at this world is all-important. This
conviction finds expression not only in the avowed pursuit of pleasure
and ambition but in such sayings as that the best religion is the one
which does most good and such ideals as self-realization or the full
development of one's nature and powers. Europeans as a rule have an
innate dislike and mistrust of the doctrine that the world is vain or
unreal. They can accord some sympathy to a dying man who sees in due
perspective the unimportance of his past life or to a poet who under the
starry heavens can make felt the smallness of man and his earth. But
such thoughts are considered permissible only as retrospects, not as
principles of life: you may say that your labour has amounted to
nothing, but not that labour is vain. Though monasteries and monks still
exist, the great majority of Europeans instinctively disbelieve in
asceticism, the contemplative life and contempt of the world: they have
no love for a philosopher who rejects the idea of progress and is not
satisfied with an ideal consisting in movement towards an unknown goal.
They demand a religion which theoretically justifies the strenuous life.
All this is a matter of temperament and the temperament is so common
that it needs no explanation. What needs explanation is rather the other
temperament which rejects this world as unsatisfactory and sets up
another ideal, another sphere, another standard of values. This ideal
and standard are not entirely peculiar to India but certainly they are
understood and honoured there more than elsewhere. They are professed,
as I have already observed, by Christianity, but even the New Testament
is not free from the idea that saints are having a bad time now but will
hereafter enjoy a triumph, parlously like the exuberance of the wicked
in this world. The Far East too has its unworldly side which, though
harmonizing with Buddhism, is native. In many ways the Chinese are as
materialistic as Europeans, but throughout the long history of their art
and literature, there has always been a school, clear-voiced if small,
which has sung and pursued the joys of the hermit, the dweller among
trees and mountains who finds nature and his own thoughts an
all-sufficient source of continual happiness. But the Indian ideal,
though it often includes the pleasures of communion with nature, differs
from most forms of the Chinese and Christian ideal inasmuch as it
assumes the reality of certain religious experience