Page:Letters from Abroad.pdf/65

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To me, humanity is rich and large and many-sided. Therefore, I feel deeply hurt when I find that, for some material gain, man’s personality is mutilated in the western world and he is reduced to a machine. The same process of repression and curtailment of humanity is often advocated in our country under the name of patriotism. Such deliberate empoverishment of our nature seems to me a crime, It is a cultivation of callousness, which is a form of sacrilege. For God’s purpose is to lead man into that perfection of growth, which is the attainment of a unity comprehending an immense manifoldness. But when I find man, for some purpose of his own, imposing upon Lis society, a mutilation of mind, a niggardliness of culture, a puritanism which is spiritual penury, it makes me inexpressibly sad.

I have been reading a book by a Frenchman on Japan—it makes me feel almost envious! The sensitiveness to the ideal of beauty, which has been made universal in Japan, is not only the source of her strength, but of her heroic spirit of renunciation, For true renunciation blossoms on the vigorous soil of beauty and joy--the soil which supplies positive food to our souls.

But the negative process of making the soil poor produces a ghastly form of renunciation, which belongs to the nihilism of life. An emaciation of human .nature has already been going on for a long time in India. Let us not add to it by creating a