Races and nations as functions of the world whole

Americans are incapable of understanding meanings. Both sets of generalisations would be equally false, and a misunderstanding of what is being affirmed. Mitrinovi¢ wrote:

“That there are individual minds in all races and nations that are “universal” and capable of taking a world-view of world-affairs we can the more readily admit since, in due course, we hope to enlist them in our present common cause.

He starts his ‘brief sketch’ of ‘the psychological lay-out of the world’ by observing that

‘it is clearly necessary to define the world in psychological terms and to indicate approximately the areas of its unconscious and conscious respectively. But is there any doubt about the existing and natural division?’

And he goes on to relate the unconscious more with the East and the conscious more with the West. This again is liable to be misunderstood if it is taken naively and literally and turned into stereotypes. It is necessary to consider what is meant by different kinds and levels of consciousness. The sharpest of such distinctions is between a group or tribal consciousness and a separate, individualised consciousness. (Obviously there are many shades of difference between these two extremes: from the individual point of view the collectivised consciousness seems unconscious). The less individuated can be associated with the human past, since it must have been originally the only consciousness—just as the consciousness of an infant does not at first even separate himself from his surroundings—and this more collectively-based consciousness can be associated with the peoples of the East and the South. Among peoples of the North and the West consciousness has tended to develop towards a more sharply individuated condition and we feel our separateness to an acute degree.

These differences of consciousness have to be seen in the light of the notion of the world as a developing organism, and not as being static at a particular moment in history. And to assist this view there is the work of another psychologist, also with a fourfold conception of Man in all his aspects, through time as well as

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