for his reliability), self-control and self-sacrifice— qualities which will grow with the increasing self-consciousness of the individual. The opportunity will arrive when the ruling wrong ideal has been sufficiently weakened or spent up morally and materially, being, on the one band, exhausted on account of a series of long wars and, on the other hand, compelled by events to suspect highly its own truth; in other words, when the natural, inevitable disruption of the ideal is at hand. When this happens, the propaganda and persuasions of self-conscious men will gain in effectiveness; they will begin to look more convincing. The numbers of these men will, therefore, swell quickly till they become powerful enough to overthrow the government.

 

Having taken possession of the machinery of government they will apply themselves to the task of conveying its fullest benefits, economic and moral, to the individual and the society. They will remodel education to suit the new ideal. They will use the school, the press, the platform, the radio and the cinema to free the individual from all enslaving influences of other ideals. The material resources will be developed as fully as possible and put into the service of the ideal. Thus the ideal will grow in power in every way. The very existence of a powerful state of the Right Ideal will be a message of death to all other ideals which will feel their internal shortcomings more and more as time goes on and will continue to become hollow from within. When the time comes for an armed clash, the Right Ideology may sometimes win and sometimes lose, but it can never lose the final battle of its war with other ideals. The courage and confidence of its armies will be unique and unparalleled because, while its believers will be sure of their victory, they will not be afraid of death.

 

Death is a message of joy rather than a source of fear for a self-conscious man because he is sure that he does not die, and what is known as death is only a change for the better in the career of his self, a step from a lower to a higher stage of its evolution. To live, according to him, means to attack resistance and thereby to gain in self-consciousness and to die means to yield to it and thus to lose in self-consciousness. Death is sweet to him because it always brings him nearer to his goal; it is the successful end of a series of trials and struggles for a better life. What he fears is not death but that fear of death which may become an obstacle in the way of his love. He loves death when it holds for him a promise to rise to a higher level of self-consciousness and to make a further approach to the Beloved. Death is then a message of a new life and a new joy for him. He makes the best possible use of his life to achieve the highest self-consciousness possible and it is his wish of a lifetime that he may make death too an instrument of a higher progress for himself and, when the fondly-awaited opportunity arrives, his joy knows no bounds. It is death that is his prey and not he that is the prey of death.

 

We hoped that we shall win a permanent peace at the end of the Second World War. But surely the peace that has come is no more than an interval of preparations for another war. Wars must continue so long as we do not choose the Right Ideal. There can be no permanent peace unless we discover our ideal and adopt it. So long as we are unable to find it, Nature wants us to go on fighting among ourselves in order that we may discover it in this way. It is Nature’s method of evolving the Right Ideology. We cannot oppose Nature nor interfere with its purposes by any number of peace conferences, disarmament schemes or plans of a new world order in the East or West. The Final Ideology is the only natural and stable foundation of our unity and brotherhood. Unity on any other basis will be difficult to achieve and, if achieved, to maintain. We cannot hope to unite ourselves by a World Federation of nations or by a League of Nations backed by a military power or by an organisation or brotherhood of nations of any other type or quality as long as our ideals remain different from each other and different from the Right Ideal. If they remain different from each other, no lasting compromise among them in the form of a federation or union of nations will be possible. Every ideal wants unlimited expansion for itself and a time must soon come when the mutual friction of ideals, their open or secret resistance to each other, must upset the artificial unity. No treaties, pledges or charters can stand against the forces of our nature. We cannot defy our nature even if we all agree to do so. Whenever peace is established finally on the earth it will come to us, not because we shall succeed in harmonising conflicting ideals, which is impossible, but because one ideal will overpower and oust all the other ideals. This ideal can be only the Right Ideal. The human race can, no doubt, achieve its unity if all accept the same wrong ideal but the unity achieved in this way will not be a permanent one. A wrong ideal is based on a part of our nature and not on the whole of it. It must, therefore, break up, sooner or later, into a number of different ideals.

 

All moves for the unity of ideal groups or states having different ideals must fail because they are unscientific and wrong. They are due to our ignorance of the laws of human nature. Conflicting ideals and ideologies can have no basis for even a partial real unity. Nations, for example, can never agree to a common world army to serve as a world police, unless they all have the same ideal.

 

Some of us have welcomed the invention of the atom bomb or the hydrogen bomb as a threat to the safety of all nations which must render international wars impossible. But the discovery of the atom bomb or other similar or worse instruments of mass annihilation of humanity cannot stop the war of ideals which is dictated by the urge of our nature and which must run its course to the end. At the most the use of all such weapons, like the use of the poison gas, may be stopped by means of international agreements, which every nation may have to respect for the sake of its own safety. A serious common danger may force a number of ideal groups to agree temporarily and artificially in certain things in order to defend themselves against that danger, but it cannot remove those inward hostilities of nations which have their root in the insistent and imperative demands of their ideals.

 

Provided war is necessitated by the Right ideal, the hatred or the cruelty involved in it will not be a sin but a virtue. Hate is a reaction of love. We cannot love one thing without hating something else that is the opposite of our love, and our hate is in proportion to our love. The purpose of hate is to clear the path of love, to approach nearer to the beloved object and to love it more ardently. Such a war will be a direct and conscious help to evolution, and we have defined moral action as that action which helps evolution directly and consciously. Such a war is a creative activity and Nature itself has fought innumerable such wars and perpetrated such apparent cruelties in the animal world in the past. Man is a co-worker with the Divine Self in its activities and purposes. The creation of the world is not yet over. We, as human beings, are to share this creation with the Consciousness of the Universe. It is as moral for us to be cruel and violent, at times, in the interests of creation, as it is for the World-Self to be so.

 

The war of species staged by Nature in the animal world was not a cruelty. It was not a destructive but a constructive activity. There is no construction which does not involve some destruction. A gardener cannot maintain the beauty of his garden without cutting the unnecessary rank growth under the trees and in the flower beds. The use of the scythe is as necessary for him as sowing the seeds and watering and manuring the plants. Before a tailor prepares a coat, he cuts the cloth into several pieces out of which some are discarded and others are made use of.

 

War is not only consistent with the Right Ideal but it is required imperatively by this ideal very often. The reason is that self-consciousness cannot grow in conditions of slavery. War will not be wrong when it will be fought by highly self-conscious men. It will rather meet its justification for the first time at their hands. That will be the first occasion in the history of war when it will be consciously and directly a help to the world, when it will be fought really for the sake of peace, freedom and progress and when it will really establish the unity of mankind and turn mankind into a single family. Because a novice would spoil the garden by unskilful use of the scythe, it does not mean that its use is not necessary at all for the proper care of the garden or that an expert should not be permitted to use it at all. Since a wise gardener will use it consistently with the general scheme of the garden, in his hands it will be in no way less useful than the watering and manuring of plants, although it will not grow the plants but cut them. A righteous war is similarly a moral and constructive and not an immoral or destructive activity.

 

Hatred is essential to love. The course of love never runs smoothly. Love always meets with obstacles and, if it does not remove them, it cannot grow. Just as there is only one love that is right, there is only one hatred that is right, and it is that hatred which subserves the Right Love. The self acquires power and progress by aggression; therefore, hatred is helpful to the self. Aggression is the result and expression of hatred. Love implies a striving for a fuller and richer intercourse with its object. Everything that favours this effort becomes itself an object of love and everything that opposes this effort becomes an object of hatred. Impediments in the way of love are stimulants of love. A genuine and sincere love is created by difficulties and disappointments. Hate serves the growth of love in two ways: directly, by removing the impeding factors and, indirectly, by fixing the attention on the beloved object which leads to a greater realisation of its beauty. It brings the lover nearer to the beloved by calling attention to the latter’s beauty. In so far as you have destroyed the object of hate you have availed yourself of a richer and fuller intercourse with the object of love; you have discovered more of its beauty and richness. This is the foundation of the idea of the Devil in religion.

 

While love grows, hatred goes on decreasing because, while love seeks a greater and greater contact with the beloved, hatred aims at severing its connections more and more from its object. Hatred wears itself out as the object of hate is destroyed and shifts to some new object which may be offering resistance to love. So long as the world does not reach its perfection, hatred must continue because so long there must remain something or another to obstruct the way to the perfection of the world and, therefore, to necessitate hatred and opposition on the part of self-conscious men.

 

The Devil, understood in this sense, that is, as representing all influences that act as an impediment on life, is a necessity for evolution. The Universe, as it is, could not have existed without the Devil as there would have been no evolution and no progress without him. To be aggressive against the forces of the Devil is to progress. The Devil serves a spiritual purpose. The Right Ideology will not progress unless it meets resistance and overcomes it. Should it, when it comes into existence, find that it is perfectly free and has no resistance to meet from other ideals, it will be unable to come into its own. It will lack the incentive to realize itself and the result will be that it will distintegrate and find itself surrounded by the resistance of wrong ideals on all sides which it will have to conquer for its freedom. It will be unable to maintain that freedom which comes to it without effort. Even when freedom is achieved by effort, continuous effort will be essential in order to maintain it.

 

Effort or endeavour is as much the life-principle of an ideal group as it is the life-principle of an organism. It seems to be an unfailing law that life can achieve or maintain no advantage which it does not earn by a hard effort. It is, so to say, boring for itself a tunnel out of a mountain of hard rocks and can go along it only as far as it is able to dig it out and no further. Man would sink to the level of brutes even today if it were not for the fact that he has learnt the value of knowledge and culture by his efforts and is keeping them up by his efforts.

