Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/181

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CITIZEN AND YOGI

in India and is scorned to-day in Europe and America. The anarchy of caprice prevailing in that part of the world is not better nor worse than the anarchy of thought prevalent in the western world. And strange as it may seem, the tendency of both people is to succeed each other in their failures as well as their triumphs. But the manifest destiny of the world is fortunately bound with the spirit of enlightenment and culture.

Hitherto, the political state with the Hindu, like the divine state with the European, has been more or less negligible. Hence the material supremacy of the one and the spiritual abnormalities of the other. Hence, too, the failure of both as individuals. For whether in Nirvana, in Fatalism, or in the State, the dwarfing and effacing tendency is the same. If the citizen, therefore, could be taught to appreciate the yogi's abstractions and the yogi, the citizen's political creed,—if a compromise between them and a rapport are possible,—there is hope for the accession

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