When life began her first experiments, she was mightily proud of the hugeness of her animal specimens. The bigger the bodies were, the more extravagantly large the armour had to be made for their protection. The ludicrous creatures, in order to maintain their balance, had to carry a tail which was absurdly disproportionate to the rest of the body. It went on like this till life became a burden to itself and to the exchequer of creation. It was uneconomical, and therefore not only harmful but ungainly. True economy