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Updated: June 1, 2025
"Convinced that the only aim that it was incumbent on man to follow, the only end he could really need, was to place himself in direct communication with Heaven, and to out-strip death by merging himself, unifying himself to the utmost, with God, it tempted souls, subjecting them to a moderate claustral course, purged them of their earthly interests, their fleshly aims, and led them back again and again to the same purpose of renunciation and repentance, the same ideas of justice and love; and then to retain them, to preserve them from themselves, it enclosed them in a fence, placed God all about them, as it were, under every form and aspect."
The details of life become increasingly complex with the years, but living grows simpler because we gradually fix a selecting and unifying principle. When we have truly found ourselves, we come to feel that the external incidents do not signify; which chance happens, whether this or that, is indifferent. It is the spirit in which the life is lived that determines its quality and value.
Memory collects the countless phenomena of our existence into a single whole; and as our bodies would be scattered into the dust of their component atoms if they were not held together by the attraction of matter, so our consciousness would be broken up into as many fragments as we had lived seconds but for the binding and unifying force of memory.
Finally, if the intellect proceeds as it does because it wishes to unite, and if it seeks unification simply because it has need of unifying, the whole of our knowledge becomes relative to certain requirements of the mind that probably might have been entirely different from what they are: for an intellect differently shaped, knowledge would have been different.
Now and then a broadminded pastor would encourage the planting of a church in some needy field, but too often the establishment of a new mission was looked upon as an encroachment on the parochial rights of the older congregation. At this point in the congregational polity of our church the absence of a directing mind and a unifying force was sorely felt.
And we have had our punishment in this strange and perverted fact that, while a unifying vision of patriotism can ennoble bands of brutal savages or dingy burghers, and be the best thing in their lives, we, who are the world being judge humane, honest, and serious individually, have a patriotism that is the worst thing in ours.
Though much more homogeneous in their lineage than the present immigration, they had not the unifying agencies that now keep Maine and Florida within a few minutes of each other by telephone or a few hours by rail. But there were in all, immigrants and sons of immigrants, hardly more in number than now enter that same land as aliens in one or two years.
With this reservation, however, it appears to me, that every class of subject has a sort of soul of its own with which we can put ourselves en rapport by, so to say, mentally unifying our own personality with its abstract principle.
That Haussmann in reconstructing Paris was merely an unconscious hunter and woodlander, building as automatically as a bee, is a fantastic hypothesis; since cities, if they are to be built on a plan at all, cannot avoid some unifying geometrical pattern; and there are not very many possibilities.... In the department of Eu-Politogenics we shall be confronted with the problem of consciously overriding what evolution has unconsciously evolved, and building towards a fairer future.
Simply this, that they were always in feud with each other; so that their expeditions, beginning in harmony, were sure to break up in anger on the road. What they needed was, some one grand compressing and unifying principle, such as the Roman found in the destinies of his city.
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