THE RENAISSANCE IN INDIA
only for its fullness of detail, but for its in-tinite, its absolute, its profoundest depth or its highest pinnacle. It knew that without a “fine excess” we cannot break down the limnits which the dull temper of the normal mind opposes to knowledge and thought and experience ; and it had in seeking this point a boundless courage and yet a sure tread. Thus it carried each tangent of philosophic thought, each line of spiritual experience to its farthest point, and chose to look from that farthest point, at all existence, so as to see what truth or power such a view could give it. It tried to know the whole of divine nature and to see too as high as it could beyond nature and into whatever there might be of supradivine. When it formul-ated a spiritual atheism, it followed that to its acme of possible vision. When, too, it indulged in materialistic atheism,— though it did that only with a side glance, as the freak of an insatiable intellectual cariosity,-yet it formulated it straight
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