Appearances: Being Notes of Travel

The reader by this time will have grasped the point I am trying to put. There are in Man two religious impulses, or, if the expression be preferred, two aspects of the religious impulse. I have called them the religion of the Eternal and the religion of Time; and India I suggest stands pre-eminently for the one, the West for the other, while the other countries of the East rank rather with the West than with India. It is not necessary to my purpose to exaggerate this antithesis. I will say, if it be preferred, that in India the emphasis is on the Eternal, in the West on Time. But that much at least must be said and is plainly true. Now, as between these two attitudes, I find myself quite clearly and definitely on the side of the West. I have said in the preceding pages hard things about Western civilisation. I hate many of its manifestations, I am out of sympathy with many of its purposes. I can see no point, for instance, in the discovery of the north or the south pole, and very little in the invention of aeroplanes; while gramophones, machine guns, advertisements, cinematographs, submarines, dreadnoughts, cosmopolitan hotels, seem to me merely fatuous or sheerly disastrous. But what lies behind all this, the tenacity, the courage, the spirit of adventure, this it is that is the great contribution of the West. It is not the aeroplane that is valuable; probably it will never be anything but pernicious, for its main use is likely to be for war. But the fact that men so lightly risk their lives to perfect it, that is valuable. The West is adventurous; and, what is more, it is adventurous on a quest. For behind and beyond all its fatuities, confusions, crimes, lies, as the justification of it all, that deep determination to secure a society more just and more humane which inspires all men and all movements that are worth considering at all, and, to those who can understand, gives greatness and significance even to some of our most reckless enterprises. We are living very "dangerously"; all the forces are loose, those of destruction as well as those of creation; but we are living towards something; we are living with the religion of Time.

So far, I daresay, most Western men will agree with me in the main. But they may say, some of them, as the Indian will certainly say, "Is that all? Have you no place for the Eternal and the Infinite?" To this I must reply that I think it clear and indisputable that the religion of the Eternal, as interpreted by Sri Ramakrishna, is altogether incompatible with the religion of Time. And the position of Sri Ramakrishna, I have urged, is that of most Indian, and as I think, of most Western mystics. Not, however, of all, and not of all modern mystics, even in India. Rabindranath Tagore, for example, in his "Sádhana," has put forward a mysticism which does, at least, endeavour to allow for and include what I have called the religion of Time. To him, and to other mystics of real experience, I must leave the attempt to reconcile Eternity and Time. For my own part, I can only approach the question from the point of view of Time, and endeavour to discover and realise the most that can be truly said by one who starts with the belief that that is real. The profoundest prophets of the religion of Time are, in my judgment, Goethe and George Meredith; and from them, and from others, and from my own small experience, I seem to have learned this: the importance of that process in Time in whose reality we believe does not lie merely in the bettering of the material and social environment, though we hold the importance of that to be great; it lies in the development of souls. And that development consists in a constant expansion of interest away from and beyond one's own immediate interests out into the activities of the world at large. Such expansion may be pursued in practical life, in art, in science, in contemplation, so long as the contemplation is of the real processes of the real world in time. To that expansion I see no limit except death. And I do not know what comes after death. But I am clear that whatever comes after, the command of Life is the same – to expand out of oneself into the life of the world. This command – I should rather say this impulse – seems to me absolute, the one certain thing on which everything else must build. I think it enough for religion, in the case at least of those who have got beyond the infant need for certitudes and dogmas. These perhaps are few; yet they may be really more numerous than appears. And on the increase in their numbers, and the intensity of their conviction and their life, the fate of the world seems to me to depend.

1

These Fellowships, each of the value of £660, were established to enable the persons appointed to them to travel round the world. The Trust is administered at the University of London, and full information regarding it can be obtained from the Principal, Sir Henry Miers, F.R.S., who is Honorary Secretary to the Trustees.

2

Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Second Edition. Part 1. Madras: Published by the Ramakrishna Mission. 1912.

3

"Brother, the quality of love stilleth our will, and maketh us long only for what we have, and giveth us no other thirst,

"Did we desire to be more aloft, our longings were discordant from his will who here assorteth us,

"And for that, thou wilt see, there is no room within these circles, if of necessity we have our being here in love, and if thou think again what is love's nature.

"Nay, 'tis the essence of this blessed being to hold ourselves within the divine will, whereby our own wills are themselves made one.

"So that our being thus, from threshold unto threshold, throughout the realm, is a joy to all the realm as to the King, who draweth our wills to what he willeth;

"And his will is our peace; it is that sea to which all moves that it createth and that nature maketh."

Dante, Purgatorio, iii. 70-87 (trans. by Rev. Philip H. Wicksteed, in the "Temple Classics" edition).

4

Imagination in Business (Harper & Brothers).

5

Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, second edition, Part 1., p. 310.

6

Ibid., p. 61.

7

Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, second edition, Part 1., p. 145.

8

The Gardener, p. 125.