Page:Love in Hindu Literature.djvu/24

 lo I. TAGORE. elemental passions, feelings,. affections or sentiments of human life. His attitude is a thoroughly non-moral one. He has thrown a man and a woman together, and the result is what you see. You need know nothing more about Arjuna and Chitra than what has been given in the play, and you see that love, that most mysterious and romantic of all terms in human vocabulary, is at bottom the name for sex-instinct, sex-impulse, sex-affection or sex-relation,-^a helpless and hopeless submission to " the most radiant form that a mortal ever wore " — the homage to Beauty.

The artist has concentrated ■ his whole attention only on one aspect of human life — the relation between man and woman. And with regard to this also he has eliminated as many considerations as possible. He has tried to give us a working " hypothesis " of the mys- tery of the female heart, or the secret of the attrac- tion which has its final consummation in marriage, family, society, church, and state.

In physical and social siences we are familiar with the method of conducting experiments by elimination, inhibition, etc. We are asked to conceive things which do not actually exist, e.g., length without breadth, motion without friction, force without matter, the terrestrial system without gravitation, the "ideal gas" of Guy- Lussac, the " absolute " solid, conditions of " absolute " equilibrium, " stationary " state, the " representative firm," the " normal " prices, and so forth. The object in each case is not to regard the problems of nature and society as really simple, but only to ' specialize ' in each aspect of the problem and try to understand separately in their elemental condition .all the strands