 

In the mutual struggle of ideals an ideal can oppose and weaken another ideal by methods which are either violent or non-violent. Non-violent methods of weakening the rival ideal include propaganda, persuading, reasoning or arguing by means of word written or spoken. But an ideal struggle for expansion cannot and does not remain confined to these methods alone. They are no doubt the only methods possible in periods of slavery or weakness and they are extremely important and useful under all circumstances, but neither can their result keep pace with the ideal’s own ever-increasing demands for expansion nor can they meet effectively all those methods which a rival militant ideal must naturally employ for its expansion at the cost of other ideals.

 

The ideal is a part of the self; it completes the self so that the self and the ideal become a single whole. The self feels uneasy and miserable when efforts are made to separate it from the ideal; it resists such efforts. The fact that men hold to their ideals tenaciously and obstinately is, therefore, quite natural. It is this natural tenacity and obstinacy which make it difficult even for a skilful debater to dissuade a person from the love of an ideal, however wrong, by giving reasons and arguments against it. A strong love listens to no arguments against itself. A lover’s mind is never open to views, however sound, which go against the beloved. Men who already love an ideal wholeheartedly are too unreasonable and too obstinate to be won over by another ideal by mere arguments. How can love be overpowered by reason which is its servant and not its master? Love rather justifies and rationalises itself with the help of reason. It is only a weak and disappointed love that reason can defeat but then, in such a case, it is love itself that has withdrawn and not reason that has defeated it.

 

The tendency of the self to persist in loving obstinately an ideal that it has once come to love (whether the ideal is right or wrong) reinforces itself considerably when the ideal is free, well- organized and well-defended. In such a case the ideal builds for itself a strong, extensive and complicated machinery of education which supports, feeds and nourishes the ideal and maintains the self’s love for it at as high a level as possible. In such a case the ideal is able to protect its adherents against the influences or the education of a rival aggressive ideal by banning the latter’s propaganda, written or spoken, as far as it is necessary and possible and also by meeting its propaganda and education by a skilfully-managed, effective counter propaganda and counter education of its own. Naturally, the self is too ready to be impressed by educative influences that favour its own ideal and, therefore, becomes safe from such influences of the opposing ideal.

 

People’s obstinacy in sticking to their ideals serves a useful purpose because, on account of it, they are able to offer resistance and opposition to other ideals and invite resistance and opposition to their own. In its absence no hard effort and, therefore, no progress would be possible. It gives that definiteness, that independent existence and stability, to an ideal group on account of which the mutual war of ideals, so essential for evolution, becomes possible. Because obstinacy is natural and useful, it does not follow that we can or we should tolerate it. Its very usefulness depends upon the fact that it invites opposition and offers opposition, that is, upon the fact that it has to be crushed. Obstinacy can be crushed, not by reasons and arguments, which go home only when love is on the decline, but by capturing the freedom of an ideal.

 

When we conquer and enslave an ideal, we interfere with its healthy life as an organism. It is wounded and paralysed and may linger on as a cripple but cannot function for the maintenance of its health and growth; it becomes weaker and weaker day by day. Between the freedom and the slavery of an ideal there is the difference of a vigorous health and a mortal or dangerous disease, if not actually of life and death. If an ideal group is like an organism, the various departments of the government that it sets up are like the vital organs which maintain this organism. When an ideal is enslaved, the function of government departments supports it no longer; it is impaired or upset so far as this ideal is concerned, with the result that the ideal becomes diseased and emaciated. Its educational system, in the widest possible sense of the term for example, which used to supply it with life-blood as the heart in an organism, is no longer its own. On the other hand, it is used against it. When the enslaved ideal gets no nourishment, when it loses its freedom and consequently its capacity for recuperation and growth, the impulse for the ideal becomes weak while the impulse for the ruling ideal gains in strength in the same proportion. As a current of water stopped at one channel is compelled to seek another, so the obstructed love of self, which was once flowing towards the enslaved ideal, is compelled to seek an outlet in the ideal of rulers, which has by now begun to display its beauty, real or unreal, in various ways. Then the arguments in favour of the conquering ideal, which lacked force and appeal formerly, begin to appear strong and convincing. The views and attitudes of the slaves (as judged, of course, by their actions and not merely by their words) undergo a change which they rarely know to be in the wrong direction or to be a departure from their own ideal. They “improve” in understanding and become more “reasonable” and more “civilised” from the point of view of the rulers as well as their own. Wise rulers exploit this period of unconscious change of views and ideas by administering to the slaves continuously heavy doses of their own education which at last make them forget themselves completely. If ever they remember themselves again, it is like a man who has a faint recollection of a dream he had some years ago. Here and there a fortunate individual, whom circumstances have kept out of touch with the influences of the new ideal and in touch with those of the old ideal, is able to retain the love of the latter, to see the light of freedom himself and to call others to see it.

 

The Final Ideology will have to resort to much the same methods for its expansion. These methods, although natural to every ideal, are directly justified only in the case of the Right Ideal. When the Right Ideal conquers and enslaves a wrong ideal, it brings about the latter’s inevitable disruption sooner than it would come otherwise. It creates circumstances which lead people actually to realise and experience the unreal character of its beauty. It adopts the most effective method of delivering people from the error of a wrong love. Not only does it cause the speedy frustration of a love that was doomed to frustration in any case but also substitutes it by a love which involves no painful disillusionments or disappointments for the future. It, therefore, renders a great service to the cause of evolution.

 

But the Right Ideology will win more on account of love than it will do on account of war. The love of man for man, which is a part of the urge of the self, is able to have a perfectly free expression only in the case of a self-conscious man. We can really love human beings only if we love their Creator and in no other way. The Right Ideology will be a message of love and good-will to all, although it may not hesitate to resort to war whenever it is necessary to do so in order to clear the path of its love. A self-conscious man may hate a part of humanity but he will do so because he loves the whole of it and that to the fullest extent. He may fight and kill a part of humanity but he will do so in order that he may save the whole of it and that for ever. His activities, whether peaceful or warlike, are rooted in his love of man and the Creator. They are always creative and constructive activities and they alone are conducive to the greatest good of the human race.

 

Both violence and non-violence as methods of opposing an ideal are consistent with the nature of consciousness and, therefore, with the nature of the Right Ideal. Each is essential for the expansion of an ideal. Each has its own natural, justified occasion and each supplements the other and prepares the ground for the success of the other. Neither can replace the other and, therefore, neither can be ruled out as wrong or unnecessary. Violence presupposes the existence of a certain amount of expansion and power already achieved by the ideal. It is, therefore, out of the question in the earliest stages of an ideal’s development when the ideal is necessarily weak but, as the power of an ideal grows, a situation is soon created when non-violent methods can no longer help its expansion or existence and the ideal has to resort to violence for its freedom, life and growth. At this time the only other alternative to the use of violence is the slavery or the death of the ideal.

 

An ideal must expand because it is in the nature of life to press forward, to grow and evolve. The ideal of the self at every stage of the self’s knowledge is the highest Perfection and Beauty known to it. The self makes an effort to establish a greater and greater contact with this Perfection or Beauty. It is this that leads to the expansion of the ideal. The self, whether social or individual, has no other aim in life except to serve the growth and expansion of its ideal and it serves it with the whole of its power and without a stop. All its activities are directed towards this purpose. The ideal expands a little and then uses the whole of its power so achieved for expanding and growing further. It insists on expanding as much as it is possible for it to expand by using the whole of its strength and not less than that. Naturally, therefore, as its power develops, the amount of expansion that it demands and that is possible for it to achieve, goes on increasing.

 

But an ideal can satisfy its ever-increasing demands for expansion only at the expense of other ideals. Every ideal has not only to resist the expansion of other ideals at its own cost but also to expand itself at the cost of other ideals. Therefore, every ideal group, every social organism, like every individual organism in Nature, develops an instrument of self-defence capable of destroying life and tries to make it as strong as it can. This instrument is the military power of the ideal group. The offence or the attack of one ideal group on another is invariably for the sake of self-defence because the ideal group has not only to live but also to grow. In fact, like an organism, it can hope to maintain its life only if it is growing in some way. If it has ceased to grow, it is slowly advancing towards death. Life and growth are ultimately identical with each other. An ideal’s urge for growth is a part of its urge to live. Whenever one ideal group attacks another, it does so, not because it is greedy or over-ambitious, but because it appears to it that it cannot satisfy its needs as a living organism otherwise.

 

The growth or the expansion of the ideal continues uninterrupted for some time, that is, for some time the resistance in the way of the ideal is such that it can be easily overcome by the normal, non-violent effort of the ideal, and the ideal does not feel the necessity of putting up an extraordinary effort to crush it. But on account of its own expansion which another ideal must take as a menace to itself, or on account of the expansion of another ideal or on account of the expansion of both at the same time, a stage is reached sooner or later when its growth cannot continue further. It meets a strong resistance from another ideal. This is a critical time in the life of the ideal because it is now face to face with death. The ideal was expecting this moment and was partly prepared for it already. Now it musters the whole of its military might to overcome the resistance of the rival ideal for the sake of its very life. Consciousness cannot tolerate the least resistance to itself. Nothing is immoral or vicious for consciousness except to tolerate resistance to itself in any form or shape. Morality of all standards has no other purpose or meaning except that the ideal should not make a compromise with resistance at any price and it never makes a real compromise with it as long as it lives. The moment it makes a compromise with resistance, it is modified; in other words, it ceases to exist and makes room for another ideal. When, therefore, two ideals are face to face with each other in a conflict, each tries to make the attack as effective as possible so that each maybe able to overcome the threat to its life as speedily and as surely as possible. Hence naturally the clash takes a violent form. Each ideal brings into action its military power, its life-destroying instrument of self-defence, which it had developed to serve it on such an occasion. As a result of it, one of the contending social organisms is wounded sufficiently to give up resistance to the other.

