The morals of human society have mostly been legalistic in their tone and so there has been a very understandable revolt against them from the deepest spirit in man which seeks untrammelled freedom. But man’s folly in assuring himself of this freedom he seeks has been his historical violence of the similar privilege which other individuals are also trying to exercise, very justifiably. Truly, man is God and brute crossed at one point. The divine spark in him urges him towards absolute freedom, but the devil that he is at the same time makes him come in conflict with his brother and wage a war with mankind, a task he perpetrates due to his ignorance of the fact that absolute freedom is impossible until and unless he takes into consideration, with due respect, the aspirations, the strengths as well as the weaknesses of others also around him in the vast atmosphere of humanity, because there cannot be a separate ‘absolute’ for each individual, and there can be only a single Absolute in which the existences and longings of all individuals are subsumed and transcended in an oceanic expanse of supreme perfection. Man, in order to have social and political peace, including the personal, may require a World-Government which will fuse into its administrative organisation the need for considering the conditions of raising human nature into its aspired goal of the Universal Absolute, which can only be an utter Spiritual Essence into which the matter of the universe melts in a Cosmic Subjectivity, and the necessity to render legal and legislative control of individual behaviour and action healthily contributory, by degrees of positive expansion and profundity, to this Great Goal of life. How grand! But, is this practicable?

Yes, is the answer. This is the golden picture of the Age of Truth, or the satya-yuga of noble Indian tradition, which is supposed to have materialised itself on the earth long, long ago, and which tradition expects to recur and repeat itself periodically after, or at the beginning of, every Age Cycle. This is the Destiny of Man for which he is striving through the glorious periods of constructive history as well as the ugly scenes of destructive warfare. May we call these the light of day and the night of darkness in the successive revolutions of the human cycle lit brilliantly by the Eternal Sun of the Almighty Absolute? There is no use merely shouting anthems of parochial nationalism or enforcing tyrannical pressure of legal commandments or even trying for social good and human peace if this ultimate and basic meaning of human nature and human history is lost sight of in the busy tension of life’s struggle caused by this inevitable friction between the downward and diversifying pull of man’s empirical personality and the upward and unifying urge of his higher spiritual nature. Thus, administrative genius is neither merely legal, ethical or secular, as divested of the spiritual significance of the structure of the universe, nor a mere religiosity or spiritualism of the formality-ridden, tradition-bound Pandit type or an asceticism-oriented attitude bereft of the realistic approach to life which demands a due consideration for a continuous need for law, morality and a humane regard towards all mankind. Unfortunately, man has been section-bound and has proved himself to be incapable of such comprehensive thinking and action, and that should explain why man is what he is and the world has been what it is seen to be.

The leadership of a tremendous genius and capacity for mustering in universal forces is called for. And these forces are neither material ones minus the spiritual nor the spiritual minus the material. Truth is a fusion of both spirit and matter, of divinity and humanity, of God and the world. Will man be able to awaken this vision of himself? Then, there is hope for him, and then there can be peace, not only on earth but also in heaven and everywhere. Else, the object sought for is far to seek, and difficult to find. The world needs the leadership of a Superman, whose eyes can see God and world at the same time, whose personality will be at once the sacred temple of the Almighty and the active thoroughfare of human business. The world did see the realisation of such an ideal in the personality of Sri Krishna, who was an outstanding specimen of the world’s greatest statesman in the sense we have defined above as an urgent need for the welfare of mankind. There have been also occasions for the manifestation of such Supermen in other periods of human history, which it is difficult for us to recount here in an essay. But this is the need of the hour, and here rests the ultimate hope for humanity, if hope at all it can ever cherish in its grief-stricken heart struggling to catch a straw in the rushing stream of the evolution of all creation to its awe-inspiring Destination.

Social security and friendship cannot be assured as long as social relationship remains merely an ‘external’ connection operating independent of the individuals so connected and not intrinsic to the nature of the individuals themselves. A relationship between two persons has to enter into the very substance of which the two persons are made; it is only then that the relationship between them becomes friendly, secure and permanent. But if this relationship is only a form taken by a pressure exerted by something else upon the individuals appearing to be related, then the individuals so related by an extrinsic power foreign to their own nature can fly at the throats of each other the moment this extrinsic pressure is lifted. This is what happens if the State enforcing the laws of the society is a machinery rather than an organism. With Hobbes we may think the State cannot be anything more than a machine externally operating upon the individual, whatever be the necessity felt to operate this machine. For Hegel, the State is an organism which reflects the law of the Absolute and is a vital principle wider and more real than the individual, not a ‘collective’ force but an ‘indivisible’ law ultimately inseparable from the internal wills of the individuals themselves. The much abused and distorted tradition of the divine descent or the divine right of the ruling authority so much respected in ancient times is perhaps explicable on the background of the Hegelian logic of the organic structure of the State as a temporal manifestation of the eternal law of the universe. But it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the common mind to understand the implications of Hegel’s philosophy of the State, a misunderstanding and a misconstruing of which has led to the economic philosophy of materialism which has appropriated into its doctrines Hegel’s dialectical logic of process, while missing its spiritual content. Greek Sparta and Nazi Germany have been examples of an apotheosis of the State-supremacy without its spiritual vitality and power, converting the State, thus, into a Titanic machine rolling heavily on the individuals like a bulldozer and crushing them under its weight. The political systems of ancient Athens and modern France gave an equal status to individual freedom and State machinery: The State was with them a machinery still, but not going to the extent of crushing individual freedom. It was England, however, which held the doctrine of individual freedom as superior to the structure of the State which exists for the good and growth of the individual and which has no other purpose to serve independent of the individual. The immediate reaction of a judicious observer of these three doctrines of the State would be that the first is wholly wrong and inconsistent with truth, the second is pragmatic and conciliatory with the empirical view of things, and the third is perhaps the best. But even this best cannot be regarded as really the best as long as it considers the individual and the State as exclusive of each other, one existing outside the other but mutually connected by an inscrutable link understandable neither to the individual nor to the State independently. Thus it is that no political system has been a complete success for all times or under all conditions. The systems have been changing now and then to suit changing circumstances outside and the needs of individuals with the march of time; but these changes, while they are logically sanctioned by the exigencies of conditions beyond human control, have not as yet come to discover a stabilising anchor to which the need for change may be referred as a permanent standard, for man does not seem to have found time to hit upon such a sheet-anchor as a standard of reference. God, the world, the individual and the society have been wrongly thought to be four distinct realities: unfortunately, they are not. They are the four facets of the shining crystal of a single Reality towards which everything gravitates, and for which realisation all things are tirelessly busy.