Britain's Place in the Great Plan · 2

Now if you look at the Root-Stock, it is of course the remainder of the Aryans who, after the emigrations, went southwards into India, those who are now called the Indo-Aryans, to distinguish them from the emigrants who went westwards - four sets of them.

You have that which went into Egypt, the first emigration, or second sub-race, and they developed particularly the physical body, in its inner mechanism and its relations to the other and subtler worlds, what was called “the Wisdom of Egypt”, or the recognition of the relationships between the surrounding subtler worlds and the physical man in the physical worlds. Its “wise men” worked from the physical body, and a very deep knowledge of that -not only of what you can see of the physical body, but also of the subtler, or etheric, parts [45] of it. And its Science is marked by the peculiarity that it began always with the science that you reject as science, thinking that your modern physical presentment is the whole of Science, forgetting that Science should “weave for God the garment thou seest Him by”. That is to say, they began with Astrology and worked on to Astronomy, they began with Alchemy and worked on to Chemistry, and so on. And this was the great characteristic of that emigration which went to Egypt, and which spread southwards in Africa, and also went along the borders of the Mediterranean.

Then you get the next, the second emigration or third sub-race, which goes to Persia. And there you had the peculiar note, the note of Purity, which dealt not only with thought and emotion, but also with the elements, as the Ancients called them, the Earth, the Air, the Fire, the Water. They all had to be kept pure. And so you find that the Parsi in modern India, the descendant of the Perso-Aryans, will not bury his dead, because that would pollute the Earth; he will not burn his dead, because that would pollute the Fire; he will not put his dead into the rivers, because that would pollute the Water. And that purity of the elements is a very remarkable step forward in human thought. That was the great contribution of Persia, which as you know made a mighty Empire, as Egypt had done before it, and that thought survives.

In every sub-race you have two Beings, the Law­giver and the Teacher of the Religion. The Law-giver makes a polity, an outer civilisation, a framework for the Nation. The Teacher gives the religion which [46] works in with that polity, develops it, strengthens it, limits it or enlarges it.

And then you come to the next emigration, third emigration, or fourth sub-race, the Indo-Keltic. That had the dominant note of Beauty. The “beauty that was Greece”, as they say. Art was its great character­istic. The beauty of painting, the beauty of sculpture, the beauty of architecture, and also the beauty of language, in which it embodied its thoughts in its literature, a wonderful language, a flexible language, a language full of music to the ear, as well as able to express the minute diversities of thought. And the Latin Nations, as they are called, show out that beauty, for they have descended from this fourth sub-race, the Keltic, and the French, Spanish, and Italian languages still show this in their music and accuracy. Beauty, remember, is a great emotion, and that third emigration developed the emotional qualities of the human being, for emotion dominated, however it showed itself forth, as you still find in the southern or Latin Nations of Europe, as well in the northern Kelts – the southern Irish, or the Highland Scotch.

And then came next the Teutonic, in order to develop the concrete mind. You see we are following the same order. That is what makes this comparatively easy to understand in all its complexity, if you have once grasped the dominating principle. These sub-races develop one by one these characteristics of human beings, so adding more and more to the great store of man. And when you come to what was the fourth emigration, the fifth sub-race, then you have the development of that scientific, [47] concrete mind which you see in this Teutonic sub-race, whether you call them Teutons - though that is not a popular name today - or whether you call them English, because they are both of the same stock, or Americans, or your Self-governing Dominions in their white races. It is a sub-race marked by the activity of this concrete mind, and showing itself forth mostly in science and its practical applications, in organisation and self-discipline, with an overwhelming sense of the value of individuality. And all these things have been developing one after another, until we get the human beings of today, with these types developed in them, each with one dominating faculty. And it is this dominating faculty which makes the great difference between the Kelt and the Teuton, with results which are going on at the present time within the limits of this one Kingdom. They cannot understand each other. They are two different types; different sub-races, with different ways of looking at the world; and until they learn to sympathise, instead of quarrelling, they cannot find a really true union. It is not the fault of either side, but the fundamental; differences of the human temperament are in the way. And so we come to where we are now, in our fourth and fifth sub-races.