 

If, at this critical moment of its life, an ideal has scruples on the point of violence or bloodshed and if, on account of them, it waits, leaves things to chance or observes a policy of drift or non-violence, instead of actively opposing the resistance at all costs, it cannot hope to grow and live. Other ideals will grow at its expense and overpower it completely. But since the ideal is the greatest good and the highest beauty or perfection known to the self, it is the justified verdict of self that violence, if resorted to for the protection of the ideal, will be no sin. But violence does not mean killing all human beings whose ideal differs from our own. The self judges carefully whether the resistance to its purposes lies really in the lives of the individuals opposing it, and it has a recourse to violence rather than to a compromise with resistance, only when it becomes clear to it that it lies nowhere else. Destruction of life, barring that which may be the result of an insane mind, is never out of proportion with the needs of the ideal that is the cause of it; it is a different matter that it may be extremely foolish, indiscriminate and unproportionate from the point of view of another ideal. To have an apparently different ideal or a different set of views is not the same thing as a readiness to offer resistance to another ideal. An ideal is aggressive and capable of offering resistance to another ideal only when it is really determining all the actions of a person, that is, when it is internally free.

 

The object of violence is not to kill every person who has a different ideal but to enslave the opposing ideal, to shatter its organisation, to paralyse its educational system and to snatch away its power in such a way that it is rendered harmless and incapable of interfering, under threat of violence or otherwise, with the independence and expansion of your own ideal, or, if the complete enslavement of the rival ideal may not be compatible with the available strength or the immediate need of your ideal, then the object of violence is to weaken the rival ideal in such a way that it permits your ideal the expansion that it desires or requires for the time being.

 

We have already known that struggle with itself is the process by which life evolves. Life always meets resistance from itself and removes that resistance in order to pass on to a fuller realisation of itself. The removal of its own resistance is not a sin but a virtue, the standard of which depends upon the standard of the ideal from which it results. In fact, this is the principal virtue, the central virtue, in every system of morality, high or low, and all other virtues are a part of it and are derived from it. The ideal is a part of the self; when one idea in an individual human being destroys another idea that competes with it, life is violent to and destroys a part of itself in order that the whole of it, as distinguished from a part, may dominate, which means, in order that it may achieve a fuller realisation of itself. The idea that the individual allows to be defeated represents imperfect, incomplete life as compared with the idea that is allowed to win. Thus when life is violent to itself it does not really destroy itself but rather builds itself, evolves itself and adds to its own life and strength.

 

Life is struggling with itself and outgrowing itself in the individual human being as well as in the human society as a whole. There is a close analogy between an individual and a group. The whole of humanity is like a single individual. The higher ideas are fighting with the lower ideas and the lower ideas are fighting with the higher ideas in the individual human being as well as in the vast group of human beings who live on this planet. As the struggle of the individual human being with himself results in his evolution, so the struggle of humanity with itself results in its evolution. The struggle and, consequently, evolution go on continuously in the individual as well as in the human society as a whole. Violent bloody wars in which some ideals conquer and others fall are only critical and decisive moments in the struggle of humanity with itself. They are similar to the moments of tense anxiety in the consciousness of the individual human being when he is about to reach a great decision as a result of which some ideas will conquer and others will fall. The struggle of ideas in the consciousness of humanity as well as in the consciousness of the individual, however, continues at a slow pace before and after such critical and decisive moments.

 

The object of violence on the part of some ideas is not to kill human beings because of their beliefs but to weaken some other ideas, which become aggressive in the form of human beings and which, in this form, offer resistance to them ; and they weaken these other ideas in order that they themselves may dominate. When one idea is weakened, another idea begins to dominate the consciousness in the same proportion in the case of the individual as well as in the case of the human society. Just as the struggle of the individual with himself is the struggle of one idea of his consciousness with other ideas, so the struggle of humanity with itself (that is, the war of ideals) is essentially the struggle of one idea with other ideas in the consciousness of the human society as a whole. If there were no violence and no bloodshed, there would be no evolution of humanity as a whole since the struggle of ideas in the consciousness of humanity would not come to a decision. In the case of the individual the Right Ideal cannot dominate the wrong ideas (which are always competing with it and pressing for supremacy) without a hard effort and struggle. It can defeat these ideas only in proportion to its effort or exertion and no more. It is this hard effort and struggle of the Right Ideal against the lower ideas which makes it so difficult for a man to lead a perfectly moral life. So in the case of human society as a whole the Right Ideal will not dominate the wrong ideas unless it struggles against them and defeats them, and it will defeat them and dominate them only in proportion to its effort and no more. The domination of an idea in the case of the human individual as well as in the case of the human society is, of course, only in proportion to its freedom to determine action.

 

A violent conflict between two ideal groups quickens the process of evolution in the consciousness of each human being in the two ideal groups, in the consciousness of each ideal group and in the consciousness of the human society as a whole.

 

The struggle of the self with an outer danger to the ideal is really a reflection of its internal struggle with an internal danger to the ideal; it is a reflection of the struggle of the individual with himself. If there were no inner struggle, there would be no outer struggle. If the self does not play a coward in the outer struggle, it only means that it does not play a coward in the inner struggle. And when it acts cowardly in the outer struggle, it is an indication that it has lost the inner battle. The external struggle exists because of the internal struggle and it is difficult in proportion as the internal struggle is difficult. That is why a small ill-equipped army with a strong love for the ideal may often defeat a large well-equipped army with a weak love for the ideal. The efforts of the military authorities to keep up the “morale” of a fighting army are really their efforts to enable it to win the internal struggle.

 

The violent opposition of an individual to his opponent in the battlefield is a minor part and a transitory phase of his major conflict with himself which goes on always in peace and in war but which becomes the hardest and, therefore, the most conducive to the evolution of self in war. When two armies are face to face with each other, the two ideas that they represent are expending the best of their power to overcome the resistance of contending ideas in the consciousness of each individual. The inner opposition to the idea is at the maximum and, therefore, the inner struggle of the individual is also at the maximum. The process of evolution in the consciousness of the individual, as well as in the consciousness of humanity as a whole, is quickened to the utmost. The external struggle in each case has its foundation in the internal struggle. The individual self, as also the social self, displays the maximum of that passion for the ideal of which it is capable. This is, therefore, also the time when the ideal’s capacity to attach the self’s love to itself is put to a test. If the ideal is wrong, the self may soon reach the limit beyond which it cannot love the ideal. The ideal may suffer disruption on account of its own internal weaknesses, which become known to the self for the first time. This happens particularly when the ideal is defeated. But the disruption of the ideal is due fundamentally to the wrong elements that it contains and not to its defeat.

 

We have a horror of violence because, while on the one hand it involves a merciless destruction of human life, on the other hand, it has been used ruthlessly in human history, in all but a few rare cases, from motives which were not very lofty or about the loftiness of which there has been no general agreement. This state of things has confused some moralists, who, not knowing how to stop violence or how to improve its motives or even what its motives really ought to be, have advocated non-violence, instead of violence, as a principle to be observed by every ideal, under all circumstances and at all costs. They indulge in a wholesale condemnation of violence as if we can stop violence by mere words. Little do they know that the cure of violence is violence itself! Violence can be stopped by meeting it and crushing it and, having once crushed it, by holding in readiness to crush it again, should it attempt to raise its head once more. It is an eternal law of Nature that Nature wants every organism high or low, social or individual, to prove its right to live by showing itself to be stronger than its opponent. Consciousness has a prejudice in favour of power because it is Power itself.

 

Violence exists in the nature of life. It exists potentially in the ideal as a part of it or as a function within it, the object of which is the protection of the ideal. It is actualised as soon as the ideal meets sufficient resistance from another ideal. Actual violence must, therefore, continue as long as there is more than one ideal in the world and there will be more than one ideal in the world so long as the Right Ideal does not conquer all other ideals. Of course when the violence of one wrong ideal is crushed by another wrong ideal, the cure is temporary because every wrong ideal waits to be conquered by some other ideal. Violence will be crushed, finally, by the Right Ideal when it has overpowered all the wrong ideals. The strength that it will acquire as a result of this struggle will be its permanent achievement. It will be a potential violence ready to become actualised as soon as any wrong ideal shows signs of life again. It will be like the resistance of an extremely healthy and vigorous man against disease or infection. As the white blood cells throng the area of infection in the body of a man of vigorous health and remove the infection, so the disciplinary troops of the future world state will rush to the area of rebellion (where some cells of the human social organism, that is, some human individuals, may have acquired the infection of wrong ideals) and will restore the health of the social individual of humanity. This attitude of latent aggressiveness on the part of a thoroughly contented, peaceful and righteous human social organism of the future against itself, i.e. against possible rebellions of wrong ideals within its body, will be similar to the latent aggressiveness and alertness of a thoroughly contented and righteous man against himself, i.e. against all possible evil ideas, slips, errors or temptations, originating in his own consciousness, to which he may become a victim. Righteousness or peace of mind (which means the unity or the wholeness of consciousness) is a gift of Nature that has not only to be won by effort but also to he maintained by effort, in the case of the individual as well as in the case of the human society as a whole. The human race of the future will not be able to safeguard the peace it has once achieved, unless it maintains an attitude of potential aggressiveness against all possible factors calculated to shatter this peace.

 

The war of ideals has no other purpose in Nature except that, as a result of this war, higher and higher ideals may begin to dominate more and more the lower ideals till finally the highest ideal may dominate all the lower ideals and efface them completely. If the highest and the last of ideals does not take part in the mutual war of ideals, assuming wrongly that violence at its own time is not a part of it, it will not be the highest and the last of them and another similar ideal with violence as a part of it must take its place, because it will not be able to bring to an end the process that Nature started in the shape of the war of ideals. The active participation of the Right Ideal in the war of ideals will mark the last stages of the successful accomplishment of that process which Nature started, no doubt, with a view to bringing it to a successful conclusion.

