Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/150

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RABINDRANATH TAGORE
CH.

nava poets and is behind those of Gitanjali. "From love the world is born, by love it is sustained, towards love it moves, and into love it enters."

We pass on to the chapter which treats of realisation in action—a very interesting one to us because it is there we have thought the Indian ideal was most apt to fail. In its pages Rabindranath tells us clearly where the ideals of east and west differ, and where they may complete one another. In the west, he says, the soul of man is mainly concerned with extending and externising its powers. It would leave aside that field of inner consciousness where its true fulfilment lies. There is no rest in the process of its material development. Its politics talk of progress, meaning a new stretch of sensation; its science talks of a restless never-ending evolution; its metaphysic has now begun to talk of the evolution of God Himself. Because of this insistence on the doing and the becoming, the Indian seers of to-day perceive the dangers in the western world of the tyranny of the material side of civilisation and the intoxication of power. "They know not the beauty of completion," says Rabindranath. In India the