Principles and aims of the New Atlantis Foundation

race and nation, he may practise a particular religion and be involved in many other kinds of association, but he will know that none of these ties can command his total allegiance as an individual, because his humanity transcends all such divisions and includes the wholeness of all that is human. This is potentially true of every human being, though as yet most are prevented from realising it by the strength of sectional loyalties.

We, humanity, have reached a turning-point in our evolution as critical as the first step towards individual self-consciousness. This was mythically portrayed in the story of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge or Prometheus stealing the fire from heaven. The natural order in which man was guided by instinct, as portrayed in the myths of Paradise and the Golden Age, has now been supplanted by the human order in which intellect claims dominance. We have lost our immediacy with nature and equally with our own inner world and we have gained the ability to think logically and control forces in the outer physical world. We are freeing ourselves from the more superstitious ideas of a transcendent God, but we have subjected ourselves to the superstitious tyranny of intellectual materialism. We have gained awareness of ourselves as individual persons, but we have lost the sense of unity with all mankind. The very process by which we have gained our individuality has increased the divisions within humanity and the intensity of partisan conflict, even to the brink of world destruction.

Our present human crisis faces us with an entirely new set of problems, different from those with which mankind has wrestled up to now. The assertion of our individuality and the production of adequate wealth are no longer real difficulties. Our chief concern must be to order the world so as to live at peace with one another and distribute freely the wealth which can now be produced in abundance. But this is only the outer aspect of a more critical problem: that of meaning and value. We have gained individuality, but what is the meaning of the individual human life? In what does its value reside? And this question forces our attention upon the more universal one of the significance of human life on earth. Has it any meaning or purpose, or is it an aimless series of accidental developments? Unless these questions are seriously and urgently considered, so that some shared vision of the human future is attained, there will be no positive will or general agreement among mankind to live and work

together, and without this it is useless to expect that peace or material plenty will be achieved.

It is no longer legitimate for us to rely on God or Providence to help us, nor