 

Violence cannot be immoral since it resides potentially in the nature of consciousness in order to become actual at the proper occasion, as the sting of a wasp or the electric organ of an electric catfish or the nematocysts of a hydra or the horns of an animal become active when necessary. Violence is right directly when it serves the Right Ideal. But even when it is wrong, being prompted by a wrong ideal, it serves a useful purpose of Nature indirectly by clearing the way for the domination of better and better ideals and finally for the domination of the best of all ideals. Unless violence runs its natural course, there can be no progress and no permanent peace on earth. Of all ideals, the Right Ideal alone has the capacity to obliterate all other ideals and, therefore, to dominate completely and permanently the consciousness of humanity. But it cannot do so unless it wins the war of ideals and it cannot win this war unless it enters it and fights it out to the end. Either other ideals will engage it in a war with themselves or, if it refuses to be thus engaged, they will not permit it to achieve its independence and to grow and expand at their cost and thus to fulfil its great mission in Nature. It will thus cease to be the Final Ideal and the Right Ideal. If it takes up the challenge of other ideals, whether implied or explicit, boldly, and it cannot but take it up by its very nature as the Right Ideal, it will acquire the health and the strength that will be necessary for its life and growth. It is by struggling that it will satisfy the necessary conditions of its existence. The life and growth of the Last Ideal cannot but be governed by those very laws of Nature which govern the life and growth of every other ideal. These laws are universal and infallible like the laws of Biology. The Final Ideal will, therefore, have to struggle for its life in the same way in which all other ideals have to struggle.

 

If we substitute non-violence for violence completely throughout the world at the present stage of human evolution while the ideals remain the same (supposing it is possible for us to persuade humanity to do anything against their nature on a large scale), we shall only delay and prolong the war of ideals instead of bringing it to a quick decision. The struggle of ideals will not cease; it will only slow down as a process. The unity that will be established in this way will be apparent and superficial and not the genuine real harmony which the victory of the Right Ideal alone will bring about. It will not be a unity at all; it will be, at the best, a truce or a suspension of hostilities which will, however, continue to lie dormant. We shall involve the vast human social individual of this earth in a mental state which will be similar to the mental state of a man who has many ideas existing side by side in his mind but who does not know what ideas to choose and what to reject. The indecision of such a man results in his inactivity and, therefore, in the absence of his progress. Thus we shall bring the process of human evolution to a stop, or, at least, retard it considerably. We shall deprive ourselves, at the same time, of that special progress, mental and moral, which can result only from a hard and strenuous effort, such as only opposition and resistance can induce. The Final Ideology cannot appear, cannot win and cannot fulfil its great mission in Nature after winning, unless that knowledge and progress which come to us, not only as a result of peace, but also as a result of war, grow from stage to stage. Our knowledge of Beauty becomes real and practical and capable of determining action when it is allowed to determine action, that is, when, urged by this knowledge, we meet resistance and overcome it, and in no other way. Thus, by substituting non-violence for violence, while mankind continues to love wrong ideals, we shall do no real service to the human society and shall only put off the day when they will be able to achieve their real unity and harmony. There is only one road leading to world peace and that is the road leading to a universal acceptance of the Right Ideal.

 

The active participation of the Right Ideology in the war of ideals, resulting in the domination of one idea over all the other ideas, will be the struggle of the consciousness of humanity with itself for the achievement of its own oneness or wholeness. It will be similar to the struggle of the consciousness of the human individual with itself for the achievement of its oneness or wholeness through the victory of one idea over all the other ideas. The idea that can dominate and unify the consciousness of the human individual as well as the consciousness of the human society, finally and completely must be, on account of the very nature of consciousness, the Right Ideal. The perfect unity or wholeness of consciousness is possible only at the highest stage of self-consciousness, in the case of the individual as well as in the case of the society. The oneness of the human race cannot be achieved unless we destroy all the wrong ideals swaying mankind at present and thus unify the consciousness of humanity. And when we succeed in achieving the oneness or the wholeness of humanity at last, it will not be maintained and carried to a higher and higher perfection unless we constantly keep in check and hold in readiness to destroy all those ideas which tend to shatter it. In other words, we shall have to maintain a continuous struggle in order to achieve our unity as well as to preserve it and to bring it to a greater and greater perfection always.

 

Oneness is a quality of consciousness and, like all the other qualities of consciousness, its expression or realisation is becoming more and more perfect and pronounced in the process of evolution. Consciousness has been struggling with obstacles in order to express itself, its qualities, ever more and more perfectly in creation. Perfection of oneness will be achieved, therefore, through a process of struggle and opposition to resistance.

 

The oneness or the wholeness of the atom, the higher oneness of the living cell, the still higher oneness of the living organism and the next higher oneness of the consciousness of the human individual or the unity of the human personality, wherever it exists, has been each the result of struggle on the part of consciousness. Each has been acquired as a result of struggle and is being maintained as a result of it. The next higher oneness, which is the oneness of the consciousness of the human society as a whole, will be also the result of a process of struggle in which victory—a hard-won and well-deserved victory—will lie with consciousness, that is, with the Right Ideology, through which indeed consciousness will become a direct and conscious participant in the struggle. Consciousness has been fighting its way to a more and more perfect oneness or wholeness in the past and it must continue to fight its way to a more and more perfect oneness or wholeness in the future. A continuous opposition to obstacles, a constant destruction or resistance, whatever the form in which it may present itself, is an essential condition of the continuous advancement of the human race towards an ever greater and greater perfection of their unity.

 

The process of the growth of oneness by means of struggle can never come to a stop unless the Universe achieves its perfection and ceases to evolve and, therefore, to exist. However perfect the wholeness or the oneness that the human race may have achieved at any time, there will be, so long as the world does not reach its perfection, always a higher and more perfect oneness or wholeness to be achieved. The struggle will, therefore, continue for ever. Struggle will be necessary, not only to achieve a oneness or wholeness, but also to maintain it and to achieve the next more perfect oneness or wholeness. To put the same thing in a more concrete way, struggle will, not only bring about the unity of the human race by establishing a government or a state of the Right Ideal throughout the world, but will also enable that state to preserve its hard-won unity as well as to go on adding to it indefinitely. The unity of the future world state of the Right Ideal will continue to develop because the self-consciousness of its members, i.e. their love for the Right Ideal, will go on increasing on account of their continuous worship and adoration of this ideal as well as their constant action and struggle in its service. As they will increase their love for the Right Ideal, they will also increase their love for each other in the same proportion and hence the unity of the human race will continue to become more and more perfect. A perfect unity of consciousness is possible only at the highest stage of self-consciousness, in the case of the individual as well as in the case of the society, and the self-consciousness of the society grows with the growth of self-consciousness of the individual. As in the case of the consciousness of the human individual, so in the case of consciousness of the human society, struggle will conquer resistance; it will hold in check the resistance that is already conquered and it will conquer fresh resistance and thus evolution will go on.

 

It may look like a self-contradicting statement but it is, all the same, a fact that the path of love lies through the valley of hatred. We can love an object or an idea only by loving it and hating its antithesis simultaneously. Every man loves and hates at the same time. When a man is conscious of loving, his hatred is implied and unconscious. When he is conscious of hating, his love is implied and unconscious. Love involving creativeness and hatred involving destructiveness are thus like the two sides of the same coin. They cooperate with each other for the evolution of consciousness. Neither of the two can function fully and freely without the other.

 

It is highly important for understanding the nature of consciousness to realise that every quality of consciousness implies and includes all its other qualities. When we desire to express one quality of consciousness, it is with the expressed or implied, conscious or unconscious, immediate or ultimate support of all its other qualities that we can do so. To the extent to which we may be unable to get such a support from any one of these other qualities of consciousness, to that extent we shall be unable to express the quality that we desire to express. No quality of consciousness is worthy of itself if it is divorced from any one of its other qualities. Each quality of consciousness is the whole consciousness or it is not that quality at all. Consciousness is a whole and must act as a whole. None of its qualities can be eliminated from it. No one of its qualities is useless or immoral now and no one of them will be useless and immoral in the future. The nature of consciousness is permanent and unalterable. All the qualities of consciousness are good and moral because they are expressed in the service of love. They are aspects or forms of love. They are the different ways in which love needs to express itself at different occasions in order to reach its own completeness. A person who is pledged to the love of an idea but not to the hatred and the consequent destruction of objects or ideas that represent its antithesis, is really pledged to neither of the two or pledged to both. A person who is not prepared to clear the path of love or to fight for it, when necessary, pays only a lip service to the object of his love. His love (whether he knows it or not) is worse than indifference. He is deceiving himself as well as others that he is a lover.

 

A sense of readiness to destroy all opposition to love will be necessary for the completeness of love and will persist for ever. Since it will enable consciousness to hold in check the resistance that it has already conquered, it will enable it to meet and conquer fresh resistance and thereby to continue its evolution. It will be an essential condition of the preservation of the past victories of consciousness as well as an indispensable foundation of its efforts for the achievement of fresh victories. When there will be nothing to hate in this world, love, divine as well as human, will teach its highest possible realisation. It will achieve its final victory, after which it can wish for nothing more. At this stage the Universe will reach its perfection. In other words, it will be impossible for it to evolve itself further and, since the conscious activity of the World-Self in the Universe, which we have known to be the cause of evolution, will come to a stop at this time, the Universe will disappear and make room for the birth of a new one. It only means that hatred, like all the other qualities of consciousness, must continue to serve love as long as the world lasts.

 

Struggle, opposition to resistance of one kind or another, will remain, by the very nature of consciousness, an essential condition of evolution till the end of the world.

