Sri Aurobindo: In the past of Europe and the past of India we can observe with an unbiassed mind the successes of the West, the gifts it brought to humanity, but also its large gaps, striking deﬁciencies, terrible and even “hideous” vices and failures. On the other balance we have to cast ancient and mediaeval India’s achievements and failures. Here we shall ﬁnd that there is little for which we need lower our heads before Europe and much in which we rise well and sometimes immeasurably above her. But we have to scrutinise next the present of the West in its strong success, vitality, conquering insolence. What has been great in it we shall allow, but take deep note too of its defects, stumblings and dangers.


Sri Aurobindo: And with this dangerous greatness we must compare the present of India, her downfall and its causes, her velleities of revival, her elements that still make for superiority now and in the future. Let us see and take account of all that we must inevitably receive from the West and consider how we can assimilate it to our own spirit and ideals. But let us see too what founts of native power there are in ourselves from which we can draw deeper, more vital and fresher streams of the power of life than from anything the West can offer. For that will help us more than occidental forms and motives, because it will be more natural to us, more stimulating to our idiosyncrasy of nature, more packed with creative suggestions, more easily taken up and completely followed in power of practice.


Sri Aurobindo: But far more helpful than any of these necessary comparisons will be the forward look from our past and present towards our own and not any foreign ideal of the future.  For it is our evolutionary push towards the future that will give to our past and present their true value and signiﬁcance. India’s nature, her mission, the work that she has to do, her part in the earth’s destiny, the peculiar power for which she stands is written there in her past history and is the secret purpose behind her present sufferings and ordeals. A reshaping of the forms of our spirit will have to take place; but it is the spirit itself behind past forms that we have to disengage and preserve and to give to it new and powerful thought-signiﬁcances, culture-values, a new instrumentation, greater ﬁgures. And so long as we recognise these essential things and are faithful to their spirit, it will not hurt us to make even the most drastic mental or physical adaptations and the most extreme cultural and social changes.


Sri Aurobindo: But these changes themselves must be cast in the spirit and mould of India and not in any other, not in the spirit of America or Europe, not in the mould of Japan or Russia.  We must recognise the great gulf between what we are and what we may and ought to strive to be. But this we must do not in any spirit of discouragement or denial of ourselves and the truth of our spirit, but in order to measure the advance we have to make. For we have to ﬁnd its true lines and to ﬁnd in ourselves the aspiration and inspiration, the ﬁre and the force to conceive them and to execute.   An original truth-seeking thought is needed if we are to take this stand and make this movement, a strong and courageous intuition, an unfailing spiritual and intellectual rectitude.


Sri Aurobindo: The courage to defend our culture against ignorant occidental criticism and to maintain it against the gigantic modern pressure comes ﬁrst, but with it there must be the courage to admit not from any European standpoint but from our own outlook the errors of our culture.  Apart from all phenomena of decline or deterioration, we should recognise without any sophistical denial those things in our creeds of life and social institutions which are in themselves mistaken and some of them indefensible, things weakening to our national life, degrading to our civilisation, dishonouring to our culture. A ﬂagrant example can be found in the treatment of our outcastes. There are those who would excuse it as an unavoidable error in the circumstances of the past; there are others who contend that it was the best possible solution then available. There are still others who would justify it and, with whatever modiﬁcations, prolong it as necessary to our social synthesis.


Sri Aurobindo: The contention is highly disputable.  The excuse was there, but it is no justiﬁcation for continuance. A solution which condemns by segregation one sixth of the nation to permanent ignominy, continued ﬁlth, uncleanliness of the inner and outer life and a brutal animal existence instead of lifting them out of it is no solution but rather an acceptance of weakness and a constant wound to the social body and to its collective spiritual, intellectual, moral and material welfare.  A social synthesis which can only live by making a permanent rule of the degradation of our fellowmen and countrymen stands condemned and foredoomed to decay and disturbance. The evil effects may be kept under for a long time and work only by the subtler unobserved action of the law of Karma; but once the light of Truth is let in on these dark spots, to perpetuate them is to maintain a seed of disruption and ruin our chances of eventual survival.


Sri Aurobindo: Again, we have to look on our cultural ideas and our social forms and see where they have lost their ancient spirit or real signiﬁcance.  Many of them are now a ﬁction and no longer in accordance with the ideas they assume or with the facts of life.  Others even if good in themselves or else beneﬁcent in their own time are no longer sufﬁcient for our growth. All these must either be transformed or discarded and truer ideas and better formulations must be found in their place.


Sri Aurobindo: The new turn we must give them will not always be a return upon their old signiﬁcance. The new dynamic truths we have to discover need not be parked within the limited truth of a past ideal.  On our past and present ideals we have to turn the searchlight of the spirit and see whether they have not to be surpassed or enlarged or brought into consonance with new wider ideals. All we do or create must be consistent with the abiding spirit of India, but framed to ﬁt into a greater harmonised rhythm and plastic to the call of a more luminous future. If faith in ourselves and ﬁdelity to the spirit of our culture are the ﬁrst requisites of a continued and vigorous life, a recognition of greater possibilities is a condition not less indispensable.


Sri Aurobindo: There cannot be a healthy and victorious survival if we make of the past a fetish instead of an inspiring impulse.   The spirit and ideals of our civilisation need no defence, for in their best parts and in their essence they were of eternal value.  India’s internal and individual seeking of them was earnest, powerful, effective. But the application in the collective life of society was subjected to serious reserves.


Sri Aurobindo: Never sufﬁciently bold and thoroughgoing, it became more and more limited and halting when the life-force declined in her peoples. This defect, this gulf between ideal and collective practice, has pursued all human living and was not peculiar to India; but the dissonance became especially marked with the lapse of time and it put at last on our society a growing stamp of weakness and failure. There was a large effort in the beginning at some kind of synthesis between the inner ideal and the outer life; but a static regulation of society was its latter end.  An underlying principle of spiritual idealism, an elusive unity and ﬁxed helpful forms of mutuality remained always there, but also an increasing element of strict bondage and minute division and ﬁssiparous complexity in the social mass. The great Vedantic ideals of freedom, unity and the godhead in man were left to the inner spiritual effort of individuals.


Sri Aurobindo: The power of expansion and assimilation diminished and when powerful and aggressive forces broke in from outside, Islam, Europe, the later Hindu society was content with an imprisoned and static self-preservation, a mere permission to live. The form of living became more and more narrow and it endured a continually restricted assertion of its ancient spirit.   Duration, survival was achieved, but not in the end a really secure and vital duration, not a great, robust and victorious survival.


Sri Aurobindo: And now survival itself has become impossible without expansion. If we are to live at all, we must resume India’s great interrupted endeavour; we must take up boldly and execute thoroughly in the individual and in the society, in the spiritual and in the mundane life, in philosophy and religion, in art and literature, in thought, in political and economic and social formulation the full and unlimited sense of her highest spirit and knowledge. And if we do that, we shall ﬁnd that the best of what comes to us draped in occidental forms, is already implied in our own ancient wisdom and has there a greater spirit behind it, a profounder truth and self-knowledge and the capacity of a will to nobler and more ideal formations. Only we need to work out thoroughly in life what we have always known in the spirit. There and nowhere else lies the secret of the needed harmony between the essential meaning of our past culture and the environmental requirements of our future.


Sri Aurobindo: That view opens out a prospect beyond the battle of cultures which is the immediate dangerous aspect of the meeting of East and West. The Spirit in man has one aim before it in all mankind; but different continents or peoples approach it from different sides, with different formulations and in a differing spirit. Not recognising the underlying unity of the ultimate divine motive, they give battle to each other and claim that theirs alone is the way for mankind. The one real and perfect civilisation is the one in which they happen to be born, all the rest must perish or go under.


Sri Aurobindo: But the real and perfect civilisation yet waits to be discovered; for the life of mankind is still nine tenths of barbarism to one tenth of culture.   The European mind gives the ﬁrst place to the principle of growth by struggle; it is by struggle that it arrives at some kind of concert. But this concert is itself hardly more than an organisation for growth by competition, aggression and farther battle. It is a peace that is constantly breaking, even within itself, into a fresh strife of principles, ideas, interests, races, classes.


Sri Aurobindo: It is an organisation precarious at its base and in its centre because it is founded on half-truths that deteriorate into whole falsehoods; but it is still or has been till now vigorous in constant achievement and able to grow powerfully and to devour and assimilate. Indian culture proceeded on the principle of a concert that strove to ﬁnd its base in a unity and reached out again towards some greater oneness.  Its aim was a lasting organisation that would minimise or even eliminate the principle of struggle. But it ended by achieving peace and stable arrangement through exclusion, fragmentation and immobility of status; it drew a magic circle of safety and shut itself up in it for good.


Sri Aurobindo: In the end it lost its force of aggression, weakened its power of assimilation and decayed within its barriers. A static and limited concert, not always enlarging itself, not plastic becomes in our human state of imperfection a prison or a sleeping-chamber.   Concert cannot be anything but imperfect and provisional in its form and can only preserve its vitality and fulﬁl its ultimate aim if it constantly adapts, expands, progresses.  Its lesser unities must widen towards a broader and more comprehensive and above all a more real and spiritual oneness.


