d Hatred and Cruelty, and the like, are
very positive things, but in the end we see that they are due merely to
ABSENCE of perception, to dulness of understanding. Or we may put the
statement in a rather less crude form, and say that there are only
two factors in life: (1) the sense of Unity with others (and with
Nature)--which covers Love, Faith, Courage, Truth, and so forth, and
(2) Non-perception of the same--which covers Enmity, Fear, Hatred,
Self-pity, Cruelty, Jealousy, Meanness and an endless similar list.
The present world which we see around us, with its idiotic wars, its
senseless jealousies of nations and classes, its fears and greeds
and vanities and its futile endeavors--as of people struggling in a
swamp--to find one's own salvation by treading others underfoot, is a
negative phenomenon. Ignorance, non-perception, are at the root of it.
But it is the blessed virtue of Ignorance and of non-perception that
they inevitably-if only slowly and painfully--DESTROY THEMSELVES. All
experience serves to dissipate them. The world, as it is, carries' the
doom of its own transformation in its bosom; and in proportion as that
which is negative disappears the positive element must establish itself
more and more.

So we come back to that with which we began, (1) to Fear bred by
Ignorance. From that source has sprung the long catalogue of follies,
cruelties and sufferings which mark the records of the human race since
the dawn of history; and to the overcoming of this Fear we perforce
must look for our future deliverance, and for the discovery, even in
the midst of this world, of our true Home. The time is coming when the
positive constructive element must dominate. It is inevitable that Man
must ever build a state of society around him after the pattern and
image of his own interior state. The whole futile and idiotic structure
of commerce and industry in which we are now imprisoned springs from
that falsehood of individualistic self-seeking which marks the second
stage of human evolution. That stage is already tottering to its fall,
destroyed by the very flood of egotistic passions and interests, of
vanities, greeds, and cruelties, all warring with each other, which are
the sure outcome and culmination of its operation. With the restoration
of the sentiment of the Common Life, and the gradual growth of a mental
attitude corresponding, there will emerge from the flood something like
a solid earth--something on which it wi