Page:The Renaissance In India.djvu/19

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THE RENAISSANCE IN INDIA

of the Indian mind, by its strong religious instincts and religious idealism, by its other-worldliness are inclined to write as if this were all the Indian spirit. An abstract, metaphysical, religious mind overpowered by the sense of the infinite, not apt for life, dreamy, unpractical, turning away from life and action as Maya, this, they said, is India ; and for a time Indians in this ' as in other matters submissively echoed their new western teachers and masters. They learned to speak with pride of their metaphysics, of their literature, of their religion, but in all else they were content to be learners and imitators. Since then Europe has discovered that there was too an Indian art of remarkable power and beauty ; but the rest of what India meant it has hardly at all seen. But meanwhile the Indian mind began to emancipate itself and to look upon its past with a clear and self-discerning eye, and it very soon dis-covered that it had been misled into an

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