Sri Aurobindo: In the larger statement of our culture and civilisation that we have now to achieve, a greater outward expression of spiritual and psychological oneness, but with a diversity which the mechanical method of Europe does not tolerate, will surely be one leading motive. A concert, a unity with the rest of mankind, in which we shall maintain our spiritual and our outer independence will be another line of our endeavour. But what now appears as a struggle may well be the ﬁrst necessary step, before we can formulate that unity of mankind which the West sees only in idea, but cannot achieve because it does not possess its spirit. Therefore Europe labours to establish unity by accommodation of conﬂicting interests and the force of mechanical institutions; but so attempted, it will either not be founded at all or will be founded on sand.  Meanwhile she wishes to blot out every other culture, as if hers were the only truth or all the truth of life and there were no such thing as truth of the spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: India, the ancient possessor of the truth of the spirit, must resist that arrogant claim and aggression and afﬁrm her own deeper truths in spite of heavy odds and against all comers. For in its preservation lies the only hope that mankind instead of marching to a new cataclysm and primitive beginning with a constant repetition of the old blind cycles will at last emerge into the light and accomplish the drive forward which will bring the terrestrial evolution to its next step of ascent in the progressive manifestation of the Spirit.   I   HEN we try to appreciate a culture, and when that culture is the one in which we have grown up or from which we draw our governing ideals and are likely from overpartiality to minimise its deﬁciencies or from overfamiliarity to miss aspects or values of it which would strike an unaccustomed eye, it is always useful as well as interesting to know how others see it. It will not move us to change our view-point for theirs; but we can get fresh light from a study of this kind and help our self-introspection.


Sri Aurobindo: But there are different ways of seeing a foreign civilisation and culture. There is the eye of sympathy and intuition and a close appreciative self-identiﬁcation: that gives us work like Sister Nivedita’s  or Mr. Fielding’s book on Burma or Sir John Woodroffe’s studies of Tantra. These are attempts to push aside all concealing veils and reveal the soul of a people.  It may well be that they do not give us all the hard outward fact, but we are enlightened of something deeper which has its greater reality; we get not the thing as it is in the deﬁciencies of life, but its ideal meaning. The soul, the essential spirit is one thing, the forms taken in this difﬁcult human actuality are another and are often imperfect or perverted; neither can be neglected if we would have a total vision.


Sri Aurobindo: Then there is the eye of the discerning and dispassionate critic who tries to see the thing as it is in its intention and actuality, apportion the light and shade, get the balance of merit and defect, success and failure, mark off that which evokes appreciative sympathy from that which calls for critical censure. We may not always agree; the standpoint is different and by its externality, by failure of intuition and selfidentiﬁcation it may miss things that are essential or may not get the whole meaning of that which it praises or condemns: still we proﬁt, we can add to our sense of shade and tone or correct our own previous judgment. Finally there is the eye of the hostile critic, convinced of the inferiority of the culture in question, who gives plainly and honestly without deliberate overcharging what he conceives to be sound reason for his judgment.  That too has its use for us; hostile criticism of this kind is good for the soul and the intellect, provided we do not allow ourselves to be afﬂicted, beaten down or shaken from the upholding centre of our living faith and action. Most things in our human world are imperfect and it is sometimes well to get a strong view of our imperfections.


Sri Aurobindo: Or, if nothing else, we can at least learn to appreciate opposite standpoints and get at the source of the opposition; wisdom, insight and sympathy grow by such comparisons.  But hostile criticism to be of any sound value must be criticism, not slander and false witness, not vitriol-throwing: it must state the facts without distortion, preserve consistent standards of judgment, observe a certain effort at justice, sanity, measure. Mr. William Archer’s well-known book on India, which on account of its very demerits I have taken as the type of the characteristic Western or anti-Indian regard on our culture, was certainly not of this character.  It is not only that here we have a wholesale and unsparing condemnation, a picture all shade and no light: that is a recommendation, for Mr. Archer’s professed object was to challenge the enthusiastic canonisation of Indian culture by its admirers in the character of a devil’s advocate whose business is to ﬁnd out and state in its strongest terms everything that can be said against the claim. And for us too it is useful to have before us an attack which covers the whole ﬁeld so that we may see in one comprehensive view the entire enemy case against our culture.


Sri Aurobindo: But there are three vitiating elements in his statement. First, it had an ulterior, a political object; it started with the underlying idea that India must be proved altogether barbarous in order to destroy or damage her case for self-government. That sort of extraneous motive at once puts his whole pleading out of court; for it means a constant deliberate distortion in order to serve a material interest, foreign altogether to the disinterested intellectual objects of cultural comparison and criticism.    In fact this book is not criticism; it is literary or rather journalistic pugilism.


Sri Aurobindo: There too it is of a peculiar kind; it is a furious sparring at a lay ﬁgure of India which is knocked down at pleasure through a long and exuberant dance of misstatement and exaggeration in the hope of convincing an ignorant audience that the performer has prostrated a living adversary.   Sanity, justice, measure are things altogether at a discount: a show-off of the appearance of staggering and irresistible blows is the object held in view, and for that anything comes in handy, — the facts are altogether misstated or clumsily caricatured, the most extraordinary and unfounded suggestions advanced with an air of obviousness, the most illogical inconsistencies permitted if an apparent point can be scored. All this is not the occasional freak of a well-informed critic suffering from a ﬁt of mental biliousness and impelled to work it off by an extravagant intellectual exercise, an irresponsible fantasia or a hostile war-dance around a subject with which he is not in sympathy.


Sri Aurobindo: That is a kind of extravagance, which is sometimes permissible and may be interesting and amusing.  It is a sweet and pleasant thing, cries the Roman poet, to play the fool in place and right season,. But Mr. Archer’s constant departures into irrational extravagance are not by any means . We discover very soon, — in addition to his illegitimate motive and his deliberate unfairness this is a third and worst cardinal defect, — that for the most part he knew absolutely nothing about the things on which he was passing his conﬁdent damnatory judgments. What he has done is to collect together in his mind all the unfavourable comments he had read about India, eke them out with casual impressions of his own and advance this unwholesome and unsubstantial compound as his original production, although his one genuine and native contribution is the cheery cocksureness of his secondhand opinions.


Sri Aurobindo: The book is a journalistic fake, not an honest critical production.   The writer was evidently no authority on metaphysics, which he despises as a misuse of the human mind; yet he lays down the law at length about the values of Indian philosophy.   He was a rationalist to whom religion is an error, a psychological disease, a sin against reason; yet he adjudges here between the comparative claims of religions, assigning a to Christianity, mainly, it seems, because Christians do not seriously believe in their own religion, — let not the reader laugh, the book advances quite seriously this amazing reason, — and bestowing the wooden spoon on Hinduism. He admits his incompetence to speak about music, yet that has not prevented him from relegating Indian music to a position of hopeless inferiority.


Sri Aurobindo: His judgment on art and architecture is of the narrowest kind; but he is generously liberal of his decisive depreciations.   In drama and literature one would expect from him better things; but the astonishing superﬁciality of his standards and his arguments here leaves one wondering how in the world he got his reputation as a dramatic and literary critic: one concludes that either he must have used a very different method in dealing with European literature or else it is very easy to get a reputation of this kind in England.  An ill-informed misrepresentation of facts, a light-hearted temerity of judgment on things he has not cared to study constitute this critic’s title to write on Indian culture and dismiss it authoritatively as a mass of barbarism.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not then for a well-informed outside view or even an instructive adverse criticism of Indian civilisation that I have turned to Mr. William Archer. In the end it is only those who possess a culture who can judge the intrinsic value of its productions, because they alone can enter entirely into its spirit.  To the foreign critic we can only go for help in forming a comparative judgment, — which too is indispensable. But if for any reason we had to depend on a foreign judgment for the deﬁnitive view of these things, it is evident that in each ﬁeld it is to men who can speak with some authority that we must turn.


Sri Aurobindo: It matters very little to me what Mr. Archer or Dr. Gough or Sir John Woodroffe’s unnamed English professor may say about Indian philosophy; it is enough for me to know what Emerson or Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, three entirely different minds of the greatest power in this ﬁeld, or what thinkers like Cousin and Schlegel have to say about it or to mark the increasing inﬂuence of some of its conceptions, the great parallel lines of thought in earlier European thinking and the conﬁrmations of ancient Indian metaphysics and psychology which are the results of the most modern research and inquiry. For religion I shall not go to Mr. Harold Begbie or any European atheist or rationalist for a judgment on our spirituality, but see rather what are the impressions of open-minded men of religious feeling and experience who can alone be judges, a spiritual and religious thinker such as Tolstoy, for instance. Or I may study even, allowing for an inevitable bias, what the more cultured Christian missionary has to say about a religion which he can no longer dismiss as a barbarous superstition. In art I shall not turn to the opinion of the average European who knows nothing of the spirit, meaning or technique of Indian architecture, painting and sculpture. For the ﬁrst I shall consult some recognised authority like Fergusson; for the others if critics like Mr. Havell are to be dismissed as partisans, I can at least learn something from Okakura or Mr. Laurence Binyon.


Sri Aurobindo: In literature I shall be at a loss, for I cannot remember that any Western writer of genius or high reputation as a critic has had any ﬁrst-hand knowledge of Sanskrit literature or of the Prakritic tongues, and a judgment founded on translations can only deal with the substance, — and even that in most translations of Indian work is only the dead substance with the whole breath of life gone out of it. Still even here Goethe’s well-known epigram on the Shakuntala will be enough by itself to show me that all Indian writing is not of a barbarous inferiority to European creation. And perhaps we may ﬁnd a scholar here and there with some literary taste and judgment, not a too common combination, who will be of help to us. This sort of excursion will certainly not give us an entirely reliable scheme of values, but at any rate we shall be safer than in a resort to the great lowland clan of Goughs, Archers and Begbies.


