XXV
I
have kept you too long. It is time I brought this address to a close. This
would have been a convenient point for me to have stopped. But this would
probably be my last address to a Hindu audience on a subject vitally concerning
the Hindus. I would therefore like, before I close, to place before the Hindus,
if they will allow me, some questions which I regard as vital and invite them
seriously to consider the same.
In
the first place, the Hindus must consider whether it is sufficient to take the
placid view of the anthropologist that there is nothing to be said about the
beliefs, habits, morals and outlooks on life, which obtain among the different
peoples of the world except that they often differ ; or whether it is not
necessary to make an attempt to find out what kind of morality, beliefs, habits
and outlook have worked best and have enabled those who possessed them to
flourish, to go strong, to people the earth and to have dominion over it. As is
observed by Prof. Carver, “Morality and religion, as the organised expression
of moral approval and disapproval, must be regarded as factors in the struggle
for existence as truly as are weapons for offence and defence, teeth and claws,
horns and hoofs, furs and feathers. The social group, community, tribe or
nation, which develops an unworkable scheme of morality or within which those
social acts which weaken it and unfit it for survival, habitually create the
sentiment of approval, while those which would strengthen and enable it to be
expanded habitually create the sentiment of disapproval, will eventually be
eliminated. It is its habits of approval or disapproval (these are the results
of religion and morality) that handicap it, as really as the possession of two
wings on one side with none on the other will handicap the colony of flies. It
would be as futile in the one case as in the other to argue, that one system is
just as good as another.” Morality and religion, therefore, are not mere
matters of likes and dislikes. You may dislike exceedingly a scheme of
morality, which, if universally practiced within a nation, would make that
nation the strongest nation on the face of the earth. Yet in spite of your
dislike such a nation will become strong. You may like exceedingly a scheme of
morality and an ideal of justice, which if universally practised within a
nation, would make it unable to hold its own in the struggle with other
nations. Yet in spite of your admiration this nation will eventually disappear.
The Hindus must, therefore, examine their religion and their morality in terms
of their survival value. Secondly, the Hindus must consider whether they
should conserve the whole of their social heritage or select what is helpful
and transmit to future generations only that much and no more. Prof. John
Dewey, who was my teacher and to whom I owe so much, has said: “Every society
gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what
is positively perverse... As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes
that it is responsible not to conserve and transmit the whole of its existing
achievements, but only such as make for a better future society.” Even Burke,
in spite of the vehemence with which he opposed the principle of change
embodied in the French Revolution, was compelled to admit that “a State without
the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such
means it might even risk the loss of that part of the constitution which it
wished the most religiously to preserve.” What Burke said of a State applies
equally to a society.
Thirdly,
the Hindus must consider whether they must not
cease to worship the past as supplying its ideals. The beneful effect of this
worship of the past are best summed up by Prof. Dewey when he says: “An
individual can live only in the present. The present is not just something
which comes after the past; much less something produced by it. It is what life
is in leaving the past behind it. The study of past products will not help us
to understand the present. A knowledge of the past and its heritage is of great
significance when it enters into the present, but not otherwise. And the
mistake of making the records and remains of the past the main material of
education is that it tends to make the past a rival of the present and the
present a more or less futile imitation of the past.” The principle, which
makes little of the present act of living and growing, naturally looks upon the
present as empty and upon the future as remote. Such a principle is inimical to
progress and is an hindrance to a strong and a steady current of life. Fourthly,
the Hindus must consider whether the time has not come for them to
recognize that there is nothing fixed, nothing eternal, nothing sanatan; that
everything is changing, that change is the law of life for individuals as well
as for society. In a changing society, there must be a constant revolution of
old values and the Hindus must realize that if there must be standards to
measure the acts of men there must also be a readiness to revise those
standards.
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