more humane which inspires all men and all
movements that are worth considering at all, and, to those who can
understand, gives greatness and significance even to some of our most
reckless enterprises. We are living very "dangerously"; all the forces
are loose, those of destruction as well as those of creation; but we are
living towards something; we are living with the religion of Time.

So far, I daresay, most Western men will agree with me in the main. But
they may say, some of them, as the Indian will certainly say, "Is that
all? Have you no place for the Eternal and the Infinite?" To this I must
reply that I think it clear and indisputable that the religion of the
Eternal, as interpreted by Sri Ramakrishna, is altogether incompatible
with the religion of Time. And the position of Sri Ramakrishna, I have
urged, is that of most Indian, and as I think, of most Western mystics.
Not, however, of all, and not of all modern mystics, even in India.
Rabindranath Tagore, for example, in his "Sadhana," has put forward a
mysticism which does, at least, endeavour to allow for and include what
I have called the religion of Time. To him, and to other mystics of real
experience, I must leave the attempt to reconcile Eternity and Time. For
my own part, I can only approach the question from the point of view of
Time, and endeavour to discover and realise the most that can be truly
said by one who starts with the belief that that is real. The
profoundest prophets of the religion of Time are, in my judgment, Goethe
and George Meredith; and from them, and from others, and from my own
small experience, I seem to have learned this: the importance of that
process in Time in whose reality we believe does not lie merely in the
bettering of the material and social environment, though we hold the
importance of that to be great; it lies in the development of souls. And
that development consists in a constant expansion of interest away from
and beyond one's own immediate interests out into the activities of the
world at large. Such expansion may be pursued in practical life, in art,
in science, in contemplation, so long as the contemplation is of the
real processes of the real world in time. To that expansion I see no
limit except death. And I do not know what comes after death. But I am
clear that whatever comes after, the command of Life is the same--to
expand out of oneself into the life of the world. This command--I should
rather say this im