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Chapter XXIIIConditions for the Comingof a Spiritual AgeACHANGE of this kind, the change from the mental andvital to the spiritual order of life, must necessarily beaccomplished in the individual and in a great number ofindividuals before it can lay any effective hold upon the community.The Spirit in humanity discovers, develops, builds itsformations first in the individual man: it is through the progressiveand formative individual that it offers the discoveryand the chance of a new self-creation to the mind of the race.For the communal mind holds things subconsciently at first or,if consciously, then in a confused chaotic manner: it is onlythrough the individual mind that the mass can arrive at a clearknowledge and creation of the thing it held in its subconscientself. Thinkers, historians, sociologists who belittle the individualand would like to lose him in the mass or think of him chieflyas a cell, an atom, have got hold only of the obscurer side ofthe truth of Nature’s workings in humanity. It is because manis not like the material formations of Nature or like the animal,because she intends in him a more and more conscious evolution,that individuality is so much developed in him and so absolutelyimportant and indispensable. No doubt what comes out in theindividual and afterwards moves the mass, must have been therealready in the universal Mind and the individual is only aninstrument for its manifestation, discovery, development: but heis an indispensable instrument and an instrument not merelyof subconscient Nature, not merely of an instinctive urge thatmoves the mass, but more directly of the Spirit of whom thatNature is itself the instrument and the matrix of his creations.All great changes therefore find their first clear and effectivepower and their direct shaping force in the mind and spirit of an