The Twain Shall Meet: Vision
and Memory in Aurobindo’s Future Man and Wordsworth’s Past
Man
T. Marx
ABSTRACT
This paper undertakes a comparative reading of Sri
Aurobindo’s concept of the ‘future Man’, the Supramental being who
evolves beyond mental humanity and William Wordsworth’s concept of
the ‘past man’, crystallised in the celebrated aphorism “The Child
is father of the Man” from the poem “My Heart Leaps Up”. While
Aurobindo projects an evolutionary teleology oriented towards a
divinized future, Wordsworth anchors human identity in the formative
experiences of childhood, arguing that the adult personality is
shaped, sustained, and morally authorized by the child it once was.
Drawing on Romantic philosophy, integral yoga, evolutionary theory,
depth psychology, and postcolonial critical perspectives, the paper
argues that the two thinkers represent not opposing but
complementary axes of human time: the retrospective and the
prospective. Both locate the essence of man outside the present
moment of rational adulthood, and both assign extraordinary value to
states of consciousness-childlike wonder and supramental gnosis that
transcend the ordinary cognitive faculty of reason. The paper
concludes that the two visions together constitute a holistic theory
of human becoming.
Keywords: Supermind, integral yoga, childhood, evolution,
Romanticism, natural piety.