 

Bloodshed, caused by the mutual wars of wrong ideals, is extremely deplorable, since it is not even a direct or consciously rendered aid to evolution. But it is going on in accordance with definite laws of Nature and there is no refuge from it except in the laws of Nature itself. There is only one way in which the human race can save itself from needless bloodshed and that is by adopting the Right Ideal, universally, and by loving it ever more and more. This is what they are going to do, sooner or later; and the sooner they do it, the better.

 

We evolve by giving a greater and greater expression to our nature, and an aspect of our nature is to live in the form of organized and independent societies or self-governing states. It follows that the idea of a self-ruling state is inseparable from the Right Ideal and that the forces of evolution are tending towards the creation of a self-ruling state founded on the Right Ideal, which will struggle and expand, gradually but inevitably, to the whole world.

 

The nature of the self is such that it can realise every ideal, whether right or wrong, only in society. Bergson writes:

 

“On the two great routes that the vital impulse has found open before it along the series of the arthropods and the series of the vertebrates, instinct and intelligence, at first wrapped up confusedly with one another, have, in their development, taken divergent directions. At the culminating point of the first evolution hymenoptera, at the culminating point of the second man. In each in spite of the radical difference in the forms attained and the growing separation of the paths followed it is to social life that evolution leads as though the need of it was felt from the very beginning or rather as though there was some original and essential aspiration of life which could find full satisfaction only in society. Society which is the community of individual energies benefits from the efforts of all its members and renders effort easier to all. It can only subsist by subordinating the individual, it can only progress by leaving the individual free, contradictory requirements which have to be reconciled. With insects the first condition alone is fulfilled. The societies of ants and bees are admirably disciplined and united but fixed in an invariable routine. If the individual is forgotten in the society the society on its part also has forgotten its destination. Individual and society, both in a state of somnambulism, go round and round in the same circle instead of moving straight forward to a greater social efficiency and complete individual freedom. Human societies alone have kept full in view both the ends to be attained.”

 

Bergson rightly believes that the gradual progress and evolution of society will consist in the gradual reconciliation of the contradictory requirements of leaving the individual free and subordinating him to the interests of the society. But the check on the individual’s freedom which the society must need impose on him can be consistent with his freedom only if it is demanded by the ideal of his nature. Only that society, therefore, will be directly helping evolution which is founded on the Right Ideal. In such a society alone the opposite requirements of the freedom and subordination of the individual will cease to be opposite and will, on the other hand, support each other. Such a society must ultimately take the form of a government which is both a democracy and a dictatorship at one and the same time.

 

A dictatorship is the most efficient form of social organisation in which the individual may lose himself for the common good of all. In a dictatorship alone the individual can be disciplined and subordinated completely to the requirements of the group. Hence, it is only in this form of society which is, by the way, the latest term in the evolution of social organisations, that the Right Ideal can be expected to reach and will actually reach its highest possible realisation. The group of men who come to be inspired by the Right Ideal in future will favour this type of society in view of its efficiency and strength to cope with dangers inside and outside the group, which will be grave and numerous in the beginning. Because they will expect a career of hard struggle, they will, out of a necessity, resort to a form of government which qualifies them most of all for this struggle by giving them the greatest possible efficiency and strength as a group. Having established a dictatorship to meet their urgent initial necessities, they will discover that it is a form of government which not only gives them a good start but which, by assuring a complete unity and discipline among the group, also supplies the individual and the society with facilities for effort and action which are valuable under all circumstances. The coming ideology will thus incarnate itself into the form of a highly organized dictatorship of self-conscious individuals working collectively with an ever-increasing unity of purpose towards individual and social freedom, progress and power and attain to a self-imposed discipline as perfect as that of bees and ants.

 

In such a society alone the urge of consciousness to achieve its oneness or wholeness in a large group, including ultimately the whole of humanity, will be able to attain to its highest satisfaction, because such a society alone can be disciplined and organized sufficiently to be able to function as a single organism or a single individual, which is what the nature of consciousness demands. The dictator of such a society will be a man who, by virtue of his high stage of self-consciousness, will be fitted to be a true representative of Consciousness, which is the real and the ultimate dictator of the human society. Every individual in such a state will obey the urge of consciousness in him interpreted by their human leader or dictator to the best of his knowledge of the self with the help of a party of highly self-conscious men.

 

The restrictions and limitations, which a society of this kind will have to impose on the individual for its own maintenance and expansion, will be not only in accordance with the deepest nature of the individual but also a source of help to him to expand and unfold the possibilities of that nature. But as the self-consciousness of the individual and the society will grow, it will become less and less necessary for them to be ruled by a government although, indeed, it will take a long time before the government becomes entirely unnecessary.

 

Lenin and Kropotkin dreamt of an ultimate class-less society functioning without a dictator or a government throughout the world. But even when a perfect economic freedom or equality has been reached throughout the world and the so-called classes have ceased to exist, differences among men will continue to be created by the different ways in which they will satisfy their urge of the self. No lasting sense of a unity of desires and purposes can be created in men unless they all have an ideal of a permanent and stable character, which means an ideal that meets all the demands of their nature. The Communists can, therefore, never see the light of that day when it will be possible for them to dispense with a government. On the other hand, when the Right Ideal has established itself thoroughly in the hearts of all men throughout the world, they may not require a human dictator at all. Then the dictator of every person will be solely his Creator and every person will be able to look within and take orders from Him for everything.

 

It is not hunger or the urge of instincts that will be able to control the urge of the self, but it will be rather the urge of the self that will control the urge of instincts and deliver mankind from mutual hatred and discord—such is our nature.

 

In the case of a dictatorship based on the Right Ideal the discipline imposed on the individual by the society will not interfere with his freedom but will rather enable him to give a fuller expression to his nature and to acquire a greater and greater freedom of his self. There will be ultimately a perfect harmony between the commands of the dictator and the most cherished and freely chosen desires of the ordinary members of the state. In such a state the individual will be free for himself from himself. It will protect him from his own weaknesses and will assure his progress and freedom. Freedom never means absolute freedom. We are always bound by the laws of our ideals and we are free only when we are under no restraint, internal or external to abide by those laws. The restraint is internal when our weaknesses, due to our instinctive inclinations, stand in the way of our ideal. It is apparently external (although really internal) when an outside power stands in the way of our ideal. The individual is a slave in both cases. In a dictatorship of the Right Ideal the external powers must naturally protect the individual’s efforts to achieve the ideal from his internal weaknesses. Thus in such a dictatorship we shall be free from all kinds of slavery, internal as well as external.

 

But while an efficient and strict government like a dictatorship is extremely useful in the service of the Right ideal, it is extremely harmful in the service of a wrong one. A dictatorship is a blessing when its ideal is the Right Ideal because, in such a case, it can protect the individual most strictly and efficiently from himself for himself; it gives him a greater and greater freedom to unfold his deepest nature; it facilitates his effort to give more and more expression to the urge of his self. But it is equally a curse if the ideal of the state is one of the wrong ideals because then it is able to obstruct the urge of the self most strictly and efficiently, it bars the individual from himself against himself with all the efficiency characteristic of it. Then not only does it subject the individual to a slavery, but also makes it most difficult for him to shatter the chains of that slavery. Then it should be regarded of all forms of government, the worst and the most wicked as also the most injurious to the evolution of humanity.

 

But although the social organisation of the Right Ideal will begin as a dictatorship, it will evolve and improve with the evolving self-consciousness of the individual and soon take the form of a social organisation which will be at once a most perfect dictatorship as well as a most perfect democracy, free from all the defects of democracy now known to be unavoidable. The reason is that it will be founded on a clearly defined intellectual or scientific ideology which, as time will pass, will be understood more and more clearly and loved more and more intensely by all the individuals in the state. A government based on such an ideology must soon become a real government of all the people by all the people and for all the people. The dictator of such a state will be a dictator only in name. He will be really a servant of the people. Having to follow strictly an ideology, the needs and requirements of which are known and understood thoroughly and in details by all the people in the state, it will not be possible for him to violate these needs and requirements and thereby to go against the general will of his subjects by means of any of his orders or decisions. Thus the scientific nature of the ideology will be a guarantee that the dictator will never be able to misuse his powers with impunity.

 

Such a state will be the culminating point of the evolution of both democracy and dictatorship. It will be like a beehive. No one can tell whether the society in a beehive is a dictatorship or a democracy, whether the individual bees working day and night dutifully for the common good of the community, of which they are the members, obey the orders of the queen or follow their own cherished wills. Since no member of the group can do anything contrary to the will of the leader and has to obey the leader implicitly and unreservedly, it is a dictatorship and, since each of its acts is completely in accord with the will of all in the community, it is a perfect “government of the people by the people for the people”, that is to say, a perfect democracy. This becomes possible because, what the leader wills is exactly the will of each member of the hive. Every individual bee in a hive acts rightly (i.e. consistently with the needs of the group as a whole) in its social life but its actions are instinctive, automatic and unconscious. At the highest stage of human evolution the highly self-conscious human individual will act rightly and consistently with the requirements of the society as a whole, not instinctively and automatically like a bee, but by a conscious and deliberate choice and it will be as difficult for him to mistake the path dictated to him by his love and illuminated for him by his own intellect and intelligence, as it is for a bee to mistake the path chalked out for it by its inflexible instincts. Thus the activities of the future man will result from the orders of his human dictator as well as from his own most cherished desires simultaneously, and no one will know what their real source is.