Sri Aurobindo: If I still ﬁnd it necessary or useful to notice these lucubrations, it is for quite another purpose.  Even for that purpose all that Mr. Archer writes is not of utility; much of it is so irrational, inconsequent or unscrupulous in suggestion that one can only note and pass on. When for instance he assures his readers that Indian philosophers think that sitting cross-legged and contemplating one’s own navel is the best way of ascertaining the truths of the universe and that their real object is an indolent immobility and to live upon the alms of the faithful, his object in thus describing one of the postures of abstracted meditation is to stamp the meditation itself in the eyes of ignorant English readers with the character of a bovine absurdity and a selﬁsh laziness; that is an instance of his unscrupulousness which helps us to observe the kinks of his own rationalistic mind, but is useful for nothing else. When he denies that there is any real morality in Hinduism or afﬁrms that it has never claimed moral teaching as one of its functions, statements which are the exact contrary of the facts, when he goes so far as to say that Hinduism is the character of the people and it indicates a melancholy proclivity towards is monstrous and unwholesome, one can only conclude that truth-speaking is not one of the ethical virtues which Mr. William Archer thought it necessary to practise or at least that it need be no part of a rationalist’s criticism of religion.  But no, after all Mr. Archer does throw a grudging tribute on the altar of truth; for he admits in the same breath that Hinduism talks much of righteousness and allows that there are in the Hindu writings many admirable ethical doctrines.


Sri Aurobindo: But that only proves that Hindu philosophy is illogical, — the morality is there indeed, but it ought not to be; its presence does not suit Mr. Archer’s thesis.   Admire the logic, the rational consistency of this champion of rationalism! Mark that at the same time one of his objections to the Ramayana, admitted to be one of the Bibles of the Hindu people, is that its ideal characters, Rama and Sita, the effective patterns of the highest Indian manhood and womanhood, are much too virtuous for his taste.


Sri Aurobindo: Rama is too saintly for human nature. I do not know in fact that Rama is more saintly than Christ or St. Francis, yet I had always thought they were within the pale of human nature; but perhaps this critic will reply that, if not beyond that pale, their excessive virtues are at least like the daily practice of the Hindu cult, — shall we say for example, scrupulous physical purity and personal cleanliness and the daily turning of the mind to God in worship and meditation, — “sufﬁcient to place them beyond the pale of civilisation.” For he tells us that Sita, the type of conjugal ﬁdelity and chastity, is so excessive in her virtue “as to verge on immorality.”  Meaningless smart extravagance has reached its highest point when it can thus verge on the idiotic. I am as sorry to use the epithet as Mr. Archer to harp on Indian “barbarism”, but there is really no help for it; “it expresses the essence of the situation.”


Sri Aurobindo: If all were of this character, — there is too much of it and it is deplorable, — a contemptuous silence would be the only possible reply. But fortunately Apollo does not always stretch his bow thus to the breaking-point; all Mr. Archer’s shafts are not of this wildgoose ﬂight. There is much in his writing that expresses crudely, but still with sufﬁcient accuracy the feeling of recoil of the average occidental mind at its ﬁrst view of the unique characteristics of Indian culture and that is a thing worth noting and sounding; it is necessary to understand it and ﬁnd out its value.    This is the utility I wish to seize on; for it is an utility and even more.


Sri Aurobindo: It is through the average mind that we get best at the bedrock of the psychological differences which divide from each other great blocks of our common humanity. The cultured mind tends to diminish the force of these prejudices or at least even in difference and opposition to develop points of similarity or of contact. In the average mentality we have a better chance of getting them in their crude strength and can appreciate their full force and bearing. Mr. Archer helps us here admirably.  Not that we have not to clear away much rubbish to get at what we want.


Sri Aurobindo: I should have preferred to deal with a manual of misunderstanding which had the same thoroughness of scope, but expressed itself with a more straightforward simplicity and less of vicious smartness and of superﬂuous ill-will; but none such is available. Let us take Mr. Archer then and dissect some of his prejudices to get at their inner psychology. We shall perhaps ﬁnd that through all this unpleasant crudity we can arrive at the essence of a historic misunderstanding of continents. An exact understanding of it may even help us towards an approach to some kind of reconciliation.   II T IS best to start with a precise idea of the species of critic from whom we are going to draw our estimate of oppositions.


Sri Aurobindo: What we have before us are the ideas of an average and typical occidental mind on Indian culture, a man of sufﬁcient education and wide reading, but no genius or exceptional capacity, rather an ordinary successful talent, no ﬂexibility or broad sympathy of mind, but pronounced and rigid opinions which are backed up and given an appearance of weight by the habit of using to good effect a varied though not always sound information. This is in fact the mind and standpoint of an average Englishman of some ability formed in the habit of journalism.  That is precisely the kind of thing we want in order to seize the nature of the antagonism which led Mr. Rudyard Kipling, — himself a super-journalist and “magniﬁed non-natural” average man, the average lifted up, without ceasing to be itself, by the glare of a kind of crude and barbaric genius, — to afﬁrm the eternal incompatibility of the East and the West. Let us see what strikes such a mentality as unique and abhorrent in the Indian mind and its culture: if we can put aside all sensitiveness of personal feeling and look dispassionately at this phenomenon, we shall ﬁnd it an interesting and illuminative study.


Sri Aurobindo: A certain objection may be advanced against taking a rationalistic critic with a political bias, a mind belonging at best to the today which is already becoming yesterday, in this widely representative capacity. The misunderstanding of continents has been the result of a long-enduring and historic difference, and this book gives us only one phase of it which is of a very modern character. But it is in modern times, in an age of scientiﬁc and rationalistic enlightenment, that the difference has become most pronounced, the misunderstanding most aggressive and the sense of cultural incompatibility most conscious and selfrevealing. An ancient Greek, full of disinterested intellectual curiosity and a ﬂexible aesthetic appreciation, was in spite of his feeling of racial and cultural superiority to the barbarian much nearer to the Indian mind than a typical modern European. Not only could a Pythagoras or a philosopher of the Neo-platonist school, an Alexander or a Menander understand with a more ready sympathy the root ideas of Asiatic culture, but an average man of ability, a Megasthenes for instance, could be trusted to see and understand, though not inwardly and perfectly, yet in a sufﬁcient measure.


Sri Aurobindo: The mediaeval European, for all his militant Christianity and his prejudice against the inﬁdel and paynim, yet resembled his opponent in many characteristic ways of seeing and feeling to an extent which is no longer possible to an average European mind, unless it has been imbued with the new ideas which are once more lessening the gulf between the continents.   It was the rationalising of the occidental mind, the rationalising even of its religious ideas and sentiments, which made the gulf so wide as to appear unbridgeable. Our critic represents this increased hostility in an extreme form, a shape given to it by the unthinking free-thinker, the man who has not thought out originally these difﬁcult problems, but imbibed his views from his cultural environment and the intellectual atmosphere of the period. He will exaggerate enormously the points of opposition, but by his very exaggeration he will make them more strikingly clear and intelligible.


Sri Aurobindo: He will make up for his want of correct information and intelligent study by a certain sureness of instinct in his attack upon things alien to his own mental outlook.    It is this sureness of instinct which has led him to direct the real gravamen of his attack against Indian philosophy and religion. The culture of a people may be roughly described as the expression of a consciousness of life which formulates itself in three aspects. There is a side of thought, of ideal, of upward will and the soul’s aspiration; there is a side of creative selfexpression and appreciative aesthesis, intelligence and imagination; and there is a side of practical and outward formulation.


Sri Aurobindo: A people’s philosophy and higher thinking give us its mind’s purest, largest and most general formulation of its consciousness of life and its dynamic view of existence. Its religion formulates the most intense form of its upward will and the soul’s aspirations towards the fulﬁlment of its highest ideal and impulse.  Its art, poetry, literature provide for us the creative expression and impression of its intuition, imagination, vital turn and creative intelligence. Its society and politics provide in their forms an outward frame in which the more external life works out what it can of its inspiring ideal and of its special character and nature under the difﬁculties of the environment.


Sri Aurobindo: We can see how much it has taken of the crude material of living, what it has done with it, how it has shaped as much of it as possible into some reﬂection of its guiding consciousness and deeper spirit. None of them express the whole secret spirit behind, but they derive from it their main ideas and their cultural character. Together they make up its soul, mind and body.   In Indian civilisation philosophy and religion, philosophy made dynamic by religion, religion enlightened by philosophy have led, the rest follow as best they can.


Sri Aurobindo: This is indeed its ﬁrst distinctive character, which it shares with the more developed Asiatic peoples, but has carried to an extraordinary degree of thoroughgoing pervasiveness.   When it is spoken of as a Brahminical civilisation, that is the real signiﬁcance of the phrase. The phrase cannot truly imply any domination of sacerdotalism, though in some lower aspects of the culture the sacerdotal mind has been only too prominent; for the priest as such has had no hand in shaping the great lines of the culture. But it is true that its main motives have been shaped by philosophic thinkers and religious minds, not by any means all of them of Brahmin birth.


Sri Aurobindo: The fact that a class has been developed whose business was to preserve the spiritual traditions, knowledge and sacred law of the race, — for this and not a mere priest trade was the proper occupation of the Brahmin, — and that this class could for thousands of years maintain in the greatest part, but not monopolise, the keeping of the national mind and conscience, and the direction of social principles, forms and manners, is only a characteristic indication. The fact behind is that Indian culture has been from the beginning and has remained a spiritual, an inward-looking religio-philosophical culture. Everything else in it has derived from that one central and original peculiarity or has been in some way dependent on it or subordinate to it; even external life has been subjected to the inward look of the spirit.   Our critic has felt the importance of this central point and directed upon it his most unsparing attack; in other quarters he may make concessions, allow attenuations, here he will make none.


Sri Aurobindo: All here must be bad and harmful, or if not deleterious, then ineffective, by the very nature of the central ideas and motives, for any real good.  This is a signiﬁcant attitude. Of course there is the polemical motive. That which is claimed for the Indian mind and its civilisation is a high spirituality, high on all the summits of thought and religion, permeating art and literature and religious practice and social ideas and affecting even the ordinary man’s attitude to life. If the claim is conceded, as it is conceded by all sympathetic and disinterested inquirers even when they do not accept the Indian view of life, then Indian culture stands, its civilisation has a right to live.


