In the Sanskrit language, religion goes by the name dharma, which in the derivative meaning imi4r THE RELIGION OF MAN plies the principle of relationship that holds us firm, and in its technical sense means the virtue of a thing, the essential quality of it; for instance, heat is the essential quality of fire, though in certain of its stages it may be absent.
Religion consists in the endeavour of men to cultivate and express those qualities which are in- herent in the nature of Man the Eternal, and to have faith in him. If these qualities were abso- lutely natural in individuals, religion could have no purpose. We begin our history with all the original promptings of our brute nature which helps us to fulfil those vital needs of ours that are immediate. But deeper within us there is a current of tendencies which runs in many ways in a con- trary direction, the life current of universal hu- manity. Religion has its function in reconciling the contradiction, by subordinating the brute na- ture to what we consider as the truth of Man. This is helped when our faith in the Eternal Man, whom we call by different names and imagine in different images, is made strong. The contradic- tion between the two natures in us is so great that men have willingly sacrificed their vital needs and courted death in order to express their dharma, which represents the truth of the Supreme Man.
The vision of the Supreme Man is realized by our imagination, but not created by our mind. More real than individual men, he surpasses each of US in his permeating personality which is trans- cendental. The procession of his ideas, following his great purpose, is ever moving across obstruc- tive facts towards the perfected truth. We, the individuals, having our place in his composition, may or may not be in conscious harmony with his purpose, may even put obstacles in his path bring- ing down our doom upon ourselves. But we gain our true religion when we consciously co-operate with him, finding our exceeding joy through suf- fering and sacrifice. For through our own love for him we are made conscious of a great love that radiates from his being, who is Mahatma, the Supreme Spirit The great Chinese sage Lao-tze has said: “One who may die, but will not perish, has life ever- lasting”. It means that he lives in the life of the immortal Man. The urging for this life induces men to go through the struggle for a true survival. And it has been said in our scripture: “Through adharma (the negation of dharma) man prospers, gains what appears desirable, conquers enemies, but he perishes at the root.” In this saying it is suggested that there is a life which is truer for men than their physical life which is transient.
Our life gains what is called “value” in those of its aspects which represent eternal humanity in knowledge, in sjmipathy, in deeds, in character and creative works. And from the beginning of THE RELIGION OF MAN our history we are seeking, often at the cost of everything else, the value for our life and not merely success; in other words, we are trying to realize in ourselves the immortal Man, so that we may die but not perish. This is the meaning of the utterance in the Upanishad: "Tam vedyam p<uru- sham veda, yatha ma vo mrityuh parwyathah ” — “Realize the Person so that thou mayst not suffer from death.”
The meaning of these words is highly paradoxi- cal, and cannot be proved by our senses or our rea- son, and yet its influence is so strong in men that they have cast away all fear and greed, defied all the instincts that cling to the brute nature, for the sake of acknowledging and preserving a life which belongs to the Eternal Person. It is all the more significant because many of them do not believe in its reality, and yet are ready to fling away for it all that they believe to be final and the only positive fact.
We call this ideal reality “spiritual”. That word is vague; nevertheless, through the dim light which reaches us across the barriers of physical existence, we seem to have a stronger faith in the spiritual Man than in the physical; and from the dimmest period of his history, Man has a feeling that the apparent facts of existence are not final; that his supreme welfare depends upon his being able to remain in perfect relationship with some great mystery behind the veil, at the threshold of a larger life, which is for giving him a far higher value than a mere continuation of his physical life in the material world.
Our physical body has its comprehensive reality in the physical world, which may be truly called our universal body, without which our individual body would miss its function. Our physical life realizes its growing meaning through a widening freedom in its relationship with the physical world, and this gives it a greater happiness than the mere pleasure of satisfied needs. We become aware of a profound meaning of our own self at the consciousness of some ideal of perfection, some truth beautiful or majestic which gives us an inner sense of completeness, a heightened sense of our own reality. This strengthens man’s faith, effec- tive even if indefinite — his faith in an objective ideal of perfection comprehending the human world. His vision of it has been beautiful or dis- torted, luminous or obscure, according to the stages of development that his consciousness has attained. But whatever may be the name and nature of his religious creed, man’s ideal of human perfection has been based upon a bond of unity running through individuals culminating in a supreme Being who represents the eternal in human person- ality. In his civilization the perfect expression of this idea produces the wealth of truth which is for I4S THE RELIGION OF MAN the revelation of Man and not merely for the suc- cess of life. But when this creative ideal which is dharma gives place to some overmastering pas- sion in a large body of men civilization bursts out in an explosive flame, like a star that has lighted its own funeral pyre of boisterous brilliancy.
