India and the Future Author:William Archer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV HINDU SPIRITUALITY The common task which English and Indians have before them—that of bringing India into line in the march of civilization—will not be ... more »facilitated by false ideals on either side. And the Indian is at least as liable to them as the Englishman. The Abb£ Dubois, a Catholic missionary who spent the best part of his life in the most intimate contact with the peoples of Southern India—who adopted their dress, spoke their languages, and came to be accepted by them almost as one of themselves—wrote of them nearly a century ago as "a vain and self-sufficient people, filled with the idea of their own moral ascendancy." This is plain speaking, but there is a great deal of justice in it even to-day. Indeed, if the worthy Abb6 had said "moral and intellectual ascendancy," he would not have been far wrong. Until Hindu patriotism is dissociated from irrational arrogance, and associated with rational humility, the advance of the mass of the people towards self-respecting intelligence must inevitably be slow. I do not say that the same remark is not justly applicable to many other people nearer home. That is not the question: two blacks do not make one white. Nor do I say that the reproach applies to all Indians. On the contrary, the leading intelligences of the country prove their claim to that position by seeing things in juster proportions. But the general tendency is to regard India as a sort of divinityunder a cloud: a heaven-born paragon of genius, valour, piety and learning, who has only to cast off an evil spell in order to shine forth in the eyes of all the world, resplendent, incomparable, the saviour of the human species. Now the evil spell is real enough: another name for it is the history of India. The illusion lies in supposing that the races which hav...« less