Sri Aurobindo: More, it has a right even to throw a challenge to rationalistic modernism and say, “Attain ﬁrst my level of spirituality before you claim to destroy and supersede me or call on me to modernise myself entirely in your sense.  No matter if I have myself latterly fallen from my own heights or if my present forms cannot meet all the requirements of the future mind of humanity; I can reascend, the power is there in me. I may even be able to develop a spiritual modernism which will help you in your effort to exceed yourself and arrive at a larger harmony than any you have reached in the past or can dream of in the present.” The hostile critic feels that he must deny this claim at its roots. He tries to prove Indian philosophy to be unspiritual and Indian religion to be an irrational animistic cult of monstrosity.


Sri Aurobindo: In this effort which is an attempt to stand Truth on her head and force her to see facts upside down, he lands himself in a paradoxical absurdity and inconsistency which destroy his case by sheer overstatement.  Still there arise even from this farrago two quite genuine issues. First, we can ask whether the spiritual and religio-philosophical view of life and the government of civilisation by its ideas and motives or the rationalistic and external view of life and the satisfaction of the vital being governed by the intellectual and practical reason give the best lead to mankind. And granting the value and power of a spiritual conception of life, we can ask whether the expression given to it by Indian culture is the best possible and the most helpful to the growth of humanity towards its highest level.  These are the real questions at issue between this Asiatic or ancient mind and the European or modern intelligence.


Sri Aurobindo: The typical occidental mind, which prolongs still the mentality of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has been almost entirely fashioned by the second view; it has grown into the mould of the vitalistic rational idea.  Its attitude to life has never been governed by a philosophic conception of existence except during a brief period of Graeco-Roman culture and then only in a small class of thinking and highly cultivated minds; always it is dominated by environmental necessity and the practical reason.   It has left behind it too the ages in which spiritual and religious conceptions which invaded it from the East, strove to impose themselves on the vitalistic and rational tendency; it has largely rejected them or thrust them into a corner.


Sri Aurobindo: Its religion is the religion of life, a religion of earth and of terrestrial humanity, an ideal of intellectual growth, vital efﬁciency, physical health and enjoyment, a rational social order. This mind confronted by Indian culture is at once repelled, ﬁrst by its unfamiliarity and strangeness, then by a sense of irrational abnormality and a total difference and often a diametrical opposition of standpoints and ﬁnally by an abundance and plethora of unintelligible forms.   These forms appear to its eye to teem with the supranatural and therefore, as it thinks, with the false.  Even the unnatural is there, a persistent departure from the common norm, from right method and sound device, a frame of things in which everything, to use Mr. Chesterton’s expression, is of the wrong shape.


Sri Aurobindo: The old orthodox Christian point of view might regard this culture as a thing of hell, an abnormal creation of demons; the modern orthodox rationalistic standpoint looks at it as a nightmare not only irrational, but antirational, a monstrosity, an out-of-date anomaly, at best a coloured fantasia of the oriental past. That is no doubt an extreme attitude, — it is Mr. Archer’s, — but incomprehension and distaste are the rule. One continually ﬁnds traces of these feelings even in minds which try to understand and sympathise; but to the average occidental content with his ﬁrst raw natural impressions all is a repellent confusion. Indian philosophy is an incomprehensible, subtly unsubstantial cloudweaving; Indian religion meets his eye as a mixture of absurd asceticism and an absurder gross, immoral and superstitious polytheism.  He sees in Indian art a riot of crudely distorted or conventional forms and an impossible seeking after suggestions of the inﬁnite — whereas all true art should be a beautiful and rational reproduction or ﬁne imaginative representation of the natural and ﬁnite.


Sri Aurobindo: He condemns in Indian society an anachronistic and semi-barbaric survival of old-world and mediaeval ideas and institutions. This view, which has recently undergone some modiﬁcation and is less loud and conﬁdent in expression, but still subsists, is the whole foundation of Mr. Archer’s philippic.   This is evident from the nature of all the objections he brings against Indian civilisation. When you strip them of their journalistic rhetoric, you ﬁnd that they amount simply to this natural antagonism of the rationalised vital and practical man against a culture which subordinates reason to a supra-rational spirituality and life and action to a feeling after something which is greater than life and action.


Sri Aurobindo: Philosophy and religion are the soul of Indian culture, inseparable from each other and interpenetrative. The whole objective of Indian philosophy, its entire , is the knowledge of the spirit, the experience of it and the right way to a spiritual existence; its single aim coincides with the highest signiﬁcance of religion. Indian religion draws all its characteristic value from the spiritual philosophy which illumines its supreme aspiration and colours even most of what is drawn from an inferior range of religious experience. But what are Mr. Archer’s objections, ﬁrst to Indian philosophy? Well, his ﬁrst objection simply comes to this that it is too philosophical.


Sri Aurobindo: His second accusation is that even as that worthless thing, metaphysical philosophy, it is too metaphysical. His third charge, the most positive and plausible, is that it enervates and kills the personality and the will-power by false notions of pessimism, asceticism, karma and reincarnation. If we take his criticism under each of these heads, we shall see that it is really not a dispassionate intellectual criticism, but the exaggerated expression of a mental dislike and a fundamental difference of temperament and standpoint.   Mr. Archer cannot deny, — the denial would go beyond even his unequalled capacity for afﬁrming absurdities, — that the Indian mind has displayed an unparalleled activity and fruitfulness in philosophical thinking.


Sri Aurobindo: He cannot deny that a familiarity with metaphysical conceptions and the capacity of discussing with some subtlety a metaphysical problem is much more widespread in India than in any other country.  Even an ordinary Indian intellect can understand and deal with questions of this kind where an occidental mind of corresponding culture and attainments would be as hopelessly out of its depth as is Mr. Archer in these pages. But he denies that this familiarity and this subtlety are any proof of great mental capacity — “necessarily”, he adds, I suppose in order to escape the charge of having suggested that Plato, Spinoza or Berkeley did not show a great mental capacity. Perhaps it is not “necessarily” such a proof; but it does show in one great order of questions, in one large and especially difﬁcult range of the mind’s powers and interests a remarkable and unique general development. The European journalist’s capacity for discussing with some show of acumen questions of economy and politics or, for that matter, art, literature and drama, is not “necessarily” proof of a great mental capacity; but it does show a great development of the European mind in general, a wide-spread information and normal capacity in these ﬁelds of its action.


Sri Aurobindo: The crudity of his opinions and his treatment of his subjects may sometimes seem a little “barbaric” to an outsider; but the thing itself is a proof that there is a culture, a civilisation, a great intellectual and civic achievement and a sufﬁcient wide-spread interest in the achievement.  Mr. Archer has to avoid a similar conclusion in another subtler and more difﬁcult range about India. He does it by denying that philosophy is of any value; this activity of the Indian mind is for him only an unequalled diligence in knowing the unknowable and thinking about the unthinkable. And why so? Well, because philosophy deals with a region where there is no possible “test of values” and in such a region thought itself, since it is simply unveriﬁable speculation, can be of little or no value.


Sri Aurobindo: There we come to a really interesting and characteristic opposition of standpoints, more, a difference in the very grain of the mind.  As stated, it is the sceptical argument of the atheist and agnostic, but after all that is only the extreme logical statement of an attitude common to the average European turn of thinking which is inherently a positivist attitude. Philosophy has been pursued in Europe with great and noble intellectual results by the highest minds, but very much as a pursuit apart from life, a thing high and splendid, but ineffective. It is remarkable that while in India and China philosophy has seized hold on life, has had an enormous practical effect on the civilisation and got into the very bones of current thought and action, it has never at all succeeded in achieving this importance in Europe.


Sri Aurobindo: In the days of the Stoics and Epicureans it got a grip, but only among the highly cultured; at the present day, too, we have some renewed tendency of the kind. Nietzsche has had his inﬂuence, certain French thinkers also in France, the philosophies of James and Bergson have attracted some amount of public interest; but it is a mere nothing compared with the effective power of Asiatic philosophy.  The average European draws his guiding views not from the philosophic, but from the positive and practical reason.   He does not absolutely disdain philosophy like Mr. Archer, but he considers it, if not a “man-made illusion”, yet a rather nebulous, remote and ineffective kind of occupation.


Sri Aurobindo: He honours the philosophers, but he puts their works on the highest shelf of the library of civilisation, not to be taken down or consulted except by a few minds of an exceptional turn. He admires, but he distrusts them. Plato’s idea of philosophers as the right rulers and best directors of society seems to him the most fantastic and unpractical of notions; the philosopher, precisely because he moves among ideas, must be without any hold on real life.  The Indian mind holds on the contrary that the Rishi, the thinker, the seer of spiritual truth is the best guide not only of the religious and moral, but the practical life. The seer, the Rishi is the natural director of society; to the Rishis he attributes the ideals and guiding intuitions of his civilisation.


Sri Aurobindo: Even today he is very ready to give the name to anyone who can give a spiritual truth which helps his life or a formative idea and inspiration which inﬂuences religion, ethics, society, even politics.  This is because the Indian believes that the ultimate truths are truths of the spirit and that truths of the spirit are the most fundamental and most effective truths of our existence, powerfully creative of the inner, salutarily reformative of the outer life.   To the European the ultimate truths are more often truths of the ideative intellect, the pure reason; but, whether intellectual or spiritual, they belong to a sphere beyond the ordinary action of the mind, life and body where alone there are any daily verifying “tests of values”.  These tests can only be given by living experience of outward fact and the positive and practical reason.


