From Man Human to Man Divine

Publishers' Note

This is a companion volume to the other book by the same author, The Destiny of the Body, which too has been published by us some time back under the auspices of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry.

The Destiny of the Body dealt with the particular question of the evolutionary possibilities of man's physical existence including his body.

The present volume, From Man Human to Man Divine, widens and intensifies the scope of investigation and treats man as a species in general and studies his lowly past beginnings, his present achievements and failures and, of course, his glorious evolutionary future.

All the human problems dealt with in this book have been thoroughly analysed on the basis of modern knowledge and then their solutions indicated in the light of Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy of Integralism.

A research publication of this nature and dimension has perforce to draw its sustenance from the ideas and observations of many sages and thinkers. Of course, all these ideas and observations gathered from different sources have been blended by the author into an integrated organic whole. The present work is the result of a very fruitful reading of numerous books, both ancient and modern, of the Orient as well as of the Occident. The author craves the indulgence of any writer whose name he may have inadvertently forgotten to mention in the body of the book in the proper context where the ideas or observations of the writer concerned have been alluded to.

In lieu of an Index, the Contents itself has been sufficiently expanded to indicate some of the principal topics discussed in the book.

The readers may please note that wherever Sri Aurobindo has been quoted in the book, all the pages indicated, unless otherwise stated, invariably refer to the Centenary Editions of his works.

We are grateful to the Government of India for a financial grant to meet the cost of publishing the present volume.

24 Nov. 1989