In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the story of mankind upon this planet undergoes a change of phase.
Behind it appear, vague and dim at first, and refracted and distorted by the slow dissolution of the traditional veils, the intimations of the type of behaviour necessary to that single world community in which we live to-day..
What has been hitherto a final and impenetrable background of conviction in the rightness of the methods of behaviour characteristic of the national or local culture of each individual, becomes, as it were, a dissolving and ragged curtain.
It is an age of increasing mental uneasiness, of forced beliefs, hypocrisy, cynicism, abandon and impatience.
They fade, they become attenuated.
The conceptions of life and obligation that have served and satisfied even the most vigorous and intelligent personalities hitherto, conceptions that were naturally partial, sectarian and limited, begin to lose, decade by decade, their credibility and their directive force.
The first phase of that readjustment is necessarily destructive.
And that vision brings with it an immense readjustment of ideas.
With that a vision of previously unsuspected possibilities opens to the human imagination.
There is a complete confluence of racial, social and political destinies.
It ceases to be a tangle of more and more interrelated histories and it becomes plainly and consciously one history.
It unifies.
It broadens out.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the story of mankind upon this planet undergoes a change of phase