Sri Aurobindo: The rest are speculations and their proper place is in the world of ideas, not in the world of life. That brings us to a difference of standpoint which is the essence of Mr. Archer’s second objection. He believes that all philosophy is speculation and guessing; the only veriﬁable truth, we must suppose, is that of the normal fact, the outward world and our responses to it, truth of physical science and a psychology founded on physical science. He reproaches Indian philosophy for having taken its speculations seriously, for presenting speculation in the guise of dogma, for the “unspiritual” habit which mistakes groping for seeing and guessing for knowing, — in place, I presume, of the very spiritual habit which holds the physically sensible for the only knowable and takes the knowledge of the body for the knowledge of the soul and spirit.  He waxes bitterly sarcastic over the idea that philosophic meditation and Yoga are the best way to ascertain the truth of Nature and the constitution of the universe.


Sri Aurobindo: Mr. Archer’s descriptions of Indian philosophy are a grossly ignorant misrepresentation of its idea and spirit, but in their essence they represent the view inevitably taken by the normal positivist mind of the Occident.   In fact, Indian philosophy abhors mere guessing and speculation. That word is constantly applied by European critics to the thoughts and conclusions of the Upanishads, of the philosophies, of Buddhism; but Indian philosophers would reject it altogether as at all a valid description of their method. If our philosophy admits an ultimate unthinkable and unknowable, it does not concern itself with any positive description or analysis of that supreme Mystery, — the absurdity the rationalist ascribes to it; it concerns itself with whatever is thinkable and knowable to us at the highest term as well as on the lower ranges of our experience.


Sri Aurobindo: If it has been able to make its conclusions articles of religious faith, — dogmas, as they are here called, — it is because it has been able to base them on an experience veriﬁable by any man who will take the necessary means and apply the only possible tests. The Indian mind does not admit that the only possible test of values or of reality is the outward scientiﬁc, the test of a scrutiny of physical Nature or the everyday normal facts of our surface psychology, which is only a small movement upon vast hidden subconscious and superconscious heights, depths and ranges. What are the tests of these more ordinary or objective values? Evidently, experience, experimental analysis and synthesis, reason, intuition, — for I believe the value of intuition is admitted nowadays by modern philosophy and science. The tests of this other subtler order of truths are the same, experience, experimental analysis and synthesis, reason, intuition.


Sri Aurobindo: Only, since these things are truths of the soul and spirit, it must necessarily be a psychological and spiritual experience, a psychological and psychophysical experimentation, analysis and synthesis, a larger intuition which looks into higher realms, realities, possibilities of being, a reason which admits something beyond itself, looks upward to the supra-rational, tries to give as far as may be an account of it to the human intelligence. Yoga, which Mr. Archer invites us so pressingly to abandon, is itself nothing but a well-tested means of opening up these greater realms of experience.  Mr. Archer and minds of his type cannot be expected to know these things; they are beyond the little narrow range of facts and ideas which is to them the whole arc of knowledge.  But even if he knew, it would make no difference to him; he would reject the very thought with scornful impatience, without any degrading of his immense rationalistic superiority by any sort of examination into the possibility of an unfamiliar truth.


Sri Aurobindo: In this attitude he would have the average positivist mind on his side.  To that mind such notions seem in their very nature absurd and incomprehensible, — much worse than Greek and Hebrew, languages which have very respectable and creditworthy professors; but these are hieroglyphs which can only be upheld as decipherable signs by Indians and Theosophists and mystical thinkers, a disreputable clan. It can understand dogma and speculation about spiritual truth, a priest, a Bible, whether disbelieving them or giving them a conventional acceptance; but profoundest veriﬁable spiritual truth, ﬁrmly ascertainable spiritual values! The idea is foreign to this mentality and sounds to it like jargon. It can understand, even when it dismisses, an authoritative religion, an “I believe because it is rationally impossible”; but a deepest mystery of religion, a highest truth of philosophical thinking, a farthest ultimate discovery of psychological experience, a systematic and ordered experimentation of self-search and self-analysis, a constructive inner possibility of self-perfection, all arriving at the same result, assenting to each other’s conclusions, reconciling spirit and reason and the whole psychological nature and its deepest needs, — this great ancient and persistent research and triumph of Indian culture bafﬂes and offends the average positivist mind of the West.


Sri Aurobindo: It is bewildered by the possession of a knowledge which the West never more than fumbled after and ended by missing.  Irritated, perplexed, contemptuous, it refuses to recognise the superiority of such a harmony to its own lesser self-divided culture. For it is accustomed only to a religious seeking and experience which is at war with science and philosophy or oscillates between irrational belief and a troubled or else a self-conﬁdent scepticism. In Europe philosophy has been sometimes the handmaid — not the sister — of religion; but more often it has turned its back on religious belief in hostility or in a disdainful separation.


Sri Aurobindo: The war between religion and science has been almost the leading phenomenon of European culture. Even philosophy and science have been unable to agree; they too have quarrelled and separated.  These powers still coexist in Europe, but they are not a happy family; civil war is their natural atmosphere.   No wonder that the positivist mind to which this seems the natural order of things, should turn from a way of thinking and knowing in which there is a harmony, a consensus, a union between philosophy and religion and a systematised well-tested psychological experience.


Sri Aurobindo: It is easily moved to escape from the challenge of this alien form of knowledge by readily dismissing Indian psychology as a jungle of self-hypnotic hallucinations, Indian religion as a rank growth of antirational superstitions, Indian philosophy as a remote cloud-land of unsubstantial speculation. It is unfortunate for the peace of mind which this selfsatisﬁed attitude brings with it and for the effect of Mr. Archer’s facile and devastating method of criticism that the West too has recently got itself pushed into paths of thinking and discovery which seem dangerously likely to justify all this mass of unpleasant barbarism and to bring Europe herself nearer to so monstrous a way of thinking. It is becoming more and more clear that Indian philosophy has anticipated in its own way most of what has been or is being thought out in metaphysical speculation.  One ﬁnds even scientiﬁc thought repeating very ancient Indian generalisations from the other end of the scale of research. Indian psychology which Mr. Archer dismisses along with Indian cosmology and physiology as baseless classiﬁcation and ingenious guessing, — it is anything but that, for it is based rigorously on experience, — is justiﬁed more and more by all the latest psychological discoveries.


Sri Aurobindo: The fundamental ideas of Indian religion look perilously near to a conquest by which they will become the prominent thought and sentiment of a new and universal religious mentality and spiritual seeking. Who can say that the psycho-physiology of Indian Yoga may not be justiﬁed if certain lines of “groping and guessing” in the West are pushed a little farther? And even perhaps the Indian cosmological idea that there are other planes of being than this easily sensible kingdom of Matter, may be rehabilitated in a not very distant future?   But the positivist mind may yet be of good courage: for its hold is still strong and it has still the claim of intellectual orthodoxy and the prestige of the right of possession; many streams must swell and meet together before it is washed under and a tide of uniting thought sweeps humanity towards the hidden shores of the Spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: III    HIS CRITICISM so far is not very formidable; its edge, if it has any apart from the edge of trenchant misrepresentation, turns against the assailant. To have put a high value on philosophy, sought by it the highest secrets of our being, turned an effective philosophic thought on life and called in the thinkers, the men of profoundest spiritual experience, highest ideas, largest available knowledge, to govern and shape society, to have subjected creed and dogma to the test of the philosophic mind and founded religious belief upon spiritual intuition, philosophical thought and psychological experience, are signs, not of barbarism or of a mean and ignorant culture, but marks of the highest possible type of civilisation. There is nothing here that would warrant us in abasing ourselves before the idols of the positivist reason or putting the spirit and aim of Indian culture at all lower than the spirit and aim of Western civilisation whether in its high ancient period of rational enlightenment and the speculative idea or in its modern period of broad and minute scientiﬁc thought and strong applied knowledge. Different it is, inferior it is not, but has rather a distinct element of superiority in the unique height of its motive and the spiritual nobility of its endeavour.


Sri Aurobindo: It is useful to lay stress on this greatness of spirit and aim, not only because it is of immense importance and the ﬁrst test of the value of a culture, but because the assailants take advantage of two extraneous circumstances to create a prejudice and confuse the real issues.   They have the immense advantage of attacking India when she is prostrate and in the dust and, materially, Indian civilisation seems to have ended in a great defeat and downfall.


Sri Aurobindo: Strong in this temporary advantage they can afford to show a superb and generous courage in kicking the surrounding dust and mire with their hooves upon the sick and wounded lioness caught in the nets of the hunters and try to persuade the world that she had never any strength and virtue in her. It is an easy task in this age of the noble culture of Reason and Mammon and Science doing the works of Moloch, when the brazen idol of the great goddess Success is worshipped as she was never before worshipped by cultured human beings. But they have too the yet greater advantage of representing her to the world in a period of the eclipse of her civilisation when after at least two thousand years of the most brilliant and many-sided cultural activity she had for a time lost everything except the memory of her past and her long depressed and obscured but always living and now strongly reviving religious spirit.   I have touched elsewhere on the signiﬁcance of this failure and this temporary eclipse.


Sri Aurobindo: I may have to deal with it again at closer quarters, since it has been raised as an objection to the value of Indian culture and Indian spirituality. At present it will be enough to say that culture cannot be judged by material success; still less can spirituality be brought to that touchstone.  Philosophic, aesthetic, poetic, intellectual Greece failed and fell while drilled and militarist Rome triumphed and conquered, but no one dreams of crediting for that reason the victorious imperial nation with a greater civilisation and a higher culture.  The religious culture of Judaea is not disproved or lessened by the destruction of the Jewish State, any more than it is proved and given greater value by the commercial capacity shown by the Jewish race in their dispersion. But I admit, as ancient Indian thought admitted, that material and economic capacity and prosperity are a necessary, though not the highest or most essential part of the total effort of human civilisation.


