Page:The Renaissance In India.djvu/37

 But this spiritual tendency does not shoot upward only to the abstract, the hidden and the intangible ; it casts its rays downward and outward to embrace the mutiplicities of thought and the richness of life. Therefore the second long epoch of India’s greatness was an age of the intellect, the ethical sense, the dynamic will in action enlightened to formulate and govern life in the lustre of spiritual truth. After the age of the Spirit, the age of the Dharma ; after the Veda and Upanishads, the heroic centuries of action and social formation, typal construction and thought and philosophy,' when the outward forms of Indian life and culture were fixed in their large lines and even their later developments were being determined in the seed. The great classical age of Sanskrit culture was the fiowering of this intellectuality into curiosity of detail in the refinements of scholarship, science, art, literature, politic, sociology, mundane life. We see