96 CREATIVE INVOLUTION 



rifice for their benefit your own wishes ; to love your 

 neighbour as yourself ; to forgive your enemies ; to 

 restrain your passions ; to honour your parents ; to 

 respect those who are set over you ; these and a 

 few others are the sole essentials of morals ; but they 

 have been known for thousands of years, and not one 

 jot or tittle has been added to them by all the ser- 

 mons, homilies, and text-books which moralists and 

 theologians have been able to produce. . . ." Have 

 we not here the invariants of our group-analysis? 



The Eastern religions conceive humanity as a be- 

 ing spiritual and eternal, 1 manifesting itself in time 

 in a series of generations. Ancestor-worship is a 

 recognition of this continuous life. The progress 

 of mankind marks in Oriental thought the develop- 

 ment of an entity of which the individual is the 

 structural element. 



The concept of the state as a unified organism 

 dates back to Ezekiel, who likens Jerusalem to a man. 

 Cicero finds all stages of human life reproduced in 

 the history of Rome. St. Augustine generalises the 

 simile, if simile it was, to humanity as a whole. Pas- 

 cal leaves no doubt as to his attitude, for he says: 

 " We must look upon the continuity of the human 

 race throughout the centuries as the continued ex- 

 istence and progressive experience of a single hu- 



i From the static or dynamic point of view, man is really 

 and fundamentally an abstraction; reality belongs to hu- 

 manity alone. 



AUGUSTE COMTE. 