Sri Aurobindo: In that respect India throughout her long period of cultural activity can claim equality with any ancient or mediaeval country. No people before modern times reached a higher splendour of wealth, commercial prosperity, material appointment, social organisation.   That is the record of history, of ancient documents, of contemporary witnesses; to deny it is to give evidence of a singular prepossession and obfuscation of the view, an imaginative, or is it unimaginative, misreading of present actuality into past actuality. The splendour of Asiatic and not least of Indian prosperity, the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind, the “barbaric doors rough with gold”,, were once stigmatised by the less opulent West as a sign of barbarism.


Sri Aurobindo: Circumstances are now strangely reversed; the opulent barbarism and a much less artistic ostentation of wealth are to be found in London, New York and Paris, and it is the nakedness of India and the squalor of her poverty which are ﬂung in her face as evidence of the worthlessness of her culture.   India’s ancient and mediaeval political, administrative, military and economic organisation was no mean achievement; the records stand and can be left to contradict the ignorance of the uninstructed and the rhetoric of the journalistic critic or the interested politician. There was no doubt an element of failure and defect, almost unavoidable in the totality of a problem on so large a scale and in the then conditions. But to exaggerate that into a count against her civilisation would be a singular severity of criticism which few civilisations watched to their end could survive. Failure in the end, yes, because of the decline of her culture, but not as a result of its most valuable elements.


Sri Aurobindo: A later eclipse of the more essential elements of her civilisation is not a disproof of their original value.  Indian civilisation must be judged mainly by the culture and greatness of its millenniums, not by the ignorance and weakness of a few centuries. A culture must be judged, ﬁrst by its essential spirit, then by its best accomplishment and, lastly, by its power of survival, renovation and adaptation to new phases of the permanent needs of the race. In the poverty, confusion and disorganisation of a period of temporary decline, the eye of the hostile witness refuses to see or to recognise the saving soul of good which still keeps this civilisation alive and promises a strong and vivid return to the greatness of its permanent ideal. Its obstinate elastic force of rebound, its old measureless adaptability are again at work; it is no longer even solely on the defence, but boldly aggressive.


Sri Aurobindo: Not survival alone, but victory and conquest are the promise of its future.    But our critic does not merely deny the lofty aim and greatness of spirit of Indian civilisation, which stand too high to be vulnerable to an assault of this ignorant and prejudiced character. He questions its leading ideas, denies its practical life-value, disparages its fruits, efﬁcacy, character. Has this disparagement any critical value or is it only a temperamental expression of the misunderstanding natural to a widely different view of life and to a diametrically opposite estimate of our nature’s highest signiﬁcances and realities?


Sri Aurobindo: If we consider the character of the attack and its terms, we shall see that it amounts to no more than a condemnation passed by the positivist mind attached to the normal values of life upon the quite different standards of a culture which looks beyond the ordinary life of man, points to something greater behind it and makes it a passage to something eternal, permanent and inﬁnite. India, we are told, has no spirituality, — a portentous discovery; on the contrary she has succeeded, it would seem, in killing the germs of all sane and virile spirituality.  Mr. Archer evidently puts his own sense, a novel and interesting and very occidental sense, on the word. Spirituality has meant hitherto a recognition of something greater than mind and life, the aspiration to a consciousness pure, great, divine beyond our normal mental and vital nature, a surge and rising of the soul in man out of the littleness and bondage of our lower parts towards a greater thing secret within him. That at least is the idea, the experience, which is the very core of Indian thinking.


Sri Aurobindo: But the rationalist does not believe in the spirit in this sense; life, human will-force and reason are his highest godheads. Spirituality then, — it would have been simpler and more logical to reject the word when the thing on which it rests is denied, — has to be given another sense, some high passion and effort of the emotions, will and reason, directed towards the ﬁnite, not towards the inﬁnite, towards things temporary, not towards the eternal, towards perishable life, not towards any greater reality which overpasses and supports the superﬁcial phenomena of life.  The thought and suffering which seam and furrow the ideal head of Homer, there, we are told, is the sane and virile spirituality. The calm and compassion of Buddha victorious over ignorance and suffering, the meditation of the thinker tranced in communion with the Eternal, lifted above the seekings of thought into identity with a supreme light, the rapture of the saint made one by love in the pure heart with the transcendent and universal Love, the will of the Karmayogin raised above egoistic desire and passion into the impersonality of the divine and universal will, these things on which India has set the highest value and which have been the supreme endeavour of her greatest spirits, are not sane, not virile. This, one may be allowed to say, is a very occidental and up to date idea of spirituality.


Sri Aurobindo: Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Spinoza, Kant, Charlemagne, Abraham Lincoln, Lenin, Mussolini, these, shall we suggest, are to ﬁgure henceforth not only as great poets and artists or heroes of thought and action, but as our typical heroes and exemplars of spirituality. Not Buddha, not Christ, Chaitanya, St. Francis, Ramakrishna; these are either semi-barbaric Orientals or touched by the feminine insanity of an oriental religion.  The impression made on an Indian mind resembles the reaction that a cultured intellectual might feel if he were told that good cooking, good dressing, good engineering, good schoolmastering are the true beauty and their pursuit the right, sane, virile aesthetic cult and literature, architecture, sculpture and painting are only a useless scribbling on paper, an insane hacking of stone and an effeminate daubing of canvas ; Vauban, Pestalozzi, Dr. Parr, Vatel and Beau Brummell are then the true heroes of artistic creation and not Da Vinci, Angelo, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare or Rodin. Whether Mr. Archer’s epithets and his accusations against Indian spirituality stand in the comparison, let the judicious determine.


Sri Aurobindo: But meanwhile we see the opposition of the standpoints and begin to understand the inwardness of the difference between the West and India.   This forms the gravamen of the charge against the effective value of Indian philosophy, that it turns away from life, nature, vital will and the effort of man upon earth. It denies all value to life; it leads not towards the study of nature, but away from it.  It expels all volitional individuality; it preaches the unreality of the world, detachment from terrestrial interests, the unimportance of the life of the moment compared with the endless chain of past and future existences.


Sri Aurobindo: It is an enervating metaphysic tangled up with false notions of pessimism, asceticism, karma and reincarnation, all of them ideas fatal to that supreme spiritual thing, volitional individuality. This is a grotesquely exaggerated and false notion of Indian culture and philosophy, got up by presenting one side only of the Indian mind in colours of a sombre emphasis, after a manner which I suppose Mr. Archer has learned from the modern masters of realism. But in substance and spirit it is a fairly correct statement of the notions which the European mind has formed in the past about the character of Indian thought and culture, sometimes in ignorance, sometimes in deﬁance of the evidence. For a time even it managed to impress some strong shadow of this error on the mind of educated India.


Sri Aurobindo: It is best to begin by setting right the tones of the picture; that done, we can better judge the opposition of mentality which is at the bottom of the criticism.   To say that Indian philosophy has led away from the study of nature is to state a gross unfact and to ignore the magniﬁcent history of Indian civilisation. If by nature is meant physical Nature, the plain truth is that no nation before the modern epoch carried scientiﬁc research so far and with such signal success as India of ancient times. That is a truth which lies on the face of history for all to read; it has been brought forward with great force and much wealth of detail by Indian scholars and scientists of high eminence, but it was already known and acknowledged by European savants who had taken the trouble to make a comparative study in the subject.


Sri Aurobindo: Not only was India in the ﬁrst rank in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, surgery, all the branches of physical knowledge which were practised in ancient times, but she was, along with the Greeks, the teacher of the Arabs from whom Europe recovered the lost habit of scientiﬁc enquiry and got the basis from which modern science started.  In many directions India had the priority of discovery, — to take only two striking examples among a multitude, the decimal notation in mathematics or the perception that the earth is a moving body in astronomy, —, the earth moves and only appears to be still, said the Indian astronomer many centuries before Galileo. This great development would hardly have been possible in a nation whose thinkers and men of learning were led by its metaphysical tendencies to turn away from the study of nature. A remarkable feature of the Indian mind was a close attention to the things of life, a disposition to observe minutely its salient facts, to systematise and to found in each department of it a science, Shastra, well-founded scheme and rule. That is at least a good beginning of the scientiﬁc tendency and not the sign of a culture capable only of unsubstantial metaphysics.


Sri Aurobindo: It is perfectly true that Indian science came abruptly to a halt somewhere about the thirteenth century and a period of darkness and inactivity prevented it from proceeding forward or sharing at once in the vast modern development of scientiﬁc knowledge.   But this was not due to any increase or intolerance of the metaphysical tendency calling the national mind away from physical nature. It was part of a general cessation of new intellectual activity, for philosophy too ceased to develop almost at the same time. The last great original attempts at spiritual philosophy are dated only a century or two later than the names of the last great original scientists.


Sri Aurobindo: It is true also that Indian metaphysics did not attempt, as modern philosophy has attempted without success, to read the truth of existence principally by the light of the truths of physical Nature. This ancient wisdom founded itself rather upon an inner experimental psychology and a profound psychic science, India’s special strength, — but study of mind too and of our inner forces is surely study of nature, — in which her success was greater than in physical knowledge.  This she could not but do, since it was the spiritual truth of existence for which she was seeking; nor is any really great and enduring philosophy possible except on this basis. It is true also that the harmony she established in her culture between philosophical truth and truth of psychology and religion was not extended in the same degree to the truth of physical Nature; physical Science had not then arrived at the great universal generalisations which would have made and are now making that synthesis entirely possible.  Nevertheless from the beginning, from as early as the thought of the Vedas, the Indian mind had recognised that the same general laws and powers hold in the spiritual, the psychological and the physical existence.