But, you say, you have left out the Root-Stock. The remarkable point about that is that that shows out in itself at different stages of its own growth resemblances of the succession of sub-races born of it, and it is the only one of the great civilisations of antiquity that still endures - a thing to remember when we are coming to our next two lectures. For you have to remember that [48] India was a mighty, civilised power, trading, colonising, enormously wealthy, with a wonderful and varied literature, when she traded with Babylon 3000 years before the Christian Era, and she came down all through the millennia, still showing out these wonderful capacities and varied powers of mind. She was philo­sophical, she was political, she tried every form of political government that has since been tried in the daughter sub-races. In the time of Alexander, in the fourth century before the Christian Era, there were fourteen Schools of Political Science[2] - I mean by Schools, not buildings, but types of thought - existing in India, discussing, quarrelling, and agreeing; working themselves out sometimes in Republics, sometimes in City States like those of Greece, sometimes in Council Governments, sometimes in Royal Governments and sometimes in Imperial Governments, and so on, an extraordinary mass of political experiments and of knowledge developed from these. Most of you know India vaguely as philosophical, you know her as meta­physical, you know her as religious, but very few of you know her as political. And yet her experiments in political life have been far more numerous than those of other Nations, because her life is so much longer, a Nation that has had - to say the very least of it - a civilisation for at least 5000 years, as great and as complex as that of Babylon - a remarkable phenomenon, because all the daughter civilisations have perished, and the present one is perishing, broken into pieces.

If you realise that we have come to that stage, you [49] will see what I mean by the phrase “The World’s Opportunity”. We have come, as it were, to the point in the development of the concrete mind where other lines of thought and other methods of thought have to be taken up. The next stage beyond the mind which was the separating force, is that of the uniting, the union.

I ought to have said - I forgot it at the moment in speaking of the Lawgiver and the Teacher - it is a peculiarity of Christianity, which was given for the special development of the individual, that no polity was given with that which was distinctly Christianity. In all other cases they work together, but in the development of the individual, which was the work of Christi­anity - the value of the individual, the strength of the individual, the combativeness of the individual which inevitably grew out of it, in order that strength might be developed - there was no definite Lawgiver with a political plan put on Christendom, but only religion given by the great Teacher, the Christ. He gave the religion, and it was to work itself out in all its wonderful variety, just because it was specifically, an individualising faith, and that was why it lost reincarnation; that doctrine was taught in many different forms in the early Church, and then it was banned the form adopted by Origen by a Church Council.

Reincarnation diminishes the value of the individual the value of the individual life. You always have another chance, you always have another opportunity. You may have failed, but you say: “I shall have another life, and I will succeed”. You may have [50] broken down, but you say: “I shall have another life, and I will stand up”. It lessens the value of the individual life. Whereas to drop reincarnation out of religion, and to make the everlasting future of the man depend on the way in which he lives or believes in this one brief mortal life, gave an enormous strength to the development of the individual. This life was like a lifeboat in a storm, on which all the lives of the sailors depend; the whole life of the man depended on his single earth-life; everlasting happiness, everlasting misery, turned on these few years of mortal life. Not a very rational view, I grant, but a necessary view for development (for reasons you will see in the later lectures), where another view of the relations of human beings had to be taken.

And the world’s opportunity lies in this, that we are now at the transition stage of human evolution, of racial evolution, in which the next step forward, according to the ladder that was descended and that we are ascending, is Union, and not persistence in division.

You may not have thought, when I began, that I was coming to that conclusion. I wanted it to rest on a definite and reasoned basis. For there are being born today in all parts of the world, and most largely in America, a new type of men, not that which is concerned with the individualising mind but with the Life, which is thinning and lessening the walls, trying to unite itself with the life in others that once more it may be one. And if you look at the records in the Washington Bureau of Ethnology, you may find traced out the physical characteristics of this new type. They call it American; [51] that does not matter; there are more of them in America, and so they have drawn more attention, but there are many in other countries; they are being born in different parts of the world, this same type, recognisable and distinguishable from the ordinary multitude by their similarities. It means a new departure. It means another quality is coming out now, and that the cultiva­tion of human individuality has done its work, and that the civilisation which embodied individuality is breaking into pieces all around us, because it naturally has its end in combat and war, with war between Nation and Nation, combat between class and class within the limit of a Nation. And if you look abroad you will see signs of a desire for more union, signs of aspiration for a more human life, signs of a longing that within a Nation classes shall unite and form a real family, instead of being warring fragments as they are unhappily at the present time. And whether by success or failure in the struggles between classes, one thing is sure, that they will find that union and co-operation are better than division and combat, and that to work for a common end is more important than the pressing of the interests of a particular individual or a class of individuals. Whether by pain or by necessity, the world is being pushed in that direction. It may resist, and reap still much fruit of misery; but if wisdom is chosen, it will recognise its opportunity, marked by its place in evolution; it will then work for Union, for an ever wider and wider circle of Union, class united with class, and Nation with Nation, and later, Humanity in one great Unity in the far, far future that is before us, that our study may forecast with [52] certainty. Everything that tends to Union now is on the line of evolution, and everything that tends to separation is on the line of the past which we ought to have outgrown; and the great difference in the coming years - that to which I hope to lead you in the next two lectures - is that we have before us now in this land of Great Britain a possibility - if we can take it up and carry it out - of making a model for the future Federation of the World. The world is not yet ripe, because of the great differences between the Races, to join them all together in the perfect Federation. But it is possible here, where there are links, which have been bonds of Empire and shall become links of Commonwealth, if you can bring about Union, Union between India and Britain, between East and West, between Asia and Europe. For that reason were India and Britain brought together, that they might unite the elder and the younger races in a Commonwealth of Free Nations, where all shall stand together, linked by amity, friendship, mutual respect, mutual support, mutual service, equally free, equal in status, the first great conglomeration of peoples brought together, not in an Empire made by force, but in a Commonwealth made by mutual goodwill and friendliness. That is the great opportunity of Britain and India today, and that will be the model for the World’s Federation in the future. [53]