When I was a child I had the freedom to make my own toys out of trifles and create my own games from imagination. In my happiness my playmates had their full share, in fact the complete enjoy- ment of my games depended upon their taking part in them. One day, in this paradise of our child- hood, entered the temptation from the market world of the adult. A toy brought from an English shop was given to one of our companions; it was perfect, it was big and wonderfully life-like. He became proud of the toy and less mindful of the game; he kept that expensive thing carefully away from us, glorying in his exclusive possession of it, feeling himself superior to his playmates whose toys were cheap. I am sure if he could use the modern language of history he would say that he was more civilized than ourselves to the extent of his owning that ridiculously perfect toy.
One thing he failed to realize in his excitement — a fact which at the moment seemed to him insig- nificant — that this temptation obscured something a great deal more perfect than his toy, the revela- tion of the perfect child which ever dwells in the heart of man, in other words, the dharma of the child. The toy merely expressed his wealth but not himself, not the child’s creative spirit, not the child’s generous joy in his play, his identification of himself with others who were his compeers in his play world. Civilization is to express Man’s dharma and not merely his cleverness, power and possession.
Once there was an occasion for me to motor down to Calcutta from a place a hundred miles away. Something wrong with the mechanism made it necessary for us to have a repeated supply of water almost every half-hour. At the first village where we were compelled to stop, we asked the help of a man to find water for us. It proved quite a task for him, but when we oflfered him his re- ward, poor though he was, he refused to accept it. In fifteen other villages the same thing happened. In a hot country, where travellers constantly need water and where the water supply grows scanty in summer, the villagers consider it their duty to offer water to those who need it. They could easily make a business out of it, following the inexorable law of demand and supply. But the ideal which they consider to be their dharma has become one with their life. They do not claim any personal merit for possessing it.
Lao-tze, speaking about the man who is truly good, says; “He quickens but owns not. He acts THE RELIGION OF MAN but claims not. Merit he accomplishes but dwells not in it. Since he does not dwell in it, it will never leave him.” That which is outside ourselves we can sell; but that which is one with our being we cannot sell. This complete assimilation of truth belongs to the paradise of perfection; it lies beyond the purgatory of self-consciousness. To have reached it proves a long process of civilization.
To be able to take a considerable amount of trouble in order to supply water to a passing stranger and yet never to claim merit or reward for it seems absurdly and negligibly simple com- pared with the capacity to produce an amazing number of things per minute. A millionaire tour- ist, ready to corner the food market and grow rich by driving the whole world to the brink of starva- tion, is sure to feel too superior to notice this sim- ple thing while rushing through our villages at sixty miles an hour.
Yes, it is simple, as simple as it is for a gentle- man to be a gentleman; but that simplicity is the product of centuries of culture. That simplicity is difficult of imitation. In a few years’ time, it might be possible for me to learn how to make holes in thousands of needles simultaneously by turning a wheel, but to be absolutely simple in one’s hospitality to one’s enemy, or to a stranger, requires generations of training. Simplicity takes no account of its own value, claims no wages, and therefore those who are enamoured of power do not realize that simplicity of spiritual expression is the highest product of civilization.
A process of disintegration can kill this rare fruit of a higher life, as a whole race of birds pos- sessing some rare beauty can be made extinct by the vulgar power of avarice which has civilized weapons. This fact was clearly proved to me when I found that the only place where a price was expected for the water given to us was a suburb at Calcutta, where life was richer, the water supply easier and more abundant and where progress flowed in numerous channels in all directions. It shows that a harmony of character which the peo- ple once had was lost — the harmony with the inner self which is greater in its universality than the self that gives prominence to its personal needs. The latter loses its feeling of beauty and generos- ity in its calculation of profit; for there it repre- sents exclusively itself and not the universal Man.
