ulty or stumbling-block to the general
acceptance of the belief in a third (or 'Golden-Age') phase of human
evolution is the obstinate and obdurate pre-judgment that the passing of
Humanity out of the Second stage can only mean the entire ABANDONMENT
OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS; and this people say--and quite rightly--is both
impossible and undesirable. Throughout the preceding chapters I have
striven, wherever feasible, to counter this misunderstanding--but I have
little hope of success. The DETERMINATION of the world to misunderstand
or misinterpret anything a little new or unfamiliar is a thing which
perhaps only an author can duly appreciate. But while it is clear that
self-consciousness originally came into being through a process of
alienation and exile and fear which marked it with the Cain-like brand
of loneliness and apartness, it is equally clear that to think of that
apartness as an absolute and permanent separation is an illusion, since
no being can really continue to live divorced from the source of its
life. For a period in evolution the SELF took on this illusive form in
consciousness, as of an ignis fatuus--the form of a being sundered from
all other beings, atomic, lonely, without refuge, surrounded by dangers
and struggling, for itself alone and for its own salvation in the midst
of a hostile environment. Perhaps some such terrible imagination was
necessary at first, as it were to start Humanity on its new path. But
it had its compensation, for the sufferings and tortures, mental and
bodily, the privations, persecutions, accusations, hatreds, the wars and
conflicts--so endured by millions of individuals and whole races--have
at length stamped upon the human mind a sense of individual
responsibility which otherwise perhaps would never have emerged, and
whose mark can now be effaced; ultimately, too, these things have
searched our inner nature to its very depths and exposed its bed-rock
foundation. They have convinced us that this idea of ultimate
separation is an illusion, and that in truth we are all indefeasible and
indestructible parts of one great Unity in which "we live and move and
have our being." That being so, it is clear that there remains in the
end a self-consciousness which need by no means be abandoned, which
indeed only comes to its true fruition and understanding when
it recognizes its affiliation with the Whole, and glories in an
individuality which is an expression both of itself AND of the wh