THE RENAISSANCE IN INDIA
out, boldly and nakedly, without the least concession to idealism or cehicism. Everywhere we find this tendency. The ideals of the Indian mind have includedthe height of self-assertion of the human spirit and its thirst of independence andmastery and possession and the heigh also of its self-abnegation, dependence and submission and self-giving. In lite the ideal of opulent living and the ideal of poverty were carried to the extreme of regal splendour and the extreme of satis- fied nudity. Its intuitions were sufficiently clear and courageous not to be blinded by its own most cherished ideas and fixed habits of life. If it was obliged to stereo-type caste as the symbol of its social order, it never quite forgot, as the caste- spirit is apt to forget, that the human soul and the human mind axe beyond caste. For it had seen in the lowest hu-man being the Godhead, Narayan. It em-phasised distinctions only to turn upon them and deny all distinctions. If all its
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