There is an utterance in the Atharva Veda, wherein appears the question as to who it was that gave Man his music. Birds repeat their single notes, or a very simple combination of them, but Man builds his world of music and establishes ever new rhythmic relationship of notes. These reveal to him a universal mystery of creation which can- not be described. They bring to him the inner rhythm that transmutes facts into truths. They THE RELIGION OF MAN THE RELIGION OF MAN give him pleasure not merely for his sense of hear- ing, but for his deeper being, which gains satisfac- tion in the ideal of perfect unity. Somehow man feels that truth finds its body in such perfection; and when he seeks for his own best revelation he seeks a medium which has the harmonious unity, as has music. Our impulse to give expression to Universal Man produces arts and literature. They in their cadence of lines, colours, movements, words, thoughts, express vastly more than what they appear to be on the surface. They open the win- dows of our mind to the eternal reality of man. They are the superfluity of wealth of which we claim our common inheritance whatever may be the country and time to which we belong; for they are inspired by the universal mind. And not merely in his arts, but in his own behaviour, the individual must for his excellence give emphasis to an ideal which has some value of truth that ideally belongs to all men. In other words, he should create a music of expression in his conduct and surround- ings which makes him represent the supreme Per- sonality. And civilization is the creation of the race, its expression of the universal Man.
When I first visited Japan I had the opportu- nity of observing where the two parts of the human sphere strongly contrasted; one, on which grew up the ancient continents of social ideal, standards of beauty, codes of personal behaviour; and the other man’s nature part, the fluid element, the perpetual current that carried wealth to its shores from all parts of the world. In half a century’s time Japan has been able to make her own the mighty spirit of progress which suddenly burst upon her one morning in a storm of insult and menace. China also has had her rousing, when her self-respect was being knocked to pieces through series of helpless years, and I am sure she also will master before long the instrument which hurt her to the quick. But the ideals that imparted life and body to Japanese civilization had been nourished in the reverent hopes of countless generations through ages which were not primarily occupied in an incessant hunt for opportunities. They had those large tracts of leisure in them which are necessary for the blos- soming of Life’s beauty and the ripening of her wisdom.
On the one hand we can look upon the modem factories in Japan with their numerous mechanical organizations and engines of production and de- struction of the latest type. On the other hand, against them we may see some fragile vase, some small piece of silk, some architecture of sublime simplicity, some perfect lyric of bodily movement. We may also notice the Japanese expression of courtesy daily extracting from them a considerable amount of time and trouble. All these have come not from any accurate knowledge of things but THE RELIGION OF MAN from an intense consciousness of the value of real- ity which takes time for its fullness. What Japan reveals in her skilful manipulation of telegraphic wires and railway lines, of machines for manufac- turing things and for killing men, is more or less similar to what we see in other countries which have similar opportunity for training. But in her art of living, her pictures, her code of conduct, the various forms of beauty which her religious and social ideals assume Japan expresses her own per- sonality, her dharma, which, in order to be of any worth, must be unique and at the same time repre- sent Man of the Everlasting Life.
Lao-tze has said; “Not knowing the eternal causes passions to rise; and that is evil”. He has also said: “Let us die, and yet not perish”. For we die when we lose our physical life, we perish when we miss our humanity. And humanity is the dharma of human beings.
What is evident in this world is the endless pro- cession of moving things; but what is to be real- ized, is the supreme human Truth by which the human world is permeated.
We must never forget to-day that a mere move- ment is not valuable in itself, that it may be a sign of a dangerous form of inertia. We must be reminded that a great upheaval of spirit, a uni- versal realization of true dignity of man once caused by Buddha’s teachings in India, started a movement for centuries which produced illumina- tion of literature, art, science and numerous efforts of public beneficence. This was a movement whose motive force was not some additional accession of knowledge or power or urging of some overwhelm- ing passion. It was an inspiration for freedom, the freedom which enables us to realize dharma, the truth of Eternal Man.
Lao-tze in one of his utterances has said: “Those who have virtue {dharma) attend to their obliga- tions; those who have no virtue attend to their claims.” Progress which is not related to an inner dharma, but to an attraction which is external, seeks to satisfy our endless claims. But civiliza- tion, which is an ideal, gives us the abundant power to renounce which is the power that realizes the infinite and inspires creation.
This great Chinese sage has said: “To increase life is called a blessing.” For, the increase of life realizes the eternal life and yet does not transcend the limits of life’s unity. The mountain pine grows tall and great, its every inch maintains the rhythm of an inner balance, and therefore even in its seeming extravagance it has the reticent grace of self-control. The tree and its productions belong to the same vital system of cadence; the timber, the flowers, leaves and fruits are one with the tree; their exuberance is not a malady of exaggeration, but a blessing.
