1910-1912
(India's Rebirth, pp 85)
We have, most of us, our chosen explanation of this dolorous phenomenon [of the
decline of Indian civilization]. The patriot attributes our decline to the
ravages of foreign invasion and the benumbing influences of foreign rule; the
disciple of European materialism finds out the enemy, the evil, the fount and
origin of all our ills, in our religion and its time-honoured social
self-expression. Such explanations, like most human thoughts, have their bright
side of truth as well as their obscure side of error; but they are not, in any
case, the result of impartial thinking. Man may be, as he has been defined, a
reasoning animal, but it is necessary to add that he is, for the most part, a
very badly reasoning animal. He does not ordinarily think for the sake of
finding out the truth, but much more for the satisfaction of his mental
preferences and emotional tendencies; his conclusions spring from his
preferences, prejudices and passions; and his reasoning and logic paraded to
justify them are only a specious process or a formal mask for ths covert
approach to an upshot previously necessitated by his heart or by his
temperament. When we are awakened from our modern illusions, as we have been
awakened from our mediaeval superstitions, we shall find that the intellectual
conclusions of the rationalist, for all their pomp and protest of scrupulous
enquiry, were as much dogmas as those former dicta of Pope and theologian, which
confessed without shame their simple basis in the negation of reason.... It is
always best, therefore, to scrutinise very narrowly those bare, trenchant
explanations which so easily satisfy the pugnacious animal in our intellect;
when we have admitted that small part of the truth on which they swize, we
should always look for the large part which they have missed.
...
Few societies have been so tamasic, so full of inertia and contentment in
increasing narrowness as Indian society in later times; few have been so eager
to preserve themselves in inertia. Few therefore have attached so great an
importance to authority. Every detail of our life has been fixed for us by
Shastra and custom, every detail of our thought by Scripture and its
commentators, - but much oftener by the commentators than by Scripture. Only in
one field, that of individual spiritual experience, have we cherished the
ancient freedom and originality out of which our past greatness sprang; it is
from some new movement in this inexhaustible source that every fresh impulse and
rejuvenated strength has arisen. Otherwise we should long ago have been in the
grave where dead nations lie, with Greece and Rome of the Caesars, with
Esarhaddon (One of the last Assyrian kings in the 7th century BC) and the
Chosroes (Members of the last dynasty of native rulers of Persia, the Sassanids,
who ruled from the 3rd to 7th century AD, until the Mohomedan conquests engulfed
Persia)...
The result of this well-meaning bondage [to the outer forms of Hinduism] has
been an increasing impoverishment of the Indian intellect, once the most
gigantic and original in the world. Hence a certain incapacity, atrophy,
impotence have marked our later activities even at their best. The most
striking instance is our continued helplessness in the face of the new
conditions and new knowledge imposed on us by the recent European contact. We
have tried to assimilate, we have tried to reject, we have tried to select; but
we have not been able to do any of these things successfully. Successful
assimilation depends on mastery; but we have not mastered Eurpoean conditions
and knowledge, rather we have been seized, subjected and enslaved by them.
Successful rejection is possible only if we have intelligent possession of that
which we wish to keep. Our rejection too must be an intelligent rejection; we
must reject because we have understood, not because we have failed to
understand. But our Hinduism, our old culture are precisely the possessins we
have cherished with the least inteligence; throughout the whole range of our
life we do things without knowing why we do them, we believe things without
knowing why we believe them, we assert things without knowing what right we have
to asser them, - or, at most, it is because some book or some Brahmin enjoins
it, because Shankara thinks it, or because someone has so interpreted something
that he asserts to be a fundamental Scripture of our religion. Nothing is our
own, nothing native to our intelligence, all is derived. As little have we
understood the new knowledge; we have only understood what the Europeans want us
to think about themselves and their modern civilisation. Our English culture -
if culture it can be called - has increased tenfold the evil of our dependence
instead of remedying it.
...
How shall we recover our lost intellectual freedom and elasticify? By reversing,
for a time at least, the process by which we lost it, by liberating our minds in
all subjects from the thraldom to authority. That is not what reformers and the
Anglicised require of us. They as us, indeed, to abandon authority, revolt
against custom and superstition, to have free and enlightened minds. But they
mean by these sounding recommendations that we should renounce the authority of
Sayana for the authority of Max Muller, the Monism of Shankara for the Monism of
Haeckel, the written Shastra for the unwritten law of European social opinion,
the dogmatism of Brahmin Pandits for the dogmatism of European scientists,
thinkers and scholars. Such a foolish exchange of servitude can receive the
assent of no self-respecting mind. Let us break our chains, venerable as they
are, but let it be in order to be free, - in the name of truth, not in the name
of Europe. It would be a poor bargain to exchange our old Indian illuminations,
however dark they may have grown to us, for a derivative European enlightenment
or replace superstitions of popular Hinduism by the supoerstitions of
materialistic Science.

Our first necessity, if India is to survive and do her appointed work in the
world, is that the youth of India should learn to think, - to think on all
subjects, to think independently, fruitfully, going to the heart of things, not
stoped by their surface, free of prejudgements, shearing sophism and prejudice
asunder as with a sharp sword, smiting down obscurantism of all kinds as with
the mace of Bhima...

Let us not, either, select at random, make a nameless hotchpotch and the
triumphantly call it the assimilation of East and West. We must begin by
accepting nothing on trust from any source whatsoever, by questioning everything
and forming our own conclusions. We need not fear that we shall by that process
cease to be Indians or fall into the danger of abandoning Hinduism. India can
never cease to be India or Hinduism to be Hinduism, if we really think for
ourselves. It is only if we allow Europe to think for us that India is in danger
of becoming an ill-executed and foolish copy of Europe... We must... take our
stand on that which is true and lasting. But in order to find out what in our
conceptions is true and lasting, we must question all alike rigorously and
impartially. The necessity of such a process not for India, but for all humanity
has been recognised by leading European thinkers. It was what Carlyle meant when
he spoke of swallowing all formulas. It was the process by which Goethe helped
to reinvigorate European thinking. But... Europe has for some time ceased to
produce original thinkers, though it still produces original mechanicians...
China, Japan and the Mussulman states are sliding into a blind European
imitativeness. In India alone there is self-contained, dormant, the energy and
the invincible spiritual individuality which can yet arise and break her own and
the world's fetters.