All organic beings live like a flame, a long way beyond themselves. They have thus a smaller and a larger body. The former is visible to the eye; it can be touched, captured and bound. The latter is indefinite; it has no fixed boundaries, but is widespread both in space and time. When we see a foreign
University, we see only its smaller body - its buildings, its furniture, its regulations, its syllabus; its larger body is not present to us. But as the kernel of the coconut is in the whole coconut, so the University, in the case of Europeans, is in their society, in their parliament, in their literature, in the numerous activities of their corporate life. They have their thoughts published in their books, as well as the living men who think those thoughts and criticize, compare and disseminate them. One common medium of mind connects their teachers and students in an educational relationship which is living and luminous. In short their education has its permanent vessel which is their own mind; its permanent supply which is their own living spring of culture; its permanent field for irrigation which is their own social life. This organic unity of their mind and life and culture has enabled them to seek truth from all lands and all times, and to make it vitally one with their own culture which is the basis of their civilization.
On the other hand, those who, like our present Indian students, have to rely upon books, not truly for their mental sustenance, but for some external advantage, are sure to become anaemic in their intellects, like babies solely fed with artificial food. They never have intellectual courage, because they never see the process and the environment of those thoughts which they are compelled to learn - and thus they lose the historical sense of all ideas, never knowing the perspective of their growth. They are hypnotized by the sharp black and white of the printed words, formed and fixed, which hide their human genesis. They not only borrow a foreign culture, but also a foreign standard of judgment; and thus, not only is the money not theirs, but not even the pocket. Their education is a chariot that does not carry them in it, but drags them behind it. The sight is pitiful and very often comic. The modern European culture, whose truth and strength lie in its fluid mobility, comes to us rigidly fixed, almost like our own Sastras, about which our minds have to remain passively uncritical because of their supposed divine origin.
This has made us miss the dynamic character of living truth. The English mind from the early Victorian to the mid-Victorian, and from the mid- Victorian to the post-Victorian period of its growth, has been passing through different moods and standards. But we, who take our lessons from the English, can only accept some one or other of these moods and standards as fixed; we cannot naturally move with the moving mind of our teacher, but only hop from one point to another and miss the modulation of life. We securely confine all our intellectual faith, either within the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, or the spiritualism of Carlyle and Ruskin, or the paradoxicalism, startling lazy minds into truth, in which Chesterton and Bernard Shaw excel; and we fail to notice their relation of inevitable action and reaction. We boast of the up-to-dateness of our education; we forget that the mission of all education is to lead us beyond the present date.
University, we see only its smaller body - its buildings, its furniture, its regulations, its syllabus; its larger body is not present to us. But as the kernel of the coconut is in the whole coconut, so the University, in the case of Europeans, is in their society, in their parliament, in their literature, in the numerous activities of their corporate life. They have their thoughts published in their books, as well as the living men who think those thoughts and criticize, compare and disseminate them. One common medium of mind connects their teachers and students in an educational relationship which is living and luminous. In short their education has its permanent vessel which is their own mind; its permanent supply which is their own living spring of culture; its permanent field for irrigation which is their own social life. This organic unity of their mind and life and culture has enabled them to seek truth from all lands and all times, and to make it vitally one with their own culture which is the basis of their civilization.
On the other hand, those who, like our present Indian students, have to rely upon books, not truly for their mental sustenance, but for some external advantage, are sure to become anaemic in their intellects, like babies solely fed with artificial food. They never have intellectual courage, because they never see the process and the environment of those thoughts which they are compelled to learn - and thus they lose the historical sense of all ideas, never knowing the perspective of their growth. They are hypnotized by the sharp black and white of the printed words, formed and fixed, which hide their human genesis. They not only borrow a foreign culture, but also a foreign standard of judgment; and thus, not only is the money not theirs, but not even the pocket. Their education is a chariot that does not carry them in it, but drags them behind it. The sight is pitiful and very often comic. The modern European culture, whose truth and strength lie in its fluid mobility, comes to us rigidly fixed, almost like our own Sastras, about which our minds have to remain passively uncritical because of their supposed divine origin.
This has made us miss the dynamic character of living truth. The English mind from the early Victorian to the mid-Victorian, and from the mid- Victorian to the post-Victorian period of its growth, has been passing through different moods and standards. But we, who take our lessons from the English, can only accept some one or other of these moods and standards as fixed; we cannot naturally move with the moving mind of our teacher, but only hop from one point to another and miss the modulation of life. We securely confine all our intellectual faith, either within the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, or the spiritualism of Carlyle and Ruskin, or the paradoxicalism, startling lazy minds into truth, in which Chesterton and Bernard Shaw excel; and we fail to notice their relation of inevitable action and reaction. We boast of the up-to-dateness of our education; we forget that the mission of all education is to lead us beyond the present date.
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