Part Three. Writings from the Arya (1914 – 1921 On
Ideals and Progress
On Ideals
Ideals are truths that have not yet effected themselves
for man, the realities of a higher plane of existence which have yet to fulfil
themselves on this lower plane of life and matter, our present field of
operation. To the pragmatical intellect which takes its stand upon the
ever-changing present, ideals are not truths, not realities, they are at most
potentialities of future truth and only become real when they are visible in the
external fact as work of force accomplished. But to the mind which is able to
draw back from the flux of force in the material universe, to the consciousness
which is not imprisoned in its own workings or carried along in their flood but
is able to envelop, hold and comprehend them, to the soul that is not merely the
subject and instrument of the world-force but can reflect something of that
Master-Consciousness which controls and uses it, the ideal present to its inner
vision is a greater reality than the changing fact obvious to its outer senses.
The Idea is not a reflection of the external fact which it so much exceeds;
rather the fact is only a partial reflection of the Idea which has created it.
Certainly, ideals are not the ultimate Reality, for
that is too high and vast for any ideal to envisage; they are aspects of it
thrown out in the world-consciousness as a basis for the workings of the
world-power. But they are primary, the actual workings secondary. They are
nearer to the Reality and therefore always more real, forcible and complete than
the facts which are their partial reflection. Reflections themselves of the
Real, they again are reflected in the more concrete workings of our existence.
The human intellect in proportion as it limits itself by the phenomena of
self-realising Force fails to catch the creative Idea until after we have seen
the external fact it has created; but this order of our sense-enslaved
consciousness is not the real order of the universe. God pre-exists before the
world can come into being, but to our
experience in which the senses act first and only then the finer workings of
consciousness, the world seems to come first and God to emerge out of it, so
much so that it costs us an effort to rise out of the mechanical, pluralistic
and pantheistic conceptions of Him to a truer and higher idea of the Divine
Reality. That which to us is the ultimate, is in truth the primary reality. So
too the Idea which seems to us to rise out of the fact, really precedes it and
out of it the fact has arisen. Our vulgar contrast of the ideal and the real is
therefore a sensuous error, for that which we call real is only a phenomenon of
force working out something that stands behind the phenomenon and that is
pre-existent and greater than it. The Real, the Idea, the phenomenon, this is
the true order of the creative Divinity.
The pragmatic intellect is only sure of a thing when it
finds it realised in Power; therefore it has a certain contempt for the ideal,
for the vision, because it drives always at execution and material realisation.
But Power is not the only term of the Godhead; Knowledge is the elder sister of
Power: Force and Consciousness are twin aspects of being both in the eternal
foundation of things and in their evolutionary realisation. The idea is the
realisation of a truth in Consciousness as the fact is its realisation in Power,
both indispensable, both justified in themselves and in each other, neither
warranted in ignoring or despising its complement. For the idealist and
visionary to despise the pragmatist or for the pragmatist to depreciate the
idealist and visionary is a deplorable result of our intellectual limitations
and the mutual misunderstandings by which the arrogance of our imperfect
temperament and mentality shuts itself out from perfection. It is as if we were
to think that God the Seer and Knower must despise God the Master of works and
energies or the Lord of action and sacrifice ignore the divine Witness and
Originator. But these two are one and the division in us a limitation that
mankind has yet to conquer.
The human being advances in proportion as he becomes
more and more capable of knowing before he realises in action. This is indeed
the order of evolution. It begins with a
material working in which the Prakriti, the executive Power, is veiled by its
works, by the facts it produces, and itself veils the consciousness which
originates and supports all its workings. In Life the force emerges and becomes
vibrant in the very surface of its works; last, in Mind the underlying
consciousness reveals itself. So too man is at first subject in his mentality to
the facts which his senses envisage, cannot go behind and beyond them, knows
only the impressions they make on his receptive mind. The animal is executive,
not creative; a passive tool of Matter and Life he does not seek in his thought
and will to react upon and use them: the human being too in his less developed
state is executive rather than creative; he limits his view to the present and
to his environment, works so as to live from day to day, accepts what he is
without reaching forward in thought to what he may be, has no ideals. In
proportion as he goes beyond the fact and seeks to anticipate Nature, to catch
the ideas and principles behind her workings and finally to seize the idea that
is not yet realised in fact and himself preside over its execution, he becomes
originative and creative and no longer merely executive. He begins thus his
passage from subjection to mastery.
