Principles and aims of the New Atlantis Foundation

Part Three ©

What is this inclusive attitude of mind which does not take sides in conflicts between the major world elements? And can different points of view really be related to one another as functions of an organic whole? Is this merely idealistic dreaming or woolly humanitarianism? And is the notion Third Force just another, perhaps slightly more sophisticated, way of sitting on the fence ? What grounds are there, if any, for thinking that such an approach is rationally wellfounded and could be effective in practice?

It is of course not possible to give a conclusive answer in a few pages to these and other equally relevant questions, but it is necessary to give some indication of the lines on which an answer could be found. Some of what follows may appear at first sight to be merely theoretical exposition, and there may not seem to be any point in going back over two or three thousand years in human thinking. It is hoped, however, to show that the development of man’s thought from earliest times is indeed relevant to our present living experience, and that it has a significant bearing on the task of founding a new human order. It is necessary to show that although we live in a world full of contradictions, there is nevertheless an underlying unity in life on the basis of which man’s world can be created.

From earliest times man has been concerned with pairs of opposites. In mythology the conflict between the Persian Ormuzd and Ahriman, Good and Evil, typifies this. In Vedanta philosophy the unity of the Self was disrupted into the multiplicity of selves, each of which is not-self to the others. But it was the Greeks who first emphasised these pairs of opposites. Empedocles considered Love and Strife, or attraction and repulsion, to be the two operative forces in the world. The impulse towards community is the working of Love; that towards individuality — the desire to be oneself and not to be fused with others is Hate. This conflict, which is in effect the age-old antithesis between continuity and discreteness, was most strongly expressed in the opposing views of two Greek philosophers, Heracleitus and Parmenides.

Heracleitus expounded the primacy of motion or perpetual change; that nothing ever stays still or remains the same. Parmenides affirmed the supreme reality of Being, which he identified with thought. This identification may not seem quite obvious at first sight, but it becomes clearer if one considers the so-called Laws of Thought. These are: the law of identity, which asserts that a thing is what it is; the law of contradiction, which asserts that it cannot at the same time both have a certain attribute and not have that attribute; and the law of excluded middle, which asserts that something must either have a certain