“Soul Force” lived a century apart, but with the perspective of time they increasingly appear as brothers. Thoreau’s life and writing—especially his essay On Civil Disobedience and his masterpiece, Walden—profoundly influenced Gandhi. In many ways, we might say that Gandhi finished what Thoreau started. Satyagraha was, after all, the very embodiment of the doctrine of “truth in action” about which Thoreau had written so passionately almost a century earlier.