 

There is nothing to choose between external and internal slavery. The external slavery is bad because it stands in the way of our love, our ideal, and the internal slavery does the same. The external slavery resolves itself ultimately into internal slavery. Our drawbacks are ultimately internal and not external. External impediments are in one sense rather a blessing because they call forth effort and enable us to make progress. When we fail to make an effort to remove the impediments, it is because of our internal weaknesses, our inability to sacrifice our instinctive desires for the sake of our ideals. We become slaves only when we accept internal slavery and we become externally free only when we are internally free. Internal freedom is incompatible with external slavery, that is, a man free from the desires of his lower nature never submits to a master other than his own ideal. To have an ideal is to accept a ruler. No person internally free can be ruled by the representative of an ideal not his own.

 

When we have a wrong ideal, we are unable to express our nature; we are slaves although our slavery is of our own choice made erroneously.

 

When the subjects have the same ideal as the ruler’s, they are said to be free; when their ideal is different, they are said to be slaves. In the former case, the ideal, whether it is wrong or right, is free to realise itself to any extent, as the rulers will give the individual the freedom and facility that he needs. In the latter case the slaves have only two courses open to them. They may continue to make efforts, such as they can with their limited means and reduced power, to get freedom or they may abandon their efforts altogether. If they keep up their efforts to win freedom, their ideal is alive and they may triumph one day. If they give them up, they become a part and parcel of the ruling ideal group and their ideal disappears. If the ruling group exploits them instead of giving them a share in the government, it is because their exploitation forms a part of the ideal to which the slaves have subscribed willingly.

 

We must distinguish between real and apparent freedom. Every ideal imposes its own rules and restrictions. Everybody has an ideal and, therefore, everybody is bound by the rules and restrictions imposed by his ideal. Freedom never means the absence of restrictions. It means freedom to seek an ideal, willingly accepting all the restrictions that are imposed by the ideal. When we use the word “freedom”, therefore, we need to qualify it by specifying the purpose or the ideal for which it is to be used. The self is really free only when it is seeking the  Right Ideal, otherwise it is a slave to desires and laws which are not its own. Our freedom is only apparent when we are free to seek a wrong ideal; really it is slavery. But whether the restrictions are of our own choice or imposed from outside, they will impair our freedom only if they are contrary to our nature.

 

Whether a man is a subject or a ruler, he is a slave, if he has a wrong ideal. If he is a ruler, his freedom is apparent and his slavery is real, although it is of his own choice. There can be five different types of society from the point of view of the ideals of the rulers and the ruled.

 

The Ideal of Rulers	The Ideal of the Individual Subject	Result for the Individual Subject
I. Wrong	Wrong and different	Slavery in appearance and in reality
II. Wrong	Wrong and same	Freedom in appearance and slavery in reality
III. Right	Wrong	Slavery in appearance and in reality (tends to change into real freedom)
IV. Wrong	Right	Slavery in appearance and slavery in reality (tends to change either into the 5th or the 2nd type)
V. Right	Right	Real freedom leading to the greatest progress of man

 

An example of the first type is India of pre-partition days, when the ideal of the subjects was Indian Nationalism and the ideal of the rulers was British Imperialism, both wrong ideals. Although the British have left that country, real freedom will not come to the peoples of India so long as they do not base their constitution on the Right Ideal. Examples of the second type are Russia, France, Turkey and many other so-called “free” countries of the world. The fifth type is the objective of evolution. The fourth type is the earlier stage of the fifth type. The third type will exist side by side with the fifth type for some time and ultimately disappear enabling the fifth type to dominate. That the fourth type of society may have one of the two opposite results for the individual, either real freedom or real slavery, is due to the fact that self-consciousness and slavery are terms incompatible with each other. A group of self-conscious men living under the government of a wrong ideal must either accept slavery and lose their self-consciousness or must continue to make efforts to get independence, in which case they must ultimately succeed. Self-conscious men, as long as they remain self-conscious, have their own law to follow and their own ruler to obey, and that ruler is the Right Ideal. Their ideal must dominate all their activities, whether they are called private or public activities, because it creates a distinction between right and wrong which extends to the whole life of the individual.

 

All our activities are governed by our ideal. It is, therefore, meaningless to divide human activities into two parts, public and private. Because our ideal is always a social ideal, because it is derived from the society and is also the common ideal of a society of individuals, all our activities have a social reference, whether or not they appear to us to have been directly influenced and required by the society. The private and personal life of a man, as an individual, and his social and political life, as a member of a society or a state, cannot be strictly distinguished. Every part of our life, whether it is social, political, moral, religious, intellectual, personal or private, forms a link of a single chain and belongs to an indivisible unity, since every part of it is determined by the single force of the ideal.

 

The devotees of Nationalism or Socialism, who insist that religion is a private concern of the individual and that it should have nothing to do with Politics, in fact deny the position of religion as an ideal of life.

 

A person who is really seeking the Right Ideal will derive from that ideal alone the canons and principles that will guide him not only in his private affairs like his dealings with his friends and relatives, marriage, the choice of a profession, etc., but also in those actions which he is called upon to perform jointly and simultaneously with other individuals, actions which are determined by the policy of the rulers in matters of finance, commerce, education, the procedure of courts, international relations, civil and constitutional law, military action, etc. His ideal will, therefore, come into a clash with the ideal of the rulers at many points. If he cooperates with the ruling wrong ideal, he will be not only doing himself but also collaborating with the rulers in forcing others to do many things which are contrary to the demands of the Right Ideal. Moreover, the state will bring to bear on a great portion of his life a pressure which cannot fail to influence the rest of it, even that portion of it which he considers as private. His own public life as well as the public life of other persons around him must influence his private life also to some extent. The influence of the wrong ideal of the rulers will pervade the whole of his life, only affecting some portions of it more visibly than others.

 

Life is a single whole. Any force that influences a part of it must influence the whole of it in the long run. Every action that we perform influences every other action of our life more or less for better or for worse. But even if a man thinks that he is able to protect a portion of his life, that which he considers as the private and personal portion of it, entirely from the influence of the dominating wrong ideal, a portion of his life, that which he calls national or international, will continue to be directly influenced by it. But no servant can act under the commands of two masters at once. You cannot have one ideal for your private life and another ideal for your public or national life. No two ideals can flourish side by side with each other in the same mind. No idea can be said to be in the process of realisation if it is weighed down by the political power of another ideal. You cannot have a portion of your life—the personal and private portion of it—controlled by the Right Ideal and another portion—the public portion of it—controlled by the wrong ideal which happens to have established its rule, especially when you are compelled to do so by force.

 

Self-consciousness must grow or decline. It must progress or regress. No progress in self-consciousness is possible unless a man conforms strictly to the discipline imposed by the Right Ideal. If there is any resistance in his way he must at once apply himself to overcome it. If he yields to the slightest of resistance willingly, the progress of his self-consciousness is doomed. To shatter all resistance is the imperative demand of the ideal and an indispensable condition of the evolution of self. To attack resistance is to progress. A self-conscious man feels impelled to break all resistance in his way and he must succeed in breaking it ultimately because his efforts to break it are favourable to the aspirations of Consciousness. If he puts up with the resistance to his ideal and accepts slavery, he degenerates or at last stagnates. Being faced with the necessity of obeying two ideals, one his own, the Right Ideal, and the other that of the rulers, a wrong ideal, he makes, consciously or unconsciously, a compromise between them retaining that portion of the Right Ideal which can fit into the wrong ideal easily and which does not require any effort or any opposition to resistance in order to be followed. He thus invents a new modified ideal which is not right but wrong. His idea of Beauty is altered. He loves ugliness instead of Beauty. Such a slave consoles himself that he is a peace-loving, peaceful and law-abiding citizen, realising little that he is neglecting his own law and no longer abiding by it. What he would have loved or liked in a state of freedom, he hates and dislikes in the state of slavery and vice versa. What is really ugly appears beautiful to him. His moral judgments become marred by the influence of the wrong ideal followed by the rulers which he has himself partially accepted. He, therefore, develops a philosophy to defend and justify his new ideal which is really a combination of right and wrong.

 

The ideal is a call for action. It impels the self to change the actual conditions in the world to suit itself and its ideal. If a self-conscious man does not oppose the resistance of the ruling wrong ideal with the maximum of his power, which is, of course, always a harmonious combination of courage, prudence, planning co-operation and discipline, he has given himself up to a wrong ideal, has reconciled himself to slavery and has sacrificed the growth of his self-consciousness. A person who reconciles himself to slavery must be doing so because of his desire to preserve his life, position, riches or property. These are instinctive desires the love of which must be stronger in his heart than the love of the ideal. His ideal has lost an inner battle and every battle lost by the Right ideal is a battle won by a wrong ideal, which in this way gains in power and force at the expense of the Right Ideal. His ideal is changing more and more to his instinctive desires. Since the self could not rise to the level of the Right Ideal on account of its inability to cope with the barriers presented by the instinctive desires, so it is forced to lower the ideal to its own low level. Since the self could not act in accordance with its belief or its idea of Beauty, it is compelled to believe in accordance with what it likes to do. Its idea of Beauty has changed. The slave’s attitude towards life is altered. His ideal loses its beauty. He becomes a slave in appearance and in reality.

 

Slavery is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall an individual. It becomes a huge impediment in the way of his continued self-realisation. The slave uses his own powers but realizes the ideals of others. He works for his enemies and gets nothing but bread in return for his labour. He buys his physical existence at the cost of his consciousness. What a losing bargain! Yet the slave is rarely conscious of his loss. He considers it a favour that he is allowed to live on. Creative activity of the highest order, whether it pertains to art or science or philosophy, can be rarely expected of a slave. As long as nations remain free, they invent and create and add to the knowledge of the world but as soon as they become slaves, their creativeness is doomed. The urge of the self can find an adequate expression only in conditions of perfect freedom. Many a nation, which made astonishing contributions to human knowledge in the past when it was free, is incapable of adding anything to the achievements of its ancestors now that it is slave. The world, unable to explain it, wonders at the death of a talent, once so brilliant, which peace and education fail to revive. Unfortunately for the slaves, the killing effect of slavery is very imperceptible and it is very rare that a slave is able to realise it.