In thus progressing humanity falls apart after its
fashion into classes; it divides itself between the practical man and the
idealist and makes numerous compromises between the two extremes. In reality the
division is artificial; for every man who does anything in the world, works by
virtue of an idea and in the force given to him by ideals, either his own or
others’ ideals, which he may or may not recognise but in whose absence
nevertheless he would be impotent to move a single step. The smaller the ideals,
the fewer they are and the less recognised and insisted on, the less also is the
work done and the progress realised; on the other hand, when ideals enlarge
themselves, when they become forceful, widely recognised, when different ideals
enter into the field, clash and communicate their thought and force to each
other, then the race rises to its great periods of activity and creation. And it
is when the Ideal arisen, vehement, energetic, refuses to be debarred from
possession and throws itself with all the
gigantic force of the higher planes of existence on this reluctant and
rebellious stuff of life and matter to conquer it that we have the great eras
which change the world by carrying out the potentialities of several centuries
in the action of a few decades.
Therefore wherever and whenever the mere practical man
abounds and excludes or discourages by his domination the idealist, there is the
least work and the least valuable work done in that age or country for humanity;
at most some preliminary spade-work, some labour of conservation and hardly
perceptible motion, some repression of creative energies preparing for a great
future outburst. On the other hand, when the idealist is liberated, when the
visionary abounds, the executive worker also is uplifted, finds at once an
orientation and tenfold energy and accomplishes things which he would otherwise
have rejected as a dream and chimera, which to his ordinary capacity would be
impossible and which often leave the world wondering how work so great could
have been done by men who were in themselves so little. The union of the great
idealist with the great executive personality who receives and obeys the idea is
always the sign of a coming realisation which will be more or less deep and
extensive in proportion as they are united or as the executive man seizes more
or less profoundly and completely the idea he serves and is able to make
permanent in force what the other has impressed upon the consciousness of his
age.
Often enough, even when these two different types of
men work in the same cause and one more or less fulfils the other, they are
widely separated in their accessory ideas, distrust, dislike and repudiate each
other. For ordinarily the idealist is full of anticipations which reach beyond
the actual possibilities or exceed the work that is destined to be immediately
fulfilled; the executive man on the other hand is unable to grasp either all the
meaning of the work he does or all its diviner possibilities which to him are
illusion and vanity while to the other they are all that is supremely valuable
in his great endeavour. To the practical worker limiting himself by patent
forces and actual possibilities the idealist who made his work possible seems an
idle dreamer or a troublesome fanatic; to the
idealist the practical man who realises the first steps towards his idea seems a
coarse spoiler of the divine work and almost its enemy: for by attaching too
much importance to what is immediately possible he removes the greater
possibilities which he does not see, seems to prevent and often does prevent a
larger and nobler realisation. It is the gulf between a Cavour and a Mazzini,
between the prophet of an ideal and the statesman of a realisable idea. The
latter seems always to be justified by the event, but the former has a deeper
justification in the shortcomings of the event. The successes of the executive
man hiding away the ideal under the accomplished fact are often the tragedies of
the human spirit and are responsible for the great reactions and disappointments
it undergoes when it finds how poor and soulless is the accomplished fact
compared with the glory of the vision and the ardour of the effort.
It cannot be doubted which of these two opposites and
complementaries is the most essential to success. Not only is the upheaval and
fertilising of the general consciousness by the thinker and the idealist
essential to the practical realisation of great changes, but in the realisation
itself the idealist who will not compromise is an indispensable element. Show me
a movement without a force of uncompromising idealism working somewhere in its
sum of energies and you have shown me a movement which is doomed to failure and
abortion or to petty and inconsiderable results. The age or the country which is
entirely composed of reasonable, statesmanlike workers ever ready for concession
and compromise is a country which will never be great until it has added to
itself what is lacking to it and bathed itself in pure and divine fountains and
an age which will accomplish nothing of supreme importance for the progress of
humanity. There is a difference however between the fanatic of an idea and the
true idealist: the former is simply the materialistic, executive man possessed
by the idea of another, not himself the possessor of it; he is haunted in his
will and driven by the force of the idea, not really illumined by its light. He
does harm as well as good and his chief use is to prevent the man of compromise from pausing at a paltry or abortive result; but
his excesses also bring about great reactions. Incapable of taking his stand on
the ideal itself, he puts all his emphasis on particular means and forms and
overstrains the springs of action till they become dulled and incapable of
responding to farther excitation. But the true idealist is not the servant of
the letter or the form; it is the idea which he loves and the spirit behind the
idea which he serves.
