Page:The forerunners.djvu/21

Rh world, of the two hemispheres of thought, of Europe and Asia. I do not talk utopia. For some years this drawing together has been preluded by a thousand signs, by mutual attraction in the realms of thought and of art, in the realms of politics and of commerce. The war has merely accelerated the movement; and while the war yet rages, men are at work on behalf of this cause. Two years ago, in one of the belligerent states, there were founded great institutes for the comparative study of the civilisations of Europe and of Asia, and to promote their mutual penetration.

The most striking phenomenon of our day," thus runs the program of one of these institutes, "is the formation of a universal civilisation, issuing from a number of distinct civilisations handed down from earlier days.… No past epoch has ever beheld a more powerful impetus animating the human race than that which mankind has known during recent centuries and the one we have now entered. There has been nothing comparable to this torrential confluence of all the forces to form a resultant, the achievement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the state, in science, and in art, everywhere, there is now being elaborated the great individuality of universal mankind; everywhere there is uprising the new life of the universal human spirit.… The three spiritual and social worlds, the three mankinds (that of Europe and the Near East, that of Hindustan, and that of the Far East) are beginning to be assembled to form a single mankind. … Until two generations ago, the individual man was member of a single branch of mankind, of one distinct great form of life. Now he participates in a vast vital flux constituted by the whole of mankind; he must direct his actions in accordance with the laws of that flux, and must find his own place in it. Should he fail to do this, he will lose the best part of himself.—Doubtless, the most significant features of the past, of its religions, of its art, of its