Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/142

 of a poet, and not an attempt at a new and complete philosophy. Those pages in it that most clearly reflect its writer's experience, tested by his imagination, are those that bring us most stimulus, presenting as they do ideas that pierce the crust of our habitual half-belief, words that touch the springs of our real existence. It is a testament that needs to be related to the history of him who wrote it in order to have its full weight and its power in relating the material to the spiritual world. More than once, in referring to his work, he laid stress on this human fulfilment of a faith which has constant new revelation behind it, whose truth is decided by the first accent of the lover, the first cry of the mother who, turning to her babe, affirms in one fond word the doctrine of love and the indestructible unity of the universe.

"Man was troubled and lived in fear so long as he had not discerned the uniformity of law in nature; till then the world was alien to him. The law that he discovered is nothing but the perception of harmony that prevails between reason, which is the soul of man, and the workings of the world." But the relation of the mere understanding is partial, whereas the relation of