Sri Aurobindo: It discovered too the omnipresence of life, afﬁrmed the evolution of the soul in Nature from the vegetable and the animal to the human form, asserted on the basis of philosophic intuition and spiritual and psychological experience many of the truths which modern Science is reafﬁrming from its own side of the approach to knowledge. These things too were not the results of a barren and empty metaphysics, not the inventions of bovine navel-gazing dreamers.   Equally is it a misrepresentation to say that Indian culture denies all value to life, detaches from terrestrial interests and insists on the unimportance of the life of the moment. To read these European comments one would imagine that in all Indian thought there was nothing but the nihilistic school of Buddhism and the monistic illusionism of Shankara and that all Indian art, literature and social thinking were nothing but the statement of their recoil from the falsehood and vanity of things. It does not follow that because these things are what the average European has heard about India or what most interests or strikes the European scholar in her thought, therefore they are, however great may have been their inﬂuence, the whole of Indian thinking.


Sri Aurobindo: The ancient civilisation of India founded itself very expressly upon four human interests; ﬁrst, desire and enjoyment, next, material, economic and other aims and needs of the mind and body, thirdly, ethical conduct and the right law of individual and social life, and, lastly spiritual liberation;,,, . The business of culture and social organisation was to lead, to satisfy, to support these things in man and to build some harmony of their forms and motives.  Except in very rare cases the satisfaction of the three mundane objects must run before the other; fullness of life must precede the surpassing of life. The debt to the family, the community and the gods could not be scamped; earth must have her due and the relative its play, even if beyond it there was the glory of heaven or the peace of the Absolute. There was no preaching of a general rush to the cave and the hermitage.


Sri Aurobindo: The symmetric character of ancient Indian life and the vivid variety of its literature were inconsistent with any exclusive other-worldly direction.  The great mass of Sanskrit literature is a literature of human life; certain philosophic and religious writings are devoted to the withdrawal from it, but even these are not as a rule contemptuous of its value. If the Indian mind gave the highest importance to a spiritual release, — and whatever the positivist mood may say, a spiritual liberation of some kind is the highest possibility of the human spirit, — it was not interested in that alone. It looked equally at ethics, law, politics, society, the sciences, the arts and crafts, everything that appertains to human life.


Sri Aurobindo: It thought on these things deeply and scrutinisingly and it wrote of them with power and knowledge.   What a ﬁne monument of political and administrative genius is the, to take one example only, and what a mirror of the practical organisation of a great civilised people!  Indian art was not always solely hieratic, — it seemed so only because it is in the temples and cave cathedrals that its greatest work survived; as the old literature testiﬁes, as we see from the Rajput and Mogul paintings, it was devoted as much to the court and the city and to cultural ideas and the life of the people as to the temple and monastery and their motives. Indian education of women as well as of men was more rich and comprehensive and many-sided than any system of education before modern times.


Sri Aurobindo: The documents which prove these things are now available to anyone who cares to study. It is time that this parrot talk about the unpractical, metaphysical, quietistic, anti-vital character of Indian civilisation should cease and give place to a true and understanding estimate.   But it is perfectly true that Indian culture has always set the highest value on that in man which rises beyond the terrestrial preoccupation; it has held up the goal of a supreme and arduous self-exceeding as the summit of human endeavour.


Sri Aurobindo: The spiritual life was to its view a nobler thing than the life of external power and enjoyment, the thinker greater than the man of action, the spiritual man greater than the thinker. The soul that lives in God is more perfect than the soul that lives only in outward mind or only for the claims and joys of thinking and living matter. It is here that the difference comes in between the typical Western and the typical Indian mentality. The West has acquired the religious mind rather than possessed it by nature and it has always worn its acquisition with a certain looseness. India has constantly believed in worlds behind of which the material world is only the antechamber.


Sri Aurobindo: Always she has seen a self within us greater than the mental and vital self, greater than the ego.  Always she has bowed her intellect and heart before a near and present Eternal in which the temporal being exists and to which in man it increasingly turns for transcendence. The sentiment of the Bengali poet, the wonderful singer and rapt devotee of the Divine Mother, — How rich an estate man lies fallow here!   If this were tilled, a golden crop would spring, — expresses the real Indian feeling about human life.


Sri Aurobindo: But it is most attracted by the greater spiritual possibilities man alone of terrestrial beings possesses.  The ancient Aryan culture recognised all human possibilities, but put this highest of all and graded life according to a transitional scale in its system of the four classes and the four orders. Buddhism ﬁrst gave an exaggerated and enormous extension to the ascetic ideal and the monastic impulse, erased the transition and upset the balance. Its victorious system left only two orders, the householder and the ascetic, the monk and the layman, an effect which subsists to the present day. It is this upsetting of the Dharma for which we ﬁnd it ﬁercely attacked in the Vishnu Purana under the veil of an apologue, for it weakened in the end the life of society by its tense exaggeration and its hard system of opposites.


Sri Aurobindo: But Buddhism too had another side, a side turned towards action and creation and gave a new light, a new meaning and a new moral and ideal power to life.    Afterwards there came the lofty illusionism of Shankara at the close of the two greatest known millenniums of Indian culture.  Life thenceforward was too much depreciated as an unreality or a relative phenomenon, in the end not worth living, not worth our assent to it and persistence in its motives. But this dogma was not universally accepted, nor admitted without a struggle; Shankara was even denounced by his adversaries as a masked Buddhist.


Sri Aurobindo: The later Indian mind has been powerfully impressed by his idea of Maya; but popular thought and sentiment was never wholly shaped by it. The religions of devotion which see in life a play or Lila of God and not a half sombre, half glaring illusion defacing the white silence of eternity had a closer growing inﬂuence.  If they did not counteract, they humanised the austere ascetic ideal. It is only recently that educated India accepted the ideas of English and German scholars, imagined for a time Shankara’s Mayavada to be the one highest thing, if not the whole of our philosophy, and put it in a place of exclusive prominence. But against that tendency too there is now a powerful reaction, not towards replacing the spirit without life by life without the spirit, but towards a spiritual possession of mind, life and matter.


Sri Aurobindo: Still it is true that the ascetic ideal which in the ancient vigour of our culture was the ﬁne spire of life mounting into the eternal existence, became latterly its top-heavy dome and tended under the weight of its bare and imposing sublimity to crush the rest of the ediﬁce.   But here also we should get the right view, away from all exaggeration and false stress.  Mr. Archer drags in Karma and Reincarnation into his list of anti-vital Indian notions. But it is preposterous, it is a stupid misunderstanding to speak of reincarnation as a doctrine which preaches the unimportance of the life of the moment compared with the endless chain of past and future existences.


Sri Aurobindo: The doctrine of reincarnation and Karma tells us that the soul has a past which shaped its present birth and existence; it has a future which our present action is shaping; our past has taken and our future will take the form of recurring terrestrial births and Karma, our own action, is the power which by its continuity and development as a subjective and objective force determines the whole nature and eventuality of these repeated existences. There is nothing here to depreciate the importance of the present life. On the contrary the doctrine gives it immense vistas and enormously enhances the value of effort and action.  The nature of the present act is of an incalculable importance because it determines not only our immediate but our subsequent future. There will be found too insistently pervading Indian literature and deeply settled in the mind of the people the idea of a whole-hearted concentrated present action and energy, tapasya, as a miraculous all-powerful force for the acquisition of our desires, whether the material or the spiritual desires of the human will.


Sri Aurobindo: No doubt, our present life loses the exclusive importance which we give to it when we regard it only as an ephemeral moment in Time never to be repeated, our one sole opportunity, without any after-existence beyond it. But a narrow exaggerated insistence on the present shuts up the human soul in the prison of the moment: it may give a feverish intensity to action, but it is inimical to calm and joy and greatness of the spirit. No doubt, too, the idea that our present sufferings are the results of our own past action, imparts a calm, a resignation, an acquiescence to the Indian mind which the restless Western intelligence ﬁnds it difﬁcult to understand or tolerate.  This may degenerate in a time of great national weakness, depression and misfortune, into a quietistic fatalism that may extinguish the ﬁre of reparative endeavour. But that is not its inevitable turn, nor is it the turn given to it in the records of the more vigorous past of our culture.


Sri Aurobindo: The note there is of action, of tapasya. There is too another turn given to this belief which increased with time, the Buddhistic dogma of the succession of rebirths as a chain of Karma from which the soul must escape into the eternal silence.   This notion has strongly affected Hinduism; but whatever is depressing in it, belongs not properly to the doctrine of rebirth but to other elements stigmatised as an ascetic pessimism by the vitalistic thought of Europe.   Pessimism is not peculiar to the Indian mind: it has been an element in the thought of all developed civilisations.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the sign of a culture already old, the fruit of a mind which has lived much, experienced much, sounded life and found it full of suffering, sounded joy and achievement and found that all is vanity and vexation of spirit and there is nothing new under the sun or, if there is, its novelty is but of a day. Pessimism has been as rampant in Europe as in India and it is certainly a singular thing to ﬁnd the materialist of all people bringing against Indian spirituality this accusation of lowering the values of existence. For what can be more depressing than the materialistic view of the quite physical and ephemeral nature of human life? There is nothing in the most ascetic notes of the Indian mind like the black gloom of certain kinds of European pessimism, a city of dreadful night without joy here or hope beyond, and nothing like the sad and shrinking attitude before death and the dissolution of the body which pervades Western literature.  The note of ascetic pessimism often found in Christianity is a distinctly Western note; for it is absent in Christ’s teachings.


Sri Aurobindo: This mediaeval religion with its cross, its salvation by suffering, its devil-ridden and ﬂesh-ridden world and the ﬂames of eternal hell waiting for man beyond the grave has a character of pain and terror alien to the Indian mind, to which indeed religious terror is a stranger. The suffering of the world is there, but it fades into a bliss of spiritual peace or ecstasy beyond the sorrow line. Buddha’s teaching laid heavy stress on the sorrow and impermanence of things, but the Buddhist Nirvana won by the heroic spirit of moral self-conquest and calm wisdom is a state of ineffable calm and joy, open not only to a few like the Christian heavens, but to all, and very different from the blank cessation which is the mechanical release of our pain and struggle, the sorry Nirvana of the Western pessimist, the materialist’s brute ﬂat end of all things. Even illusionism preached, not a gospel of sorrow, but the ﬁnal unreality of joy and grief and the whole world-existence.  It admits the practical validity of life and allows its values to those who dwell in the Ignorance.


