THE RENAISSANCE IN INDIA
sway of the European conception of life which for a time threatened to swamp entirely the Indian spirit. But let us re- member that Europe itself is labouring to outgrow the limitations of its own conceptions and precisely by a rapid in- fusion of the ideas of the East,—naturally, essential ideas and not the mere forms, which have been first infiltrating and are now more freely streaming into Western thought, poetry, art, ideas of life, not to overturn its culture, but to transform, enlighten and aggrandise its best values and to add new elements which have too long been ignored or forgotten. It will be singular if while Europe is thus intelligently enlarging herself in the new light she has been able to seize and admit- ting the truths of the spirit and the aim at a divine change in man and his life, we in India are to take up the cast-off clothes of European thought and life and to straggle along in the old rut of her wheels, always taking up to-day what
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