to our inability to realise this legitimate claim of ours.
Really, there is no limit to our powers, for we are not outside
the universal power which is the expression of universal law. We
are on our way to overcome disease and death, to conquer pain and
poverty; for through scientific knowledge we are ever on our way
to realise the universal in its physical aspect. And as we make
progress we find that pain, disease, and poverty of power are not
absolute, but that is only the want of adjustment of our
individual self to our universal self which gives rise to them.

It is the same with our spiritual life. When the individual man
in us chafes against the lawful rule of the universal man we
become morally small, and we must suffer. In such a condition
our successes are our greatest failures, and the very fulfilment
of our desires leaves us poorer. We hanker after special gains
for ourselves, we want to enjoy privileges which none else can
share with us. But everything that is absolutely special must
keep up a perpetual warfare with what is general. In such a
state of civil war man always lives behind barricades, and in any
civilisation which is selfish our homes are not real homes, but
artificial barriers around us. Yet we complain that we are not
happy, as if there were something inherent in the nature of
things to make us miserable. The universal spirit is waiting to
crown us with happiness, but our individual spirit would not
accept it. It is our life of the self that causes conflicts and
complications everywhere, upsets the normal balance of society
and gives rise to miseries of all kinds. It brings things to
such a pass that to maintain order we have to create artificial
coercions and organised forms of tyranny, and tolerate infernal
institutions in our midst, whereby at every moment humanity is