 

We are happy when the urge of the self is having a full expression. There are two ways in which it can be achieved: by making a successful effort for the ideal or, if the effort required by the ideal is difficult, as when a man is the slave of a strong master, by lowering the ideal to the level of that effort which is easily possible. The ideal compels and goads the self to strive for its achievement. It is relentlessly persistent in its demands and does not stop to consider whether the effort that it demands of the self is safely possible or not, as long as there is the slightest chance of its success in the near or the distant future. It insists on the effort, no matter whether the individual lives or dies as a result of it. When the effort is difficult, as it certainly is in conditions of slavery, the self can have no rest and no peace unless it either prepares itself to obey the ideal and face boldly the dangers involved in the effort or else brings down the ideal in the scale of Beauty. In such a way the effort that was difficult becomes unnecessary and unimportant. When the self cannot raise its effort to suit the ideal, it lowers the ideal to suit the effort because it is impossible for it to take a position midway between these two alternatives.

 

Whenever the self rejects the first alternative and adopts the second one, it does so quite unknowingly; it does not know that it has lowered or changed the ideal. The self says to itself, “My ideal does not really require this effort but that one.” But although the self does not say it in so many words and does not admit it consciously, it amounts to saying, “It is not this ideal that is beautiful but that ideal.” The belief or the ideal of the self has changed. At this moment, in order to facilitate its own deception, which it needs so badly, the self invents a philosophy and even a religion based on “divine authority” in support of its new indispensable belief, knowing little that its philosophy or religion is the outcome of a necessity and has no worth or value of its own. A slave is able to justify his slavery by means of nice, hair-splitting arguments. No arguments can convince a slave who has reconciled himself to slavery that he is a slave. He resists such a conviction because the moment he has it an impossible situation will be created. He will at once see the beauty of an ideal that will strongly impel him to an effort of which he is incapable. He reconciled himself to slavery just because he was incapable of this effort. And now he has become still more incapable of it because, as a result of his slavery, he has already lost, not only his conviction, but also his courage and hope. One must know that a verbal confession of slavery is not the same thing as a conviction of slavery. A real conviction must induce action calculated to break the chains of slavery. A contented slave, whether he knows it or not, has turned himself away from his own ideal. He has refused to face it or to see its beauty and the ideal has practically lost its beauty for him. We feel only that much of the beauty of an ideal for which we are ready to make an effort; the rest of its beauty we refuse to acknowledge.

 

The pleasure derived from the use of soporifics and intoxicants is due to the fact that for the time the individual is under the influence of such drugs the self forgets its ideal, which is forcing it to exert itself to the utmost always. The self is enabled to lower the ideal to the level of instinctive desires and to give an easy expression to the urge of the self in this way. The philosophy or the religion which a slave invents for himself serves him a similar purpose; it acts on him as a narcotic or an intoxicant and enables him to forget his troublesome ideal, his hard task-master, for some time.

 

Dissatisfaction with all existing ideals is essential before a person can see the Beauty of the Right Ideal. We proceed from the rejection of one ideal to the affirmation of another. The series of world wars seems to be creating this kind of dissatisfaction at present. The shortcomings and the undesirable or unsatisfactory elements of the existing wrong ideals are becoming more and more visible and there seems to be growing in Europe and everywhere in the world a strong desire for a new and better ideology.

 

When the Perfect Ideology is at last able to win its freedom and obtain political power somewhere in the world, it will have to reclaim a considerable section of the population ruled by it from the baneful influence of wrong ideals by means of education through press, platform, radio, cinema and school. Education is an instrument which can be used equally for better or for worse. Every system of education is adapted to the ideal that creates it. If education is adapted to the Right Ideal, it will lead the individual to his freedom; if to the wrong one, it will make a slave of him, although it will, no doubt, also make him feel completely reconciled to his slavery.

 

A state founded on the Right Ideal will have to ban up to a reasonable extent the expression of all opinion that is antagonistic to the Right Ideal. It will be essential in the interests of the freedom of the individual who will have to be protected from the influence of wrong ideals. Intolerance is not bad if we know its use. It supplements education and protects its benefits. There is no use injecting a poison into the system depending upon the efficacy of an antidote. If cure is essential, there is no reason why prevention should not be equally essential. We can bother about intolerance as repressive of the individual’s freedom only so long as we do not know, for certain, in what does the individual’s welfare consist. When the knowledge of the highest good becomes the common property of all, as it must ultimately, we shall not mind being hard to the individual in his own interests as well as in the interests of the society of which he is a member. We know today the rules of health definitely and certainly and the result is that we enforce them at the point of sword in the interests of public health. A man who commits a nuisance on a public road is at once sent to prison and no one is astonished at the penalty. A day is coming in the progress of our civilisation and culture when we shall understand the rules conducive to the health or the happiness of the self as surely and as commonly as we know today the rules of bodily health. Then may the people laugh at a man who delivers a speech in a public gathering in favour of Dialectical Materialism or National Imperialism and no one will wonder at his going to prison.

 

Let us consider some of the political ideologies that prevail in the world today and compare them with the Ideology of the Future. The ideal that has had the greatest hold on the peoples of Europe since the downfall of Christianity is Nationalism. Marxism only recently overthrew it in a part of Europe, with the result that, in order to strengthen itself further and protect itself against Marxism, it assumed its most extreme form in Fascism and Nazism.

 

The material progress that Europe was able to achieve owing to the National ideal made it the most fascinating idea throughout the world, even in the backward countries of the East. Like every wrong ideal, Nationalism has some good points in it. It brings about a unity of purpose, a spirit of co-operation, self-discipline, self sacrifice for the sake of a limited, mainly material, welfare among a limited section of humanity. The ideal neglects a considerable portion of our higher needs and lacks the universality of the Right Ideal. It was, for these reasons, destined to bring about its own ruin and it is bringing it about speedily. Since each national ideal is founded on the adoration of a particular strip of territory bounded by definite geographical limits and inhabited mostly by a particular race, it creates a dangerous permanent hatred among the national group against the rest of mankind. This hatred, generally camouflaged in attractive philosophies and sweet words and skilful propaganda, is the cause of international wars. Plato had taught mankind the great truth that Politics could not be separated from Ethics, if it was to serve the interests of peace, order and good government. But the ideal of the National State left no room for Ethics and, therefore, religion was separated from Politics as a matter of necessity. Although European politicians ever paid lip service to freedom, justice and morality, yet, since they had adopted the ideal of Machiavelli, the state, they could not escape the necessity of following its law, which, according to Machiavelli (and Machiavelli was perfectly right in concluding it from his ideal), justified every cruelty and treachery provided it could further the interests of the state. The national ideal, like every other ideal, has its own moral law. Europe, having submitted to this law, could not escape its evil consequences which have appeared so far in the shape of two World Wars, the bloodiest in the history of mankind.

 

Right ethical behaviour of the individuals as well as of the states can result only from the Right Ideal. It is impossible for any state to combine Ethics with Politics as Plato desired, unless it adopts the Right Ideal. Plato himself was ignorant of this fact and that is why his carefully instructed Prince of Syracuse failed to develop into a philosopher-king. Plato did not know that we act in obedience to our impulses and not in obedience to reason. A strongly developed love for the Right Ideal alone can assure a moral behaviour on the part of a ruler. We act rightly when the right impulse in us is strengthened in such a way as to be able to dominate all other impulses. Actions which have their source in the love of the Right Ideal alone are actions of unmixed morality. We cannot really love our fellow-men irrespective of their caste, creed or religion unless we love their Creator.

 

Some of us in the East, who are zealous imitators of Europe, think that the consequences of Nationalism from which Europe has suffered and is suffering are not inevitable and that a nation can be good to a neighbouring people, have an altruistic and universal outlook and at the same time mind its own national interests adequately. This is profound mistake! Every ideal group has certain definite tendencies of behaviour inherent in the nature of its ideal which must operate and goad it to act in a definite direction as surely as a tree bears its own fruit. The behaviour of a national state is determined definitely by its ideal and you cannot change it unless you modify the ideal itself. A nation is a group of human beings that exists by virtue of its separation from the rest of mankind. An altruism or a universalism extending beyond the group is incompatible with its very nature. When it ceases to be selfish, it ceases to be itself. When a nation tries to behave towards other nations morally and justly as a principle, its ideal changes from Nationalism to Ethics. But a half-hearted obedience to the ethical law is impossible for reasons explained previously in this book. The nation will have, therefore, either to go back to its old ideal of Nationalism or to come forward to the Right Ideal.

 

The internal cohesion of a national group results from the necessity that it feels to protect itself against other ideal groups. It cannot, therefore, expand its narrower sympathies to embrace the whole of humanity so long as it remains a national group.

 

McDougall thinks that National Ethics and Universal Ethics can exist side by side with each other. This view is the result of a sad misunderstanding of the laws of human nature. Every ethical system is the result of an ideal of life. Human nature does not permit conscious obedience to two different ideals at the same time, nor can the ethical principles of two different ideals be ever perfectly consistent with each other. As long as a nation is in the grip of its national ideal derived from its territorial and racial sentiments, it cannot but have, in spite of its best efforts and intentions, a nominal and superficial allegiance to Universal Ethics.

