Page:The Renaissance In India.djvu/33

 political needs and circumstances com- pelled it at last to exaggerate the monar- chical principle and declare the divinity of the king and to abolish its earlier repub- lican city-state and independent federa- tions as too favourable to the centri- fugal tendency, if therefore it could not develop democracy, yet it had the democra- tic idea, applied it in the village, in coundl and municipality, within the caste, was the first to assert a divinity in the people and could cry to the monarch at the height of his power, “O king, what art thou but the head servant of the demos ?” Its idea of the golden age was a free spiri- tual anarchism. Its spiritual extremism could not prevent it from fathoming through a long era the life of the senses and its enjoyments, and there too it sought the utmost richness of sensuous detail and the depths and intensities of sensuous experience. Yet it is notable that this pursuit of the most opposite extremes never resulted in disorder ; and its most