THE RENAISSANCE IN INDIA
entirely false self-view. All such one-sided appreciations indeed almost invariably turn out to he false. Was it not the general misconception about Germany at one time, because she was great in philoso-phy and music, but had blundered in lifeand been unable to make the most of it- materials, that this was a nation of unpractical dreamers, idealists, crudites and sentimentalists, patient, docile and industrious certainly, but politically inapt,— “admirable, ridiculous Germany”? Europe has had a terrible awakening from that error. When the renascence ofIndia is complete, she will have an awakening, not of the same brutal kind, certainly, but startling enough, as to the real nature and capacity of the Indian spirit.
Spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind ; the sense of the infinite is native to it. India saw from the beginning,—and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance, she
9
