"God, the Invisible King"   A REMARKABLE book with this title by the well-known writer and thinker, Mr. H. G. Wells, has recently appeared, of which only a few extracts are before us, but these are sufficient to reveal its character and thought. It is on the part of the writer, speaking not for himself personally alone but as scribe to the spirit of his generation, a definite renunciation of the gospel of an all-sufficient rationalism, a discovery of God, a profession of faith in spirituality as the one lever by which mankind can rise out of the darkness and confusion of its present state into a more perfect living

Historical Impressions   The French Revolution   The greatness of the French Revolution lies not in what it effected, but in what it thought and was. Its action was chiefly destructive. It prepared many things, it founded nothing. Even the constructive activity of Napoleon only built a halfway house in which the ideas of 1789 might rest until the world was fit to understand them better and really The ideas themselves were not new; they existed in Christianity and before Christianity they existed in Buddhism; but in 1789 they came out for the first time from the Church and the Book and sought to remo

Appendix One   Baroda Speeches and Reports   Sri Aurobindo wrote the pieces in this part between 1901 and 1905, while serving in the Princely State of Baroda. The speeches were intended for delivery by Sayajirao Gaekwar, the Maharaja of Baroda. One of them later was published in a collection of the Maharaja's speeches.     Speeches Written for the Maharaja of Baroda   1901 ­ 1902   Medical Department   INTRODUCTORY   One of the peculiarities of administration in India is the extent to which the provision of medical aid for the people rests on

II   The Powers of the Mind   THE INSTRUMENT of the educationist is the mind or antaḥkaraṇa, which consists of four layers. The reservoir of past mental impressions, the citta or storehouse of memory, which must be distinguished from the specific act of memory, is the foundation on which all the other layers stand. All experience lies within us as passive or potential memory; active memory selects and takes what it requires from that storehouse. But the active memory is like a man searching among a great mass of locked-up material: sometimes he cannot find what he wants; often in his rapid search he stumbles

II   Turiu, Uriu TURIU   Goddess Leda who from heaven descendest, how beautiful are thy feet as they gild the morning. The roses of Earth are red, but the touch of vermilion with which thy feet stain the heavens, is redder, -it is the crimson of love, the glory of passion. Goddess Leda, look down upon men with gracious eyes. The clang of war is stilled, silent the hiss of the shafts and the shields clamour no more against each other in the shock of the onset. We have hung up our swords on the walls of our mansions. The young men have returned unhurt, the girls of

The Revival of Indian Art   THE MAIN DIFFERENCE   THE GREATNESS of Indian art is the greatness of all Indian thought and achievement. It lies in the recognition of the persistent within the transient, of the domination of matter by spirit, the subordination of the insistent appearances of Prakriti to the inner reality which, in a thousand ways, the Mighty Mother veils even while she suggests. The European artist, cabined within the narrow confines of the external, is dominated in imagination by the body of things and the claims of the phenomenon. Western painting starts from the eye or the im

On Poetry and Literature     Poetry   Poetry I take to be the measured expression of emotion. Of prose one asks, does the matter please, stimulate or instruct the intellect; does the style satisfy a cultured taste & observant literary sense; if it does so, it is good prose, whether it moves the heart or not. Of poetry we ask, does the matter move, stimulate, enlarge, heighten, or deepen the feelings; does it excite emotions of delight, sorrow, awe, sublimity, passionate interest, or if the nature of the subject matter is not such as to excite actual emotions, does it excite certain vague &nameless sensations, the quiet stirring of the heart which att

The Revival of Industry in India   GENTLEMEN, —  IF I hesitated to accept your invitation to preside at the opening of this Exhibition, the importance of the occasion must be my excuse. You called me to step into the breach, to face publicly the most tremendous question of our times and to give you my solution of a problem on which no two people agree, except that it is urgent. But I do not think that we realise how urgent it is. Famine, increasing poverty, widespread disease, all these bring home to us the fact that there is some radical weakness in our system and that something must be done to remedy it. But there is an

Part Nine   Bankim ­ Tilak ­ Dayananda   Sri Aurobindo wrote the pieces in this part at various times between 1907 and 1920; he published five of them in periodicals and one as the introduction to a book.     Rishi Bankim Chandra   THERE are many who, lamenting the by-gone glories of this great and ancient nation, speak as if the Rishis of old, the inspired creators of thought and civilisation, were a miracle of our heroic age, not to be repeated among degenerate men and in our distressful present. This is an error and thrice an error. Ours is the eternal land, the eternal people, the eternal religion, whose strength, greatness, holiness may be over-clo

Passing Thoughts [2]   The Object of Government   It is the habit of men to blind themselves by customary trains of associated thought, to come to look on the means as an end and honour it with a superstitious reverence as a wonderworking fetish. Government and its great formulas, law and order, efficiency, administration, have been elevated into such a fetish. The principle of good government is not merely to keep men quiet, but to keep them satisfied. It is not its objective to have loyal servants and subjects, but to give all individuals in the nation the utmost possible facilities for becoming men and re