CHAPTER XI THE MEETING Our great prophets in all ages did truly realize in themselves the freedom of the soul in their con- sciousness of the spiritual kinship of man which is universal. And yet human races, owing to their external geographical condition, developed in their individual isolation a mentality that is ob- noxiously selfish. In their instinctive search for truth in religion either they dwarfed and deformed it in the mould of the primitive distortions of their own race-mind, or else they shut their God within temple walls and scriptural texts safely away, espe- cially from those departments of life where his absence gives easy access to devil-worship in vari- ous names and forms. They treated their God in the same way as in some forms of government the King is treated, who has traditional honour but no effective authority. The true meaning of God has remained vague in our minds only because our consciousness of the spiritual unity has been thwarted.
One of the potent reasons for this— our geo- graphical separation — has now been nearly re- moved. Therefore the time has come when we IS4 THE MEETING must, for the sake of truth and for the sake of that peace which is the harvest of truth, refuse to allow the idea of our God to remain indistinct behind unrealities of formal rites and theological misti- ness.
The creature that lives its life screened and sheltered in a dark cave, finds its safety in the very narrowness of its own environment. The economi- cal providence of Nature curtails and tones down its sensibilities to such a limited necessity. But if these cave-walls were to become suddenly re- moved by some catastrophe, then either it must accept the doom of extinction, or carry on satis- factory negotiations with its wider surroundings.
The races of mankind will never again be able to go back to their citadels of high-walled exclu- siveness. They are to-day exposed to one another, physically and intellectually. The shells, which have so long given them full security within their individual enclosures have been broken, and by no artificial process can they be mended again. So we have to accept this fact, even though we have not yet fully adapted our minds to this changed environment of publicity, even though through it we may have to run all the risks entailed by the wider expansion of life’s freedom.
A large part of our tradition is our code of adjustment which deals with the circumstances special to ourselves. These traditions, no doubt, THE RELIGION OF MAN variegate the several racial personalities with their distinctive colours — colours which have their poetry and also certain protective qualities suitable to each different environment We may come to acquire a strong love for our own colourful race speciality; but if that gives us fitness only for a very narrow world, then, at the slightest variation in our outward circumstances, we may have to pay for this love with our life itself.
In the animal world there are numerous in- stances of complete race-suicide overtaking those who fondly clung to some advantage which later on became a hindrance in an altered dispensation. In fact the superiority of man is proved by his adaptability to extreme surprises of chance — neither the torrid nor the frigid zone of his destiny offering him insuperable obstacles.
The vastness of the race problem with which we are faced to-day will either compel us to train ourselves to moral fimess in the place of merely external efficiency, or the complications arising out of it will fetter all our movements and drag us to our death.^ When our necessity becomes urgently insistent, when the resources that have sustained us so long are exhausted, then our spirit puts forth all its force to discover some other source of sustenance deeper and more permanent. This leads us from * See Appendix ly.
THE MEETING the exterior to the interior of our store-house. When muscle does not fully serve us, we come to awaken intellect to ask for its help and are then surprised to find in it a greater source of strength for us than physical power. When, in their tarn, our intellectual gifts grow perverse, and only help to render our suicide gorgeous and exhaustive, our soul must seek an alliance with some power which is still deeper, yet further removed from the rude stupidity of muscle.
Hitherto the cultivation of intense race egotism is the one thing that has found its fullest scope at this meeting of men. In no period of human his- tory has there been such an epidemic of moral perversity, such a universal churning up of jeal- ousy, greed, hatred and mutual suspicion. Every people, weak or strong, is constantly indulging in a violent dream of rendering itself thoroughly hurtful to others. In this galloping competition of hurtfulness, on the slope of a bottomless pit, no nation dares to stop or slow down. A scarlet fever with a raging temperature has attacked the entire body of mankind, and political passion has taken the place of creative personality in all departments of life.
It is well known that when greed has for its object material gain then it can have no end. It is like the chasing of the horizon by a lunatic. To go on in a competition multiplying millions be- THE RELIGION OP MAN comes a steeplechase of insensate futility that has obstacles but no goal. It has for its parallel the fight with material weapons — ^weapons which must perpetually be multiplied, opening up new vistas of destruction and evoking new forms of insanity in the forging of frightfulness. Thus seems now to have commenced the last fatal ad- venture of drunken Passion riding on an intellect of prodigious power.
