COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and India, and as is still 

 the case in China. But they are still better ful- 

 filled when the community increases in the com- 

 plexity of its internal relations, and, instead of 

 remaining a tribe, becomes a federation of civic 

 bodies, as in ancient Greece, or a single great 

 civic body, uniting various tribal elements, as 

 in ancient Rome. In each of these cases, the 

 increased power of self-protection renders war- 

 fare less necessary and frequent, and the partial 

 supplanting of the primitive predatory life by 

 the occupations of agriculture and trade begins 

 to make men more and more dependent on one 

 another over a wider and wider area, and to 

 create a whole class of interests to which warfare 

 and destructiveness are more and more inimical. 

 And in the latter case, where the community 

 assumes a civic character, the rise of a genuine 

 political life begins to make men operate on 

 each other by indirect compulsion, or by persua- 

 sion, rather than by direct and brutal compul- 

 sion ; and the highest attainable ethical feeling 

 is no longer clannishness, but patriotism, in the 

 exalted sense in which that word was understood 

 by the Greeks and Romans. Note also that 

 under the influence of this high ethical feeling, 

 even military life loses its primitive purely ego- 

 istic character, and becomes a school of self-dis- 

 cipline and self-sacrifice, nourishing in no slight 

 degree the altruistic feelings. If we compare 

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