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45 There was also that characteristically modernist bursting out of the continuum of time and history, in this case into the pure, heady consciousness of cosmic consciousness. It should be said that, in its purest form, cosmic awareness arrived by way of a profound epiphanic modernist moment to which only a select ‘enlightened’ few of contemporary socialists were privy. As mentioned, Edward Carpenter was amongst that number and has left us with a telling description of that feeling of oneness with all things whereby, as he says: .

Speaking of this creative life force, Brockway recalled: Sometimes in great moments of beauty one can feel it, linking oneself with all that has been and is and will be, and then working within it and with it for a harmony in life which expresses it. This realisation of oneness with a universal life had come 32 Modernism and British Socialism to me in the deep silences of Nature . . 20 Entry into the Divine, universal consciousness or universal spirit of socialist fellowship seemed to bring an even greater feeling of liberation as it offered the prospect of opening out space and time into realms even beyond the world of nature.

This worked on a number of levels. It meant establishing new levels of intimacy with one’s ‘fellows’ based on an understanding that each was part of a single whole and a belief that the true self could only be realised if one lived ‘resolutely in the whole’, that is, in a spirit of fellowship with others. As we ‘work for the regeneration of society’, proclaimed the Fellowship of the New Life, we maintain ‘that the New Life must be the outcome of the New Spirit and that, to that spirit, the spirit of fellowship and service, we must yield ourselves .