-67_At the Society's Chambers.htm At the Society's Chambers Professor : Gentlemen, I believe we are here in full strength. It is gratifying to find so much enthusiasm still abroad for the dispassionate acquisition of knowledge. I trust it is not a short-lived fervour; I trust we shall not soon have to declare our society extinct from constitutional inability to form a quorum. Jurist : I believe this is a society for the discussion of all things discussable and the discovery of all things discoverable. Am I right in my supposition? Professor : Your definition is rather wide, but it may pass. What then? Jurist : In that case I suggest that the first subject we should discuss is wheth

SECTION NINE Passing Thoughts ACHARA — is a mould in which the thing itself rests and feels stable, it is not the thing itself. It is this sense of stability, which is the greater value of ācāra; it gives the thing itself the śraddhā, that it is meant to abide. It is a conservative force, it helps to preserve things as they are. But it is also a danger and a hindrance, when change becomes necessary. Conservative forces are either sattwic or tamasic. Ācāra with knowledge, observance full of the spirit of the thing itself, is sattwic and preserves the thing itself; ācāra without knowledge, looking to the letter of custom and observance, disregarding the spirit, is tamasi

Vyasa: Some Characteristics THE Mahabharata, although neither the greatest nor the richest masterpiece of the secular literature of India, is at the same time its most considerable and important body of poetry. Being so, it is the pivot on which the history of Sanskrit literature and incidentally the history of Aryan civilisation in India, must perforce turn. To the great discredit of European scholarship the problem of this all-important work is one that remains not only unsolved, but untouched. Yet until it is solved, until the confusion of its heterogeneous materials is reduced to some sort of order, the differen

The Age of Kalidasa VALMIKI, Vyasa and Kalidasa are the essence of the history of ancient India; if all else were lost, they would still be its sole and sufficient cultural history. Their poems are types and exponents of three periods in the development of the human soul, types and exponents also of the three great powers which dispute and clash in the imperfect and half-formed temperament and harmonise in the formed and perfect. At the same time, their works are pictures at once minute and grandiose of three moods of our Aryan civilisation, of which the first was predominatingly moral, the second predominatingly intellectual, the third predominatingly material. The fou

SEVEN Our Hope in the Future BUT profound as have been its effects, this revolution is yet in its infancy. Visible on every side, in the waning influence of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, in the triumph of the Bengali language, in the return to Hinduism, in the pride of birth, the angry national feeling and the sensitiveness to insult, which are growing more and more common among our young men, it has nevertheless only begun its work and has many more fields to conquer. Calcutta is yet a stronghold of the Philistines; officialdom is honey-combed with the antinational tradition: in politics and social reform the workings of the new movement are yet obscure. The Angli

Man ― Slave or Free? THE exclusive pursuit of Yoga by men who seclude themselves either physically or mentally from the contact of the world has led to an erroneous view of this science as something mystic, far-off and unreal. The secrecy which has been observed with regard to Yogic practices, a necessary secrecy in the former stages of human evolution — has stereotyped this error. Practices followed by men who form secret circles and confine the instruction in the mysteries strictly to those who have a certain preparatory fitness, inevitably bear the stamp to the outside world of occultism. In reality there is nothing intrinsically hidden, occult or mystic about Yoga

The Three Purushas THE greatest of all the philosophical problems which human thought has struggled to solve is the exact nature and relation to us of the conscious Intelligence in the phenomenal existence around. The idealist denies the phenomenal existence, the materialist denies the conscious Intelligence. To the former, phenomenon is a passing shadow on the luminous calm of the single universal Spirit: to the latter, Intelligence is a temporary result of the motions of Matter. The idealist can give no satisfactory explanation of the existence of the shadow; .he admits that it is inexplicable, a thing that is and yet is not: the materialist can give no satisfactory

Stray Thoughts and Glimpses TRUE heroism findeth not its symbol in the splendour and majesty of the shining armour and accoutrement, nor seeth its glory in the trophies of a thousand victories; for its symbol is the Holy War in which the might and puissance of the Eternal plays through its willing hands, and its glory the laurel-wreath of Delight wherewith God crowns all doughty champions of His Cause. * Not he the philosopher that achieves marvels in ratiocination and winneth the applause of an intellectual age, but he whose organon is a sharply whetted instrument which God pierces into the closed strongholds of prejudice, pedantry, error and obs

The Problem of the Mahabharata THE POLITICAL STORY IT WAS hinted in a recent article of the Indian Review, an unusually able and searching paper on the date of the Mahabharata war, that a society is about to be formed for discovering the genuine and original portions of our great epic. This is glad tidings to all admirers of Sanskrit literature and to all lovers of their country. For the solution of the Mahabharata problem is essential to many things, to any history worth having of Aryan civilisation and literature, to a proper appreciation of Vyasa's poetical genius and, far more important tha

SECTION Two BANKIM CHANDRA CHATTERJI On the passing away of Bankim Chandra Chatterji in 1894 Sri Aurobindo wrote a series of seven articles, "Bankim Chandra Chatterji by a Bengali" in the Induprakash of Bombay from July 16, 1894 to August 27, 1894. These articles were signed "Zero". ONE His Youth and College Life Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya, the creator and king of Bengali prose, was a high-caste Brahman and the son of a distinguished official in Lower Bengal. Born at Kantalpara on the 27th June 1838, dead at Calcutta on the 8th April 1894, his fifty-six years of laborious life were a parcel of the most splendid epoch in Bengali history; yet amon