PDF-file (The same edition. Another cover. 2.2 Mb)

618 War and Self-Determinationhigh above man and his being and his effort or of a pantheonor hierarchy of universal Powers who looked upon and swayedthe labour and passion and thought of the race. But the systemof cosmic deities lacked a base and a principle of unity in theirworkings and above it the ancients were obliged to conceive ofa vague and ineffable Divinity, the unknown God to whom theybuilt a nameless altar, or a Necessity with face of sphinx andhands of bronze to whom the gods themselves had to give anignorant obedience, and it left the life of man at once the victimof an inscrutable fate and the puppet of superhuman caprices.That to a great extent he is so long as he lives in his vital egoand is the servant of his own personal ideas and passions. Laterreligions gave a name and some body of form and quality tothe one unknown Godhead and proclaimed an ideal law whichthey gave out as his word and scripture. But the dogmatismof a partial and unlived knowledge and the external tendenciesof the human mind darkened the illuminations of religion withthe confusions of error and threw over its face strange masksof childish and cruel superstitions. Religion too by putting Godfar above in distant heavens made man too much of a worm ofthe earth little and vile before his Creator and admitted only bya caprice of his favour to a doubtful salvation in superhumanworlds. Modern thought seeking to make a clear riddance ofthese past conceptions had to substitute something else in itsplace, and what it saw and put there was the material law ofNature and the biological law of life of which human reason wasto be the faithful exponent and human science the productiveutiliser and profiteer. But to apply the mechanical blindness ofthe rule of physical Nature as the sole guide of thinking andseeing man is to go against the diviner law of his being andmaim his higher potentiality. Material and vital Nature is onlya first form of our being and to overcome and rise beyond itsformula is the very sense of a human evolution. Another andgreater Power than hers is the master of this effort, and humanreason or human science is not that Godhead, but can only beat best one and not the greatest of its ministers. It is not humanreason and human science which have been working out their