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Man's history is being shaped according to the difficulties it encounters.
For what are obstacles to the lower creatures are opportunities to the higher life of man.
But in India, our difficulties being internal, our history has been the history of continual social adjustment and not that of organized power for defence and aggression.
Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history.
Our history is that of our social life and attainment of spiritual ideals.
A nation, in the sense of the political and economic union of a people, is that aspect which a whole population assumes when organized for a mechanical purpose. Society as such has no ulterior purpose. It is an end in itself. It is a spontaneous self-expression of man as a social being.
The very psychology of men and women about their mutual relation is changing and becoming the psychology of the primitive fighting elements, rather than of humanity seeking its completeness through the union based upon mutual self-surrender.
When this organization of politics and commerce, whose other name is the Nation, becomes all-powerful at the cost of the harmony of the higher social life, then it is an evil day for humanity.
The truth is that the spirit of conflict and conquest is at the origin and in the centre of Western nationalism; its basis is not social co-operation.
It is the continual and stupendous dead pressure of this inhuman upon the living human under which the modern world is groaning. Not merely the subject races, but you who live under the delusion that you are free, are every day sacrificing your freedom and humanity to this fetich of nationalism, living in the dense poisonous atmosphere of world-wide suspicion and greed and panic.
Turn a tree into a log and it will burn for you, but it will never bear living flowers and fruit.
Because the idealism of selfishness must keep itself drunk with a continual dose of self-laudation.
The worst form of bondage is the bondage of dejection, which keeps men hopelessly chained in loss of faith in themselves.
But boasting is only a masked shame, it does not truly believe in itself.
when our knowledge is vague we are apt to accuse of vagueness our object of knowledge itself.
A mere knowledge of things can be had in a short enough time, but their spirit can only be acquired by centuries of training and self-control.
