himself, his fellow man and the universe that reach beyond immediate self-interest. For the meaning of the World Age consists in respecting man’s hopes and dreams which lead to a deeper understanding of the basic values of all peoples.
　　Today in the East and in the West men are discovering that they are bound together, beyond any divisiveness, by a more fundamental unity than any mere agreement in thought and doctrine. They are beginning to know that all men possess the same primordial desires and tendencies; that the domination of man over man can no longer be justified by any appeal to God or nature; and such consciousness is the fruit of the spiritual and moral revolution, the great seismic upheaval, through which humanity is now passing.
　　World Perspectives is planned to gain insight into the meaning of man, who not only is determined by history but who also determines history. History is to be understood as concerned not only with the life of man on this planet but as including also such cosmic influences as interpenetrate our human world.
　　This generation is discovering that history does not conform to the social optimism of modern civilization and that the organization of human communities and the establishment of justice, freedom and peace are not only intellectual achievements but spiritual and moral achievements as well, demanding a cherishing of the wholeness of human personality and constituting a never-ending challenge to marl, emerging from the abyss of meaninglessness and suffering, to be renewed and replenished in the totality of his life. “For as one’s thinking is, such one becomes, and it is because of this that thinking should be purified and transformed, for were it centered upon truth as it is now upon things perceptible to the senses, who would not be liberated from his bondage.”51
　　There is in mankind today a counterforce to the sterility and danger of a quantitative, anonymous mass culture, a new, if sometimes imperceptible, spiritual sense of convergence toward world unity on the basis of the sacredness of each human person and respect for the plurality of cultures. There is a growing awareness that equality and justice are not to be evaluated in mere numerical terms but that they are proportionate and analogical in their reality.
　　We stand at the brink of the age of the world in which human life presses forward to actualize new forms. The false separation of man and nature, of time and space, of freedom and security, is acknowledged and we are faced with a new vision of man in his organic unity and of history offering a richness and diversity of quality and majesty of scope hitherto unprecedented. In relating the accumulated wisdom of man’s spirit to the new reality of the World Age, in articulating its thought and belief, World Perspectives seeks to encourage a renaissance of hope in society and of pride in man’s decision as to what his destiny will be.
　　The vast extension of knowledge has led to a diminution of consciousness as a result of the tendency, due to some modern interpretations of science, to accept as the total truth only limited descriptions of truth. The triumphant advance of science, culminating in new realities concerning the subatomic world and overthrowing traditional assumptions of causality and uniformity, has almost succeeded in enfeebling man’s faith in his spiritual and moral worth and in his own significance in the cosmic scheme. The experience of dread, into which contemporary man has been plunged through his failure to transcend his existential limits, is the experience of the problem of whether he shall attain to being through the knowledge of himself or shall not, whether he shall annihilate nothingness or whether nothingness shall annihilate him. For he has been forced back to his origins as a result of the atrophy of meaning, and his anabasis may begin once more through his mysterious greatness to re-create his life.$$$$文$$檔$$共$$享$$與$$在$$線$$閱$$讀$$
　　The suffering and hope of this century