Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



true self from the fleeting and perishable self. 

 The animals and man, unfallen, are healthy and 

 free from care, but unaware of what they are ; 

 to attain self-knowledge man must fall ; he must 

 become less than his true self; he must endure 

 imperfection ; division and strife must enter his 

 nature. To realise the perfect Life, to know what, 

 how wonderful it is — to understand that all blessed- 

 ness and freedom consists in its possession — he 

 must for the moment suffer divorce from it ; 

 the unity, the repose of his nature must be broken 

 up, crime, disease and unrest must enter in, and 

 by contrast he must attain to knowledge. 



Curious that at the very dawn of the Greek 

 and with it the European civilisation we have 

 the mystic words "Know Thyself" inscribed 

 on the temple of the Delphic Apollo ; and that 

 first among the legends of the Semitic race stands 

 that of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of the 

 Knowledge of good and evil ! To the animal 

 there is no such knowledge, to the early man there 

 was no such knowledge, and to the perfected man 

 of the future there will be no such knowledge. 

 It is a temporary perversion, indicating the disunion 

 of the present-day man — the disunion of the outer 

 self from the inner — the horrible dual self-con- 

 sciousness — which is the means ultimately of a 

 more perfect and conscious union than could ever 

 have been realised without it — the death that is 

 swallowed up in victory. ** For the first man is 

 of the earth, earthy ; but the second man is the 

 Lord from heaven." 



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