Man approaches nearer his perfection when he combines
in himself the idealist and the pragmatist, the originative soul and the
executive power. Great executive personalities have usually been men of a
considerable idealism. Some indeed have served a purpose rather than an ideal;
even in the idea that guided or moved them they have leaned to its executive
rather than its inspiring and originative aspect; they have sought their driving
force in the interest, passion and emotion attached to it rather than in the
idea itself. Others have served consciously a great single thought or moral aim
which they have laboured to execute in their lives. But the greatest men of
action who were endowed by Nature with the most extraordinary force of
accomplishment, have owed it to the combination in them of active power with an
immense drift of originative thought devoted to practical realisation. They have
been great executive thinkers, great practical dreamers. Such were Napoleon and
Alexander. Napoleon with his violent prejudice against ideologues and dreamers
was himself a colossal dreamer, an incurable if unconscious ideologist; his
teeming brain was the cause of his gigantic force and accomplishment. The
immense if shapeless ideas of Alexander threw themselves into the form of
conquests, cities, cultures; they broke down the barriers of Greek and Asiatic
prejudice and narrow self-imprisonment and created an age of civilisation and
soul-interchange.
But these great personalities do not contain in
themselves the combination which humanity most needs; not the man of action
driven by ideas, the pragmatist stirred by a half-conscious exaltation from the
idealistic, almost the mystic side of his nature, but the seer who is able to
execute his vision is the higher term of human
power and knowledge. The one takes his stand in the Prakriti, the executive
Force, and is therefore rather driven than leads himself even when he most
successfully leads others; the other takes his stand in the Purusha, the Knower
who controls executive force, and he possesses the power that he uses. He draws
nearer to the type of the divine Seer-Will that has created and governs the
universe. But such a combination is rare and difficult; for in order to grasp
the Ideal the human soul has to draw back so far from the limitations,
pettinesses, denials of the world of phenomenal fact that the temperament and
mentality become inapt for executive action upon the concrete phenomena of life
and matter. The mastery of the fact is usually possible to the idealist mind
only when its idealism is of no great depth or power and can therefore
accommodate itself more easily to the actual life-environment.
Until this difficulty is overcome and the Seer-Will
becomes more common in man and more the master of life, the ideal works at a
disadvantage, by a silent pressure upon the reluctant world, by occasional
attacks and sudden upheavals; a little is accomplished in a long time or by a
great and sudden effort, a little that is poor enough, coarse enough, material
enough compared with the thing seen and attempted, but which still makes a
farther advance possible though often after a period of quiescence and reaction.
And times there are, ages of stupendous effort and initiative when the gods seem
no longer satisfied with this tardy and fragmentary working, when the ideal
breaks constantly through the dull walls of the material practical life,
incalculable forces clash in its field, innumerable ideas meet and wrestle in
the arena of the world and through the constant storm and flash, agitation of
force and agitation of light the possibility of the victoriously fulfilled
ideal, the hope of the Messiah, the expectation of the Avatar takes possession
of the hearts and thoughts of men. Such an age seems now to be coming upon the
world. But whether that hope and expectation and possibility are to come to
anything depends upon whether men prepare their souls for the advent and rise in
the effort of their faith, life and thought to the height and purity of a
clearly-grasped ideal. The Messiah or Avatar is
nothing but this, the divine Seer-Will descending upon the human consciousness
to reveal to it the divine meaning behind our half-blind action and to give
along with the vision the exalted will that is faithful and performs and the
ideal force that executes according to the vision.
into being, but to our
experience in which the senses act first and only then the finer workings of
consciousness, the world seems to come first and God to emerge out of it, so
much so that it costs us an effort to rise out of the mechanical, pluralistic
and pantheistic conceptions of Him to a truer and higher idea of the Divine
Reality. That which to us is the ultimate, is in truth the primary reality. So
too the Idea which seems to us to rise out of the fact, really precedes it and
out of it the fact has arisen. Our vulgar contrast of the ideal and the real is
therefore a sensuous error, for that which we call real is only a phenomenon of
force working out something that stands behind the phenomenon and that is
pre-existent and greater than it. The Real, the Idea, the phenomenon, this is
the true order of the creative Divinity.
