India: What can it teach us? A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge — Reading Notes

while observing the myriads of races intervening between man and the monad, regard the world beyond as waste and void. Intelligences of every grade were believed to people the region between mortals and the Infinite. The angels and archangels, and the spirits of the just made perfect--_devas_ and _pitris_ they called them--ministered about the throne of the Supreme Being, and abode in the various spheres of universal space. Much of the difference between our thought and theirs consists in the names and not in the substance of our beliefs.

We may thus be prepared to receive what India can teach us. In her classic dialect, the Sanskrit, we may read with what success the children of the men who journeyed from the ancient Aryan Home into the Punjâb and Aryavartta have ventured "to look inward upon themselves, upward to something not themselves, and to see whether they could not understand a little of the true purport of that mystery which we call life upon earth." It was perfectly natural, as well as perfectly right, that as the beholder caught a glance of the Infinite Beyond, the image impressed itself upon his sensorium, as would be the case from looking at the sun, and he would as a result perceive that Infinite in all that he looked upon. Thus to the Sanskrit-speaking Aryan, as to the enlightened mind of to-day, not to see it was utter blindness. What we call science, law, morality, religion, was in his view pervaded alike throughout by this concept of Divine presence, or else it would have been less than a dream that had not come to the awaking. He was a follower of the light, not from the senses or the logical understanding, but from the eternal world. Let us not dwell on any darker shade of the picture. Clouds are dark to those who are beneath them; but on the upper side, where the sun shines, they glow with golden splendor. Let us be willing to contemplate India fraternally, and upon that side where the radiance of the Divine sheds a refulgent illumination.

NEWARK, N. J., May 14th, 1883.

WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US?

When I received from the Board of Historical Studies at Cambridge the invitation to deliver a course of lectures, specially intended for the candidates for the Indian Civil Service, I hesitated for some time, feeling extremely doubtful whether in a few public discourses I could say anything that would be of real use to them in passing their examinations. To enable young men to pass their examinations seems now to have become the chief, if not the only object of the universities; and to no class of students is it of greater importance to pass their examinations, and to pass them well, than to the candidates for the Indian Civil Service.

But although I was afraid that attendance on a few public lectures, such as I could give, would hardly benefit a candidate who was not already fully prepared to pass through the fiery ordeal of the three London examinations, I could not on the other hand shut my eyes completely to the fact that, after all, universities were not meant entirely, or even chiefly, as stepping-stones to an examination, but that there is something else which universities can teach and ought to teach--nay, which I feel quite sure they were originally meant to teach--something that may not have a marketable value before a Board of Examiners, but which has a permanent value for the whole of our life, and that is a real interest in our work, and, more than that, a love of our work, and, more than that, a true joy and happiness in our work. If a university can teach that, if it can engraft that one small living germ in the minds of the young men who come here to study and to prepare themselves for the battle of life, and, for what is still more difficult to encounter, the daily dull drudgery of life, then, I feel convinced, a university has done more, and conferred a more lasting benefit on its pupils than by helping them to pass the most difficult examinations, and to take the highest place among Senior Wranglers or First-Class men.

Unfortunately, that kind of work which is now required for passing one examination after another, that process of cramming and crowding which has of late been brought to the highest pitch of perfection, has often the very opposite effect, and instead of exciting an appetite for work, it is apt to produce an indifference, if not a kind of intellectual nausea, that may last for life.