Lecture III

The Conflict of East and West

FRIENDS: We have arrived tonight at what I may call the more concrete part of the subject on which these four talks are being delivered. In the first lecture, you may remember, I carried you far away into regions not very closely thought over as a rule, dealing with the Inner Government of the World. Last Sunday I tried to put before you the methods of that Government, and to suggest a great opportunity that lay before the world of building a civilisation on securer, on more permanent, lines.

Today, I have as title “The Conflict of East and West”. Sometimes I am inclined to think that here in the West you almost forget that there is an East throbbing with life, throbbing with energy, full of aspirations, full of hopes; and an East, moreover, that has behind it - especially in the country most closely connected with yourselves - a past so immense in its length, so complicated in its details, that one wonders almost, living there, as I of course do, why Great Britain does not take more interest in India, and see whether it may not be possible, looking at the two civilisations so different in their character, it may not be possible to [54] build a mightier civilisation by blending the ideals, the two being at first sight opposed but really complementary the one to the other. For the length of Indian history is a phenomenon unique in history - and I will come to that in a moment, when I remind you that the first conflicts, as it were, between East and West one can pass over very swiftly, for they were physical, not a conflict of Ideals but a conflict of Nations. Europe invaded by Asia and Asia invaded by Europe; the pendulum of power swinging from one side to the other.

Not very long ago, in India, I read an English review, or rather an English book, which remarked, for the first time I had seen it in an English book, on this swing of the pendulum between these two great divisions, the great continents of Asia and Europe. And the writer said - a rather surprising statement, coming as it did from a Westerner - that the pendulum was now swinging towards Asia, suggesting dominance of eastern ideals and of eastern power.

Each of these great invasions of one continent by the other has left its traces behind; and it is not easy to decide which of the two has left its mark more deeply on the other. Sometimes we forget, in the case of war, in the case of invasions, that they have an aftermath of benefit to both countries or to both continents. When Alexander invaded India, although his stay was not long there, still Greek influence existed over a considerable period; and you cannot but notice the influence of Greek art on Indian art, the effects that you find in statues, the effects that you find in carvings of various kinds, the Greek type coming out, and almost, in some parts of the [55] country, overbearing the purely Asiatic. And if you look for the swing on the other way, then you cannot but notice that when the learning came from Arabia and was carried by the Moors into southern Europe and into Spain, it was one of the results of that invasion, of that settling, that science revived again in Europe, and began its great struggle against the Roman Catholic Church, being accused first as a form of sorcery; and even a Roman Pope, Sylvester the Second, I think it was, because he used compasses and drew some of the pro­positions of Euclid, was said by the “wise” men around him to be practising magic and to be having dealings with the devil. Still, despite that opposition, science made its way, and the darkness that followed on the fall of Rome was finally dispelled by the advance of science, and Europe took up again, after a thousand years of darkness, science where it had been left in Greece and in Egypt.

And so, if you look at philosophy instead of science, you find how in southern Italy the memories of Pytha­goras had survived, and the school of Pythagoras had left its traces even in the monasteries of the Middle Ages; and we remember that Pythagoras drew his teachings from Egypt and then from India, so that from the far East and from the middle East there came that great Greek philosophy which moulded all the thought of Europe, stamping itself deeply into the minds of the people. But the greatest influence that has been exercised over Europe by Asiatic ideals is, of course, the influence of the great religion of the Christ. Sometimes it almost seems to one, looking over the world today, [56] as though that world, so far as it is Christian, had well-­nigh forgotten that the Lord Christ was Himself an Asiatic, belonging to the Hebrew race, coming from Palestine. The Christian Bible, the Old Testament, is an Asiatic book, as indeed is the New Testament also. And yet in the white countries we find that the Asiatic is barred and is despised; so that if we borrow a thought from Stead, my old friend, who wrote If Christ came to Chicago, we might try to imagine what would happen in our time if Christ, the coloured Asiatic, went to South Africa, or to East Africa, or to Australia, or to New Zealand, or to Canada. The Asiatic is worshipped in a far-away Heaven - he is despised when in this world; he goes into countries marked by Nature for the coloured man, and finds they are to be guarded as white countries for the Europeans. And so, looking at this, we wonder how far the real influence has gone, even of so mighty a Teacher as the Christ Himself. And we wonder if He should come again, “If Christ came to South Africa”, what welcome He would find in those who use His Name as theirs?

