Page:The Renaissance In India.djvu/35

 I have dwelt on these facts because they are apt to be ignored by those who look only at certain sides of the Indian mind and spirit which are most promi-nent in the last epochs. By insisting only upon these we get an inaccurate or incom-plete idea of the past of India and of the integral meaning of its civilisation and the spirit that animated it. The present is only a last deposit of the past at a time of ebb; it has no doubt also to be the starting-point of the future, but in ihis present all that was in India’s past is still dormant, it is not destroyed ; it is waiting there to assume new forms. The decline was the ebb-movement of a creative spirit which can only be under- stood by seeing it in the full tide of its greatness ; the renascence is the return of the tide and it is the same spirit that is likely to animate it, although the forms it takes may be quite new. To judge there-fore the possibilities of the renascence, the powers that it may reveal and the scope