Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 3.djvu/75

 Seer of 'Santiniketan,‘ every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man’. Culture is the witness to this Divine Hope in man, in that it affirms his high destiny to enlarge towards a glorious consummation. Culture is the pilgrimage of wonder to the shrine of wisdom. The basal assumption of Culture is that the human bosom is a mine of mysterious powers. The one great end of true education is to put man in conscious possession of these powers. The first among these is perception— the capacity to see with an investigating mind. Every conscious act of man is an exercise of this power of perception—the 'dwelling of the mind on the objects and happenings of life. Education has to steady this power by discipline and strengthen it by suggestion—that is, to develop perception into reflection, through concentration and comparison. Man thus becomes a being of the ruminating kind’; the essence of his existence as man is to choose, to ponder and to realise. And in order effectively to exercise this ruminating capacity, man has to limit himself, even as a stream limits itself to its banks. This is