Looking thus hastily over these changes, alike in the physical world of Nations and in the ideal world of thought and emotion, which are held up by the various Nations as goals towards which they strive, we begin to wonder a little whether this opposition is always to continue; whether part of that Great Plan, of which I spoke in my first lecture, may not include, by the union of Great Britain and India, a blending of the ideals into a greater Ideal of the Future, when each shall learn from each and shall take that which is good from the other, [57] while preserving that which each has worked out as good for itself.

Looking now for a moment at India, I said it was unique in the length of its history. That length from the European standpoint is indeterminate. No ordinary historian here would venture to give a date when the Indo-Aryan came down from Asia after the great emigrations had gone out from the Root-Stock, had civilised Egypt, parts of Africa, and the borders of the Mediterranean; had made a great Empire in Persia and had then gone further westwards to Greece, to Rome, building the Latin Nations of Europe; and the last of those great emigrations to northern Europe, building up the Teutonic sub-race, including, of course, the Briton, as coming from the Anglo-Saxon tribes, or whatever is the most modern name for this particular set of people, carrying with them, as Maine pointed out, the great Aryan traditions of freedom and self-government from their eastern home.

If you turn aside from ordinary western history for the moment, you find suggestions, when Plato writes of what the Egyptians told him when he was passing through the Egyptian Initiation into the Mysteries, and how they spoke of the great island Poseidonis, which is recognised now as an eastern part of the great continent of Atlantis, the last of that to survive so far as the western world is concerned.

It is said that the Indo-Aryans came down into India across Kashmir and Baluchistan and Assam, where passes existed for their passage - came down about 9000 B.C., shortly before that tremendous earthquake that [58] caused, and the tidal wave that followed on, the ruin, the destruction that Plato speaks of as falling upon Posei­donis; but it does not particularly matter, nine thousand years more or less will not really affect the point that I want to put to you. A great German scholar says that the religious literature of the Indo-Aryans, the Vedas, cannot be younger than five thousand years before the time of Christ, the Christian Era. And we come across touches of this very ancient India when it comes into contact with other civilisations of which somewhat more is known, thanks to the researches of modern antiquarians and archeologists. And so we get a number of dates that would not be challenged now by anyone who has studied the subject at all; for we find, for instance, ancient Babylon, three thousand years before the Chris­tian Era; India traded with that mighty civilisation, pre-Aryan civilisation, and was a wealthy, a prosperous, a highly civilised country; and that is nearly five thousand years ago from our time. Then a thousand years later, two thousand years before the Christian Era - and how long before that none may say, - we find Egyptian mummies which were swathed in the fine muslins of India, which still were made millennium after millennium - ­one of the things which attracted in 1600 the English merchants to gain a charter from Queen Elizabeth for trading with the East Indies. Then, coming a little further down, you find also that she is in very close con­tact with the great Empire of Persia, and that Sindh and part of Panjab paid to Darius of Persia huge tribute in gold year by year. And then we find India trading with Greece in more modern times, and with Rome, Imperial [59] Rome. We find Pliny (vide India a Nation, p. 14) com­plaining that the Roman ladies of the Imperial Court clothed themselves in Indian silks and wasted very, very much gold on these Indian manufactures. And so on and on I might take you, century after century, millen­nium after millennium; and the whole of these things go to show this one fact, that this India was a great trading, a great commercial, a great colonising, and a great ship ­building Nation through these enormous periods of time; wealthy and prosperous; so wealthy that she attracted the eyes of greedy Central Asian and European Nations, that they might share in that wealth. And coming down through Indian history, it is recognised by all, as you may read if you will in a valuable book by Vincent Smith, that that India of the older time had every kind of political experiment tried on her soil.

