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256 <strong>The</strong> Human Cycleimage of its perfection, — individually, be it noted, though withan all-embracing universality of his nature and its consciouscircumference. It is said in the old Indian writings that whilein the second age, the age of Power, Vishnu descends as theKing, and in the third, the age of compromise and balance, asthe legislator or codifier, in the age of the Truth he descendsas Yajna, that is to say, as the Master of works and sacrificemanifest in the heart of his creatures. It is this kingdom of Godwithin, the result of the finding of God not in a distant heavenbut within ourselves, of which the state of society in an age of theTruth, a spiritual age, would be the result and the external figure.<strong>The</strong>refore a society which was even initially spiritualisedwould make the revealing and finding of the divine Self in manthe supreme, even the guiding aim of all its activities, its education,its knowledge, its science, its ethics, its art, its economicaland political structure. As it was to some imperfect extent inthe ancient Vedic times with the cultural education of the higherclasses, so it would be then with all education. It would embraceall knowledge in its scope, but would make the whole trendand aim and the permeating spirit not mere worldly efficiency,though that efficiency would not be neglected, but this selfdevelopingand self-finding and all else as its powers. It wouldpursue the physical and psychic sciences not in order merely toknow the world and Nature in her processes and to use them formaterial human ends, but still more to know through and in andunder and over all things the Divine in the world and the ways ofthe Spirit in its masks and behind them. It would make it the aimof ethics not to establish a rule of action whether supplementaryto the social law or partially corrective of it, the social law thatis after all only the rule, often clumsy and ignorant, of the bipedpack, the human herd, but to develop the divine nature in thehuman being. It would make it the aim of Art not merely topresent images of the subjective and objective world, but to seethem with the significant and creative vision that goes behindtheir appearances and to reveal the Truth and Beauty of whichthings visible to us and invisible are the forms, the masks or thesymbols and significant figures.

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