Swami Vivekananda's conception of spiritual evolution was very comprehensive. He was not one of those ascetic thinkers who scorned matter in order to boost up the spirit. The spirit being conditioned by matter in its earthly manifestation, it is incumbent that a healthy and prosperous society has to be developed by man in order that the individuals constituting it may get the physical requirements that form the essential background for higher cultural developments. Thus, science, technology, social and industrial organization, statecraft and all such institutions of man for controlling the natural environment, both physical and social, come within the field of Vedanta. But it must be noted that it forms only its outer field, the inner field being constituted of his efforts to conquer Nature within. The internal environment of man is his own mind.
The mastery of it is the main task of culture in its higher spiritual sense and the special field of Vedanta and of every other system of religious ethics and philosophy. The control of external Nature is only an indirect aid, and in a wisely ordered society, the institutions developed by man for effecting this control have to be consciously motivated by the higher aim.
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