We know that when, at first, any large body of people in their history
became aware of their unity, they expressed it in some popular symbol
of divinity. For they felt that their combination was not an
arithmetical one; its truth was deeper than the truth of number. They
felt that their community was not a mere agglutination but a creation,
having upon it the living touch of the infinite Person. The
realisation of this truth having been an end in itself, a fulfilment,
it gave meaning to self-sacrifice, to the acceptance even of death.
But our modern education is producing a habit of mind which is ever
weakening in us the spiritual apprehension of truth--the truth of a
person as the ultimate reality of existence. Science has its proper
sphere in analysing this world as a construction, just as grammar has
its legitimate office in analysing the syntax of a poem. But the
world, as a creation, is not a mere construction; it too is more than
a syntax. It is a poem, which we are apt to forget when grammar takes
exclusive hold of our minds.
Upon the loss of this sense of a universal personality, which is
religion, the reign of the machine and of method has been firmly
established, and man, humanly speaking, has been made a homeless
tramp. As nomads, ravenous and restless, the men from the West have
come to us. They have exploited our Eastern humanity for sheer gain of
power. This modern meeting of men has not yet received the blessing of
God. For it has kept us apart, though railway lines are laid far and
wide, and ships are plying from shore to shore to bring us together.
It has been said in the Upanishads:
Yastu sarvani bhutani atmanyevanupashyati
Sarva bhuteshu chatmanam na tato vijugupsate.
(He who sees all things in _atma_, in the infinite spirit,
and the infinite spirit in all beings, remains no longer
unrevealed.)
In the modern civilisation, for which an enormous number of men are
used as materials, and human relationships have in a large measure
become utilitarian, man is imperfectly revealed. For man's revelation
does not lie in the fact that he is a power, but that he is a spirit.
The prevalence of the theory which realises the power of the machine
in the universe, and organises men into machines, is like the eruption
of Etna, tremendous in its force, in its outburst of fire and fume;
but its creeping lava covers up human shelters made by the ages, and
its ashes smother life.