 

Hegel and Gentile believed that the state is an end in itself and has a right to unlimited expansion. They raised it to the level of a mystical being deserving of unqualified allegiance. This view embodies a great fundamental truth provided it is applied only to the Ultimate State which will be founded on the Right Ideal. The aggression and expansion of such a state alone is reasonable and justifiable. The state is not always rational and always right as Hegel and his followers imagine, but it is rational and right only when it exists and strives for the Right Ideal. The State of the Right Ideal is, so to say, the Creator Himself come to the earth.

 

The ideal of Communism supplanted Nationalism in Russia at the end of the First World War. Since that time it has stimulated a good deal of interest throughout the world and has won over a considerable number of adherents in almost all countries of the world. It is at least apparently an improvement on the national ideal and much nearer to the Final Ideology than Nationalism. It has the following points of apparent similarity with the Final Ideology:

 

(1)      It claims to be a complete explanation of life.

(2)      It has a universal outlook.

(3)      It assures economic independence and equality for all. The state of the Right Ideal will assure economic justice and equality for all because it is necessitated by the self’s attributes of Truth, Goodness and Justice. Moreover, it must provide for all men the reasonable satisfaction of their fundamental economic needs because it is essential for the continuation of life and of the process of evolution. An easy satisfaction of the instinctive needs relieves the urge of self of a part of its duty of maintaining the body and enables it to satisfy its own needs more adequately than otherwise; thus it is a help to the process of evolution. The aim of all moral action, we have seen, is to help evolution directly and consciously.

(4)      It is a dictatorship. Its emphasis on education, moulded to suit the needs of the ideal, the protection of the individual’s faith in the ideal through a reasonable intolerance of hostile opinion and the institution of a party of the faithful (the Communist Party) influencing the policy of the government by sheer will power and faith are features which the Future Ideology will certainly have to retain.

 

Marxism, however, does not satisfy the whole of our urge of self and is, therefore, totally unsatisfactory. It ignores the real and the most important desire of our nature, the desire which is subserved by all our other desires, that is, the desire for Beauty, and gives us a substitute for it, which may no doubt deceive us for some time but cannot deceive us for long. It makes us submit to an ethical system which does not conform to our nature and cannot give us an enduring satisfaction. It is imperfect and does not contain all the elements of Beauty. As such it must break up in the long run and make room for another, more satisfactory, ideal. Many enthusiastic Communists are pinning their hopes on Communism as the ultimate solution of all human problems. But as a matter of fact Communism is a passing phase in our history and may disappear sooner than many other ideals, leaving behind only the truth that is there in it. No need of our nature can be met permanently by means of unnatural substitutes.

 

While the Right Ideal makes the urge of self the end and the economic urge the means to that end, Communism looks upon the economic urge as an end in itself and tries to ignore the urge of the self altogether. But when we ignore it, we only try to satisfy it by means of wrong and unsatisfactory substitutes. While the former holds out a promise of unlimited progress for men, the latter is bound to cut short our progress and disappear itself at some stage in the future.

 

Although Communism appears to have some qualities in common with the Final Ideology, it does not mean that it really possesses any of these qualities. A wrong ideal always appears, at first, to have some elements of Beauty. But in due course of time, as the ideal is worked out in practice, it turns out that really it does not possess any of those elements. The reason is that the wrong qualities of such an ideal are always influencing its (apparently) right qualities in their outward practical expression and altering them and turning them into wrong qualities actually. Thus in the present case the material outlook of the Marxist philosophy can never allow it to become a complete and correct explanation of existence, to create a genuine economic equality for all, to have a really universal outlook or to incarnate itself in a political organisation which is at once a perfect Dictatorship and a perfect Democracy like that of the Right Ideology. Qualities of the Right Ideal can never come to their own and can never find a true expression or realization unless they are expressed and realized as elements of their own ideal. An ideal which is partially right and partially wrong is always totally wrong and that is why it is totally abandoned and forgotten.

 

In modern times several philosophers have tried to interpret the events of history with a view to explaining the historical process and to forecasting the future of man, society and humanity. The most prominent of them are Denilevsky, Spengler, Toynbee, Schubart, Berdyaev, Northrop, Kroeber, Schwitzer and Sorokin. Each of these writers counts a number of civilisations or culture-civilisations in history and talks of each as constituting a socio-cultural unity, all parts of which are integrated by a prime symbol or a philosophical presupposition or principle and having, like an organism, a birth, a youth, an old age and a death. But the theories of these writers, though very extensive and laborious, are hardly clear, complete or accurate. No one of them, for example, defines the exact nature of his culture-civilisation or explains why a culture-civilisation is born, why does it progress up to a certain limit, why it begins to decline and why does it ultimately die and disappear. The result is that their research does not provide us with any guidance for the future which it should be the object of social philosophy to provide. For none of them is able to say whether this process of the appearance and disappearance of civilisations is going to continue indefinitely or whether mankind is heading towards an ultimate civilisation which will be safe from the operation of those laws of Nature which cause a civilisation to decline and disappear, what are going to be the qualities or characteristics of this ultimate civilisation, or how we can create and preserve such a civilisation by our own conscious planning or endeavour.

 

The vagueness of these writers is due to the fact that they do not begin their study of history by analysing and understanding, first of all, the nature of the smallest culture-civilisation area which is the human individual. History is made up of the activities of the human individuals and human individuals act in accordance with the laws of their nature which are permanent and unalterable. Unless we are definite about the laws of human nature as operating in the individual, we can neither interpret history nor predict its course for the future. It is not possible to understand history as it is unfolded in the human society, unless we understand its manifestation in the human individual.

 

Another drawback of the theories of these writers is that none of them explains the process of history as a continuation of the evolutionary process at the material and biological stages of evolution, which it really is. The evolutionary process of the world is a single whole and its various parts can be understood only in their relation to the whole. Although the latest phase of this process, which is the process of psycho-social evolution or the historical process, must have its own special characteristics, its full significance can be understood only in the light of its past during the biological and material stages.

 

Karl Marx is the only social philosopher so far who has attempted to build a philosophy of history on a definite view of human nature and to explain human history as a continuation of the general evolutionary process. But since his views about the nature of evolution and the nature of the human individual are absurd, his interpretation of history is also absurd.

 

According to the view of human nature maintained in this book, the motivating force of all human activity, whether it is individual or social, is the urge for ideals. All human history is, therefore, the history of ideals.

 

When a number of individuals are inspired by a single ideal and are able to live and work together for its realization the result is the birth of an organized group of men which has been described above as an ideal group. Ideal groups have evolved from their primitive forms as families and tribes to the gigantic, highly organized modern states which claim to be based on philosophical or scientific ideologies. The ideal of the group is always the idea of the highest beauty and perfection known to the group and actually felt and realised by them as such for the time being. In due course of time, as members of the group make an effort to realise the ideal in practice, the values, norms and meanings embodied in the ideal and its qualities are externalised and socialised. The result is a cultural, behavioural and material incarnation and objectification of the ideal in the shape of a culture civilisation. All aspects of the life of an ideal group, whatever may be the stage of its evolution, all its cultural, behavioural and material elements, its science, philosophy, fine arts, religion, law, way of life, social customs, habits and institutions, are created by its ideal.

 

An ideal group continues to progress in all directions as long as its members remain oblivious of the hidden defects of their ideal and are able to love, adore and serve it wholeheartedly and thereby to grow their love for it to the highest possible level. When, however, the inner defects of the ideal begin to become apparent and to tell upon their love for it, their efforts begin to relax and the ideal group begins to decline steadily, till a time comes when it is no longer able to continue its existence. It dies and disappears. The ultimate and permanent culture-civilisation can be only that which is founded on an ideal which is free from all possible defects and has all the qualities demanded by our urge for Beauty, and that ideal is the Right Ideal. Man is progressing towards it slowly and steadily, impelled by the forces of evolution working within his consciousness, but he can certainly bring its advent near by his own conscious efforts.

 

The instincts of attraction and repulsion in the animal and the physical laws of attraction and repulsion in matter, which were leading evolution during its biological and material stages, respectively, are the earlier forms of the urge for Beauty which manifests itself in the human being as the love of an ideal and the hatred of everything opposed to the ideal. The urge to love an ideal is leading evolution now during its psychosocial period.

 

Since the spiritual influence of an ideal is always catching and always spreads, not from one individual to another, but also from one group to another, it happens many a time in history that a number of territorial, racial and linguistic groups living close to each other come to have similar ideals inspired by one leading group in all the rest. Such is, for example, the collection of the existing national states of Europe.

 

Unfortunately, it is such a collection or congeries of different contemporary ideal groups, resembling each other in their ideals plus their enslaved races and nations absorbing the cultural influence of their masters, which almost all our social philosophers mentioned above have described as a culture-civilisation having a causal-meaningful unity. As a matter of fact an assemblage or a collection of different ideal groups, like that of the present European states, however similar their ideals may be, can never be a really causal-meaningful unity. An independent culture-civilisation that is really such a unity is never more nor less than an ideal group. It is always a political organization or a state. A mere geographical proximity of ideal groups belonging to a collection, or the resemblance of their ideals, or the fact that most of them come into existence, live, grow, decline and disappear almost simultaneously, does not make them a unified culture-civilisation. On the contrary, they are always the open or the secret enemies of each other. Each of them wants to expand and excel at the expense of every other and, therefore, each is at war with all the rest. In such a collection some groups may die, while others may extend the sphere of their ideological influence at their expense.

 

The reason is that, when the ideal of one group is adopted by another group having its own political organization, it never remains the same ideal but undergoes a change consistent with the conditions and aspirations of the latter resulting from their geography, history, race or language. The change in the ideal may be apparently slight but, when it is considered important enough to need a separate political organization, it alters the ideal radically. The organizing and unifying force of a political group is its ideal. It can never be a different group unless it has a different ideal. The moment two separate groups or states come to have the same ideal, they cannot but merge into a single group or state.