Sri Aurobindo: And like all Indian asceticism it places before man the possibility of a great effort, a luminous concentration of knowledge, a mighty urge of the will by which he can rise to an absolute peace or an absolute bliss. A not ignoble pessimism there has been about man’s normal life as it is, a profound sense of its imperfection, a disgust of its futile obscurity, smallness and ignorance; but an unconquerable optimism as regards his spiritual possibility was the other side of this mood. If it did not believe in the ideal of an immense material progress of the race or a perfection of the normal man with earth as its ﬁeld, it believed in a sure spiritual progress for every individual and an ultimate perfection lifted above subjection to the shocks of life. And this pessimism with regard to life is not the sole note of the Indian religious mind; its most popular forms accept life as a game of God and see beyond our present conditions for every human being the eternal nearness to the Divine.  A luminous ascent into godhead was always held to be a consummation well within man’s grasp.


Sri Aurobindo: That can hardly be called a depressing or pessimistic theory of existence.  There can be no great and complete culture without some element of asceticism in it; for asceticism means the self-denial and self-conquest by which man represses his lower impulses and rises to greater heights of his nature. Indian asceticism is not a mournful gospel of sorrow or a painful mortiﬁcation of the ﬂesh in morbid penance, but a noble effort towards a higher joy and an absolute possession of the spirit. A great joy of self-conquest, a still joy of inner peace and the forceful joy of a supreme selfexceeding are at the heart of its experience.  It is only a mind besotted with the ﬂesh or too enamoured of external life and its restless effort and inconstant satisfactions that can deny the nobility or idealistic loftiness of the ascetic endeavour.


Sri Aurobindo: But there are the exaggerations and deﬂections that all ideals undergo.  Those which are the most difﬁcult to humanity, suffer from them most, and asceticism may become a fanatic self-torture, a crude repression of the nature, a tired ﬂight from existence or an indolent avoidance of the trouble of life and a weak recoil from the effort demanded of our manhood. Practised not by the comparatively few who are called to it, but preached in its extreme form to all and adopted by unﬁt thousands, its values may be debased, counterfeits may abound and the vital force of the community lose its elasticity and its forward spring. It would be idle to pretend that such defects and untoward results have been absent in India.  I do not accept the ascetic ideal as the ﬁnal solution of the problem of human existence; but even its exaggerations have a nobler spirit behind them than the vitalistic exaggerations which are the opposite defect of Western culture.


Sri Aurobindo: After all asceticism and illusionism are minor issues. The point to be pressed is that Indian spirituality in its greatest eras and in its inmost signiﬁcance has not been a tired quietism or a conventional monasticism, but a high effort of the human spirit to rise beyond the life of desire and vital satisfaction and arrive at an acme of spiritual calm, greatness, strength, illumination, divine realisation, settled peace and bliss. The question between the culture of India and the vehement secular activism of the modern mind is whether such an endeavour is or is not essential to man’s highest perfection. And if it is, then the other question arises whether it is to be only an exceptional force conﬁned to a few rare spirits or can be made the main inspiring motive-power of a great and complete human civilisation.   IV RIGHT judgment of the life-value of Indian philosophy is intimately bound up with a right appreciation of the life-value of Indian religion; religion and philosophy are too intimately one in this culture to be divided from each other.


Sri Aurobindo: Indian philosophy is not a purely rational gymnastic of speculative logic in the air, an ultra-subtle process of thoughtspinning and word-spinning like the greater part of philosophy in Europe; it is the organised intellectual theory of the intuitive ordering perception of all that is the soul, the thought, the dynamic truth, the heart of feeling and power of Indian religion.  Indian religion is Indian spiritual philosophy put into action and experience. Whatever in the religious thought and practice of that vast, rich, thousand-sided, inﬁnitely pliable, yet very ﬁrmly structured system we call Hinduism, does not in intention come under this description, — whatever its practice, — is either social framework or projection of ritual buttresses or survival of old supports and additions. Or else it is an excrescence and growth of corruption, a degradation of its truth and meaning in the vulgar mind, part of the debased mixtures that overtake all religious thinking and practice.  Or, in some instances, it is dead habit contracted in periods of fossilisation or ill-assimilated extraneous matter gathered into this giant body.


Sri Aurobindo: The inner principle of Hinduism, the most tolerant and receptive of religious systems, is not sharply exclusive like the religious spirit of Christianity or Islam; as far as that could be without loss of its own powerful idiosyncrasy and law of being, it has been synthetic, acquisitive, inclusive. Always it has taken in from every side and trusted to the power of assimilation that burns in its spiritual heart and in the white heat of its ﬂaming centre to turn even the most unpromising material into forms for its spirit.   But before we turn to see what it is that so ﬁercely irritates and exasperates our hostile Western critic in Indian religious philosophy, it is as well to consider what he has to say about other sides of this ancient, dateless and still vigorously living, growing, all-assimilating Hinduism. For he has a great deal to say and it is unsparing and without measure.


Sri Aurobindo: There is not the intemperate drunkenness of denunciation and vomit of false witness, hatred, uncharitableness and all things degrading and unspiritual and unclean that are the mark of a certain type of “Christian literature” on the subject, — for example, the superlative specimen of this noxious compound which Sir John Woodroffe has cited from the pages of Mr. Harold Begbie, “virile” perhaps if violence is virile, but certainly not sane. But still it is a mass of unsparing condemnation, exaggerated where it has any foundation at all and serenely illogical in its blithe joy of deliberate misrepresentation. Still, even from this crude mass it is possible to disengage the salient and typical antipathies that recommend it to the uncritical and even to many critical minds, and it is these alone that it is useful to discover.   The total irrationality of Hinduism is the main theme of the attack.


Sri Aurobindo: Mr. Archer does casually admit a philosophical, and one might therefore suppose a rational element in the religion of India, but he disparages and dismisses as false and positively harmful the governing ideas of this religious philosophy as he understands or imagines he understands them.  He explains the pervading irrational character of Hindu religion by the allegation that the Indian people have always gravitated towards the form rather than the substance and towards the letter rather than the spirit. One would have supposed that this kind of gravitation is a fairly universal feature of the human mind, not only in religion, but in society, politics, art, literature, even in science. In every conceivable human activity a cult of the form and forgetfulness of the spirit, a turn towards convention, externalism, unthinking dogma has been the common drift of the human mind from China to Peru and it does not skip Europe on its way. And Europe where men have constantly fought, killed, burned, tortured, imprisoned, persecuted in every way imaginable by human stupidity and cruelty for the sake of dogmas, words, rites and forms of church government, Europe where these things have done duty for spirituality and religion, has hardly a record which would entitle it to cast this reproach in the face of the East.


Sri Aurobindo: But, we are told, this gravitation afﬂicts the Indian religion more than any other creed.  Higher Hinduism can be scarcely said to exist except in certain small reforming sects and current Hinduism, the popular religion, is the cult of a monstrous folk-lore oppressive and paralysing to the imagination, — although here again one would think that if anything an excess rather than a paralysis of the creative imagination might be charged against the Indian mind. Animism and magic are the prevailing characteristics. The Indian people has displayed a genius for obfuscating reason and formalising, materialising and degrading religion. If India has possessed great thinkers, she has not extracted from their thoughts a rational and ennobling religion: the devotion of the Spanish or the Russian peasant is rational and enlightened by comparison.


Sri Aurobindo: Irrationalism, antirationalism, — that in this laboured and overcharged accusation is the constant cry; it is the keynote of the Archer tune.    The phenomenon that has astonished and disgusted the mind of the critic is the obstinate survival in India of the old religious spirit and large antique religious types unsubmerged by the ﬂood of modernism and its devastating utilitarian free thought. India, he tells us, still clings to what not only the Western world, but China and Japan have outgrown for ages. The religion is a superstition full of performances of piety repulsive to the free enlightened secular mind of the modern man.


Sri Aurobindo: Its daily practices put it far outside the pale of civilisation. Perhaps, if it had conﬁned its practice decorously to church attendance on Sundays and to marriage and funeral services and grace before meat, it might have been admitted as human and tolerable!  As it is, it is the great anachronism of the modern world; it has not been cleansed for thirty centuries; it is paganism, it is a wholly unﬁltered paganism; its tendency towards pollution rather than puriﬁcation marks out its place as incomparably the lowest in the scale of world religions. An ingenious remedy is proposed.  Christianity destroyed Paganism in Europe; therefore, since any immediate or very rapid triumph of sceptical free-thought would be too happily abrupt a transition to be quite feasible, we unenlightened, polluted, impure Hindus are advised to take up for a time with Christianity, poor irrational thing that it is, dark and deformed though it looks in the ample light of the positivist reason, because Christianity and especially Protestant Christianity will be at least a good preparatory step towards the noble freedom and stainless purities of atheism and agnosticism.


Sri Aurobindo: But if even this little cannot be hoped for in spite of numerous famine conversions, at any rate Hinduism must somehow or other get itself ﬁltered, and until that hygienic operation has been executed, India must be denied fellowship on equal terms with the civilised nations.   Incidentally, to support this charge of irrationalism and its companion charge of Paganism, we ﬁnd a third and more damaging count brought against us and our religious culture, an alleged want of all moral worth and ethical substance.  There is now an increasing perception, even in Europe, that reason is not the last word of human mind, not quite the one and only sovereign way to truth and certainly not the sole arbiter of religious and spiritual truth. The accusation of paganism too does not settle the question, since plenty of cultivated minds are well able to see that there were many great, true and beautiful things in the ancient religions that were lumped together by Christian ignorance under that inappropriate nickname.