To-day, more than ever before in our history, the aid of spiritual power is needed. Therefore, I believe its resources will surely be discovered in the hidden depths of our being. Pioneers will come to take up this adventure and suffer, and through suffering open out a path to that higher elevation of life in which lies our safety.
Let me, in reference to this, give an instance from the history of Ancient India. There was a noble period in the early days of India when, to a band of dreamers, agriculture appeared as a great idea and not merely useful fact. The heroic personality of Ramachandra, who espoused its cause, was sung in popular ballads, which in a later age forgot their original message and were crystallized into an epic merely extolling some domestic virtues of its hero. It is quite evident, however, from the legendary relics lying entombed in the story, that a new age ushered in by the spread of agriculture came as a divine voice to those who could hear. It lifted up the primeval screen of the wilderness, brought the distant near, and broke down all barricades. Men who had formed separate and antagonistic groups in their sheltered seclusions were called upon to form a united people.
In the Vedic verses, we find constant mention of conflicts between the original inhabitants of An- cient India and the colonists. There we find the expression of a spirit that was one of mutual dis- trust and a struggle in which was sought either wholesale slavery or extermination for the oppo- nents carried on in the manner of animals who live in the narrow segregation imposed upon them by their limited imagination and imperfect sym- pathy. This spirit would have continued in all its ferocious vigour of savagery had men failed tc find the opportunity for the discovery that man’s highest truth was in the union of co-operation and love.
The progress of agriculture was the first exter- nal step which led to such a discovery. It not onl} made a settled life possible for a large number ol men living in close proximity, but it claimed foi its very purpose a life of peaceful co-operation The mere fact of such a sudden change from £ nomadic to an agricultural condition would no have benefited Man if he had not developed there with his spiritual sensitiveness to an inner principh THE RELIGION OF MAN THE RELIGION OF MAN of truth. We can realize, from our reading of the Ramayana, the birth of idealism among a section of the Indian colonists of those days, before whose mind’s eye was opened a vision of emancipation rich with the responsibility of a higher life. The epic represents in its ideal the change of the peo- ple’s aspiration from the path of conquest to that of reconciliation.
At the present time, as I have said, the human world has been overtaken by another vast change similar to that which had occurred in the epic age of India. So long men had been cultivating, almost with a religious fervour, that mentality which is the product of racial isolation; poets proclaimed, in a loud pitch of bragging, the exploits of their popular fighters; money-makers felt neither pity nor shame in the unscrupulous dexterity of their pocket-picking; diplomats scattered lies in order to reap concessions from the devastated future of their own victims. Suddenly the walls that sep- arated the different races are seen to have given way, and we find ourselves standing face to face.
This is a great fact of epic significance. Man, suckled at the wolf’s breast, sheltered in the brute’s den, brought up in the prowling habit of depredation, suddenly discovers that he is Man, and that his true power lies in yielding up his brute power for the freedom of spirit.
The God of humanity has arrived at the gates i6o THE MEETING of the ruined temple of the tribe. Though he has not yet found his altar, I ask the men of simple faith, wherever they may be in the world, to bring their offering of sacrifice to him, and to believe that it is far better to be wise and worshipful than to be clever and supercilious. I ask them to claim the right of manhood to be friends of men, and not the right of a particular proud race or nation which may boast of the fatal quality of being the rulers of men. We should know for certain that such rulers will no longer be tolerated in the new world, as it basks in the open sunlight of mind and breathes life’s free air.
In the geological ages of the infant earth the demons of physical force had their full sway. The angry fire, the devouring flood, the fury of the storm, continually kicked the earth into frightful distortions. These titans have at last given way to the reign of life. Had there been spectators in those days who were clever and practical they would have wagered their last penny on these titans and would have waxed hilariously witty at the expense of the helpless living speck taking its stand in the arena of the wrestling giants. Only a dreamer could have then declared with unwaver- ing conviction that those titans were doomed be- cause of their very exaggeration, as are, to-day, those formidable qualities which, in the parlance of schoolboy science, are termed Nordic.
i6i THE RELIGION OF MAN I ask once again, let us, the dreamers of the East and the West, keep our faith firm in the Life that creates and not in the Machine that constructs — in the power that hides its force and blossoms in beauty, and not in the power that bares its arms and chuckles at its capacity to make itself obnox- ious. Let us know that the Machine is good when it helps, but not so when it exploits life; that Science is great when it destroys evil, but not when the two enter into unholy alliance.
