The Creative Soul THE difference between living organism and dead matter is that while the former is endowed with creative activity, the latter has only passive receptivity. Life adds, synthetises, new-creates – gives more than what it receives; matter only sums up, gathers, reflects, gives just what it receives. Life is living, glad and green through its creative genius. Creation in some form or other must be the core of everything that seeks vitality and growth, vigour and delight. Not only so, but a thing in order to be real must possess a creative function. We consider a shadow or an echo unreal precisely because they do not create but merely image or repeat, they do not bring ou

Tagore – Poet and Seer A GREAT literature seems to have almost invariably a great name attached to it, one name by which it is known and recognised as great. It is the name of the man who releases the inmost potency of that literature, and who marks at the same time the height to which its creative genius has attained or perhaps can ever attain. Homer and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Goethe and Camoens, Firdausi in Persian and Kalidasa in classical Sanskrit, are such names – numina, each being the presiding deity, the godhead born full-armed out of the poetic consciousness of the race to which he belongs. Even in the case of France whose language and literature are more a democrati

Bypaths of Soul's Journey A POPULAR conundrum. Are the souls finite or infinite in number? Supposing they are finite, then a time is sure to come when there will be no more souls upon earth; for, as it is said, all souls are evolving and in the end will pass out of earthly life and get merged in their source, the Brahman, the absolute Reality. On the other hand, if they are infinite, then, since all of them cannot appear on earth at the same time, the number of human bodies that house the souls being limited (at the most, a few thousand millions, according to statisticians), what happens to those that are not embodied, where do they wait or what do they do in that period? Do all come

A Global Humanity A GLOBAL view of humanity is becoming more and more insistent, unavoidable and inevitable. It is being forced upon the normal consciousness of mankind so that the ordinary life itself has to be conducted and lived according to the demands of that view. It is this that humanity is one, that mankind as a whole is a single organism. Even like an individual being, the collective being too is a unit, a close knit living unit. As the individual has different parts and limbs, organs and systems, so is humanity composed of nations and races, cultures and religions. And as the parts of the "body natural" do not exist by themselves, independently of one another, each for its

Modernism: An Oriental Interpretation In the past we used to see the world, experience and express life, mainly if not exclusively, in terms of the mind and the heart. These were the two fundamental categories or basic forms in and through which we built up our universe. It was our ideas and ideals, our notions and conceptions, our imagination and sentiment that viewed and interpreted, guided and shaped our earthly existence and creativity. Whether morally or esthetically, the domination of the mind and the heart over life was the characteristic stamp of the movement of the human spirit in the past. Modernism means the release of life from this subjugation; it means the expressio

The Urge for Progression IN the process of the expression and embodiment of this innermost truth, the first necessary condition is, as we have said, sincerity, that is to say, a constant reference to the demand of that truth, putting everything and judging everything in the light of that truth, a vigilant wakefulness to it. The second condition is progression. It is the law of the Truth that it is expressing itself, seeking to express itself continually and continuously in the march of life; it is always unfolding new norms and forms of its light and power, ever new degrees of realisation. The individual human consciousness has to recognise that progressive flux and march along with it

Physics or philosophy WHAT is the world that we see really like? Is it mental, is it material? This is a question, we know, philosophers are familiar with, and they have answered and are still answering, each in his own way, taking up one side or other of the antinomy. There is nothing new or uncommon in that. The extraordinary novelty comes in when we see today even scientists forced to tackle the problem, give an answer to it, – scientists who used to smile at philosophers, because they seemed to assault seriously the windmills of abstract notions and airy concepts, instead of reposing on the terra firma of reality. The tables are turned now. The scientists have had to start the sa

Principle and Personality IT is asked of us why do we preach a man and not purely and solely a principle. Our ideal being avowedly the establishment and reign of a new principle of world-order and not gathering recruits for the camp of a sectarian teacher, it seems all the more inconsistent, if not thoroughly ruinous for our cause, that we should lay stress upon a particular individual and incur the danger of overshadowing the universal truths upon which we seek to build human society. Now, it is not that we are unconscious or oblivious of the many evils attendant upon the system of preaching a man – the history of the rise and decay of many sects and societies is there to

An Evolutionary Problem THE London Times Literary Supplement (July 27, 1946), in the course of a critical estimate of Bernard Shaw, writes: "Mr. Shaw pats Lamarck on the back and accepts his theory that 'living organisms change because they want to'. If you have no eyes and want to see and keep trying to see, you will finally get eyes. If, like a mole or a subterranean fish, you have eyes and don't want to see, you will lose your eyes. If you like eating the tender tops of trees enough to make you concentrate all your energies on the stretching of your neck, you will eventually get a long neck like the giraffe. But the metaphysics here are surely false. If a species has n