In Hindustan, as in Ionia, a period of relatively high and tolerably
stable civilization had succeeded long ages of semi-barbarism and
struggle. Out of wealth and security had come leisure and refinement,
and, close at their heels, had followed the malady of thought. To
the struggle for bare existence, which never ends, though it may be
alleviated and partially disguised for a fortunate few, succeeded the
struggle to make existence intelligible and to bring the order of things
into harmony with the moral sense of man, which also never ends, but,
for the thinking few, becomes keener with every increase of knowledge
and with every step towards the realization of a worthy ideal of life.
Two thousand five hundred years ago the value of civilization was as
apparent as it is now; then, as now, it was obvious that only in the
garden of an orderly polity can the finest fruits humanity is capable of
bearing be produced. But it had also become evident that the blessings
of culture were not unmixed. The garden was apt to turn into a hothouse.
The stimulation of the senses, the pampering of the emotions, endlessly
multiplied the sources of pleasure. The constant widening of the
intellectual field indefinitely extended the range of that especially
human faculty of looking before and after, which adds to the fleeting
present those old and new worlds of the past and the future, wherein men
dwell the more the higher their culture. But that very sharpening of the
sense and that subtle refinement of emotion, which brought such a wealth
of pleasures, were fatally attended by a proportional enlargement of the
capacity for suffering; and the divine faculty of imagination, while it
created new heavens and new earths, provided them with the corresponding
hells of futile regret for the past and morbid anxiety for the future.