CHAPTER XII THE TEACHER I HAVE already described how the nebulous idea of the divine essence condensed in my conscious- ness into a human realization. It is definite and finite at the same time, the Eternal Person mani- fested in all persons. It may be one of the numer- ous manifestations of God, the one in which is com- prehended Man and his Universe. But we can never know or imagine him as revealed in any other inconceivable universe so long as we remain human beings. And therefore, whatever character our theology may ascribe to him, in reality he is the infinite ideal of Man towards whom men move in their collective growth, with whom they seek their union of love as individuals, in whom they find their ideal of father, friend and beloved.
I am sure that it was this idea of the divine Humanity unconsciously working in my mind, which compelled me to come out of the seclusion of my literary career and take my part in the world of practical activities. The solitary enjoyment of the infinite in meditation no longer satisfied the, and the texts which I used for my silent worship THE RELIGION OF MAN lost their inspiration without my knowing it. I am sure I vaguely felt that my need was spiritual self- realization in the life of Man through some disin- terested service. This was the time when I founded an educational institution for our children in Ben- gal. It has a special character of its own which is still struggling to find its fulfilment; for it is a living temple that I have attempted to build for my divinity. In such a place education necessarily becomes the preparation for a complete life of man which can only become possible by living that life, through knowledge and service, enjoy- ment and creative work. The necessity was my own, for I felt impelled to come back into a ful- ness of truth from my exile in a dream-world.
This brings to my mind the name of another poet of ancient India, Kalidasa, whose poem of Meg- haduta reverberates with the music of the sorrow of an exile.
It was not the physical home-sickness from which the poet suffered, it was something far more fundamental, the home-sickness of the soul. We feel from almost all his works the oppressive at- mosphere of the kings’ palaces of those days, dense with things of luxury, and also with the callousness of self-indulgence, albeit an atmos- phere of refined culture based on an extravagant civilization.
The poet in the royal court lived in banishment THE TEACHER — ^banishment from the immediate presence of the eternal. He knew it was not merely his own ban- ishment, but that of the whole age to which he was born, the age that had gathered its wealth and missed its well-being, built its storehouse of things and lost its background of the great universe. What was the form in which his desire for perfec- tion persistently appeared in his drama and poems? It was the form of the tapovana, the forest-dwell- ing of the patriarchal community of ancient India. Those who are familiar with Sanskrit literature will know that this was not a colony of people with a primitive culture and mind. They were seekers after truth, for the sake of which they lived in an atmosphere of purity but not of Puritanism, of the simple life but not the life of self-mortification. They never advocated celibacy and they had con- stant intercommunication with other people who lived the life of worldly interest. Their aim and endeavour have briefly been suggested in the Upanishad in these lines: Te sarvagam sarvatah prapya dhira yuktatmanah sarvamevavisanti.
(Those men of serene mind enter into the All, having realized and being in union everywhere with the omnipresent Spirit.)
It was never a philosophy of renunciation of a negative character, but a realization completely comprehensive. How the tortured mind of Kalii6s THE EELIGION OF MAN dasa in the prosperous city of Ujjaini, and the glorious period of Vikramaditya, closely pressed by all-obstructing things and all-devouring self, let his thoughts hover round the vision of a tapo- vana for his inspiration of life!
It was not a deliberate copy but a natural coin- cidence that a poet of modern India also had the similar vision when he felt within him the misery of a spiritual banishment. In the time of Kalidasa the people vividly believed in the ideal of tapo- vana, the forest colony, and there can be no doubt that even in the late age there were communities of men living in the heart of nature, not ascetics fiercely in love with a lingering suicide, but men of serene sanity who sought to realize the spiritual meaning of their life. And, therefore, when Kali- dasa sang of the tapovana, his poems found their immediate communion in the living faith of his hearers. But to-day the idea has lost any definite outline of reality, and has retreated into the far- away phantom-land of legend. Therefore the Sanskrit word in a modern poem would merely be poetical, its meaning judged by a literary stand- ard of appraisement. Then, again, the spirit of the forest-dwelling in the purity of its original shape would be a fantastic anachronism in the present age, and therefore, in order to be real, it must find its reincarnation under modern conditions of life. It must be the same in truth, but not identical in THE TEACHER