Page:The Outline of History Vol 2.djvu/606

 and evanescent things, set up in men's minds by education and suggestion; none of them things that make now for the welfare and survival of the individuals who are under their sway nor of the states and towns and associations in which they prevail.

§ 3

Our Outline of History has been ill written if it has failed to convey our conviction of the character of the state towards which the world is moving. Let us summarize here, very briefly, the main lines to which the developments of history seem to point as the necessary lines of that world organization. The attainment of this world state may be impeded and may be opposed to-day by many apparently vast forces; but it has, urging it on, a much more powerful force, that of the free and growing common intelligence of mankind. To-day there is in the world a small but increasing number of men, historians, archæologists, ethnologists, economists, sociologists, psychologists, educationists, and the like, who are doing for human institutions that same task of creative analysis which the scientific men of the seventeenth and eighteenth century did for the materials and mechanism of human life; and just as these latter, almost unaware of what they were doing, made telegraphy, swift transit on sea and land, flying and a thousand hitherto impossible things possible, so the former may be doing more than the world suspects, or than they themselves suspect, to clear up and make plain the thing to do and the way to do it, in the greater and more urgent human affairs.

Let us ape Roger Bacon in his prophetic mood, and set down what we believe will be the broad fundamentals of the coming world state.

(i) It will be based upon a common world religion, very much simplified and universalized and better understood. This will not be Christianity nor Islam nor Buddhism nor any such specialized form of religion, but religion itself pure and undefiled; the Eightfold Way, the Kingdom of Heaven, brotherhood, creative service, and self-forgetfulness. Throughout the world men's thoughts and motives will be turned by education, example, and the circle of ideas about them, from the obsession of self to the cheerful service of human knowledge, human power, and human unity.