Page:Ramakrishna - His Life and Sayings.djvu/20

2 protest against the wild and overcharged accounts of Saints and Sages living and teaching at present in India which had been published and scattered broadcast in Indian, American, and English papers, and I wished to show at the same time that behind such strange names as Indian Theosophy, and Esoteric Buddhism and all the rest, there was something real, something worth knowing, worth know- ing even for us, the students of Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, in Europe. What happens so often to people whose powers of admiration are in excess of their know- ledge and discretion, has happened to the admirers of certain Hindu sages. They thought they had been the first to discover and unearth these Indian Mahdtmans, whom they credited not only with a profound knowledge of ancient or even primeval wisdom, but with superhuman powers exhibited generally in the performance of very silly miracles. Not knowing what had long been known to every student of Sanskrit philology, they were carried away by the idea that they had found in India quite a new race of human beings, who had gone through a number of the most fearful ascetic exercises, had retired from the world, and had gained great popularity among low and high by their preachings and teachings, by their abstemious life, by their stirring eloquence, and by the power ascribed to them of working miracles. Mah&tman, however, is but one of the many names by which these people have long been known. Mahatman means literally great-sotiled, then high-minded, noble, and all the rest It is often used simply as a complimentary term, much as we use