m of the great conglomerate of humanity, who enjoys the
temporal, sensual life, with its gratifications and excitements, as much
as most, will testify with unaffected sincerity that he would rather be
annihilated altogether than remain for ever what he knows himself to be,
or even recognizably like it. And he is a very average moral specimen.
I have heard it said, "The world's life and business would come to an
end, there would be an end to all its healthy activity, an end of
commerce, arts, manufactures, social intercourse, government, law, and
science, if we were all to devote ourselves to the practice of Yoga,
which is pretty much what your ideal comes to." And the criticism is
perfectly just and true. Only I believe it does not go quite far
enough. Not only the activities of the world, but the phenomenal world
itself, which is upheld in consciousness, would disappear or take new,
more interior, more living, and more significant forms, at least for
humanity, if the consciousness of humanity was itself raised to a
superior state. Readers of St. Martin, and of that impressive book of
the late James Hinton, "Man and his Dwelling-place," especially if they
have also by chance been students of the idealistic philosophies, will
not think this suggestion extravagant. If all the world were Yogis, the
world would have no need of those special activities, the ultimate end
and purpose of which, by-the-by, our critic would find it not easy to
define. And if only a few withdraw, the world can spare them. Enough of
that.

Only let us not talk of this ideal of impersonal, universal being in
individual consciousness as an unverified dream. Our sense and
impatience of limitations are the guarantees that they are not final and
insuperable. Whence is this power of standing outside myself, of
recognizing the worthlessness of the pseudo--judgments, of the
prejudices with their lurid colouring of passion, of the temporal
interests, of the ephemeral appetites, of all the sensibilities of
egoism, to which I nevertheless surrender myself so that they indeed
seem myself? Through and above this troubled atmosphere I see a being,
pure, passionless, rightly measuring the proportions and relations of
things, for whom there is, properly speaking, no present, with its
phantasms, falsities, and half-truths; who has nothing personal in the
sense of being opposed to the whole of related personalities: who sees
the truth rather than struggle