Page:The Renaissance In India.djvu/32

 out, boldly and nakedly, without the least concession to idealism or cehicism. Everywhere we find this tendency. The ideals of the Indian mind have includedthe height of self-assertion of the human spirit and its thirst of independence andmastery and possession and the heigh also of its self-abnegation, dependence and submission and self-giving. In lite the ideal of opulent living and the ideal of poverty were carried to the extreme of regal splendour and the extreme of satis- fied nudity. Its intuitions were sufficiently clear and courageous not to be blinded by its own most cherished ideas and fixed habits of life. If it was obliged to stereo-type caste as the symbol of its social order, it never quite forgot, as the caste- spirit is apt to forget, that the human soul and the human mind axe beyond caste. For it had seen in the lowest hu-man being the Godhead, Narayan. It em-phasised distinctions only to turn upon them and deny all distinctions. If all its