You think of India as a great philosophical country with her own metaphysical literature; a great meta­physical and religious country; and you know most of the translations that have been made of that line of thought in India. You hardly realise that for hundreds upon hundreds of years – nay! for thousands - she was trying every form of political organisation known in the history of the world. You find there Republics, flourishing and strong; States governed by Councils; you find limited and absolute Monarchies; Ministers making Kings and Peoples electing Kings. You find City States, like the City State of Aristotle. And you find mighty Empires, like the Empire Chandra-­gupta Maurya I. organised, perfectly organised in all the details of what you might think a modern [60] Govern­ment, with its registration of births and deaths, with its army and its navy, its municipal Governments, its various Councils elected by the people, and the whole of them based on the villages, which were the unit of government through all these thousands of years.

Or, if you take the Empire of his grandson Ashoka, you find it stretching from the Hindu Khush right down to what is now Madras; and you find Viceroys there - not only one Viceroy, as in modern times, but four Viceroys - through whom that great Empire was administered; Ashoka, of course, the fifth, over them all.

If you went further East you would find her colonies clearly traceable today by the marks of her civilisation and her religion in Java, in Sumatra, and in neighbour­ing islands. So that you gradually realise that you are face to face here with a civilisation marvellous for its length and its prosperity, for its wealth and its political institutions; and surely such a civilisation, lasting so long, so wealthy, so prosperous and so strong, must have had something to explain that long prosperity, something that it may have to suggest to the modern civilisation over here, something that may be of use and of value in the ideals that there were followed and realised, and that kept it secure and stable for a period of time that would seem a dream, if we did not see it touching civilisation after civilisation, always strong and rich, and itself civilised right down to the eighteenth century. India must surely have something to give to you politically.

I take first, however, the religious side, for every great Teacher of religion that the world has known is [61] an Asiatic, and that must mean something for the world. Not one has been born out of Asia; and a vast continent that has thus given to the world Those who are more revered than any monarch, more revered than any conqueror, Those who are crowned with the love, the adoration of Humanity - whether you take the Lord Buddha or the Lord Christ - surely such a continent has something worth hearing by the West; something to say which may be of use in trying to outline our ideals of the future, the rebuilding of civilisa­tion out of the fragments that lie around us today.

So let us for a moment glance, not at the detail which touches your modern problems - that I keep for next Sunday - but at the great Ideals which underlie the civilisations of the East and of the West. For it is these big Ideals which mould the thoughts and hearts of men. It is these which really make a civilisation, however important the economic aspect of it may be, or the political aspect of it may be; there is something that is greater than the outer organisation, and that is the Ideals which mould the brains and the hearts of the people, and which gradually civilise and train and uplift.

Now, what are the Ideals of the East as opposed, for the moment, to the Ideals of the West? You must remember that, when we speak in this sense of the East, we speak of India, for India has dominated the civilisation of Asia. If you look at Japan, they tell you that they draw from India their civilisation. If you look at China, you find there the multitudes who bow before the Lord Buddha. The great mystic Lao-tsze, [62] the great philosopher Confucius, appeal more to the learned among the Chinese; and very splendid are their sayings and their thoughts. But Buddhism spread upwards, northwards from India, passed through Tibet, went on into China, so that some of the most splendid of the Lord Buddha’s teachings come to us in Chinese garb and are translated from the Chinese into our own tongue, profoundly interesting when put side by side with those that came from the Pali - more familiar over here than those that are drawn from the Chinese recensions of His teachings, - on some points differing considerably, although the outline of the morality is identical. But in the Chinese, more of philosophy than as yet has made very much impression, I think, in Great Britain, although in the Pali you find the philosophy differs on one great point from that which we find in China. Putting it roughly, I would say that China has remembered that the Lord Buddha was a Hindu, and took some of the essential truths of the great spiritual verities for granted, speaking to Hindus from the Hindu view of truth; and that is found more in the recensions that come from China than from those that come from Ceylon, from Burma, and from Siam. But it is not that difference that I have aught to do with really this evening.

It is interesting, as regards the Lord Buddha Himself, that He lived surrounded largely by Republics, and based His own great Order and the government of His Order on the Council Government that He found in the Republics; so that, when in that Order some new law is to be promulgated and His directions, as exist in the [63] books, are carried out, we find, in what we may call the great Buddhic Parliament, political method is used in a religious assembly, and that when the law is proposed it is put to the vote by acclamation; if any dissent in that, it is argued and put again the second time, and still unanimity is sought for; and if for the third time after discussion unanimity is not found, then they proceed to the voting, in the way they did in Lord Buddha’s day when they voted in the political Councils, with little slips of wood, one coloured for “Yes” and one for “No”. Sometimes a secret ballot, if they wished it, and sometimes open voting. And it may be well just to bear that in mind, because it may get out of your minds the idea that these things are not familiar by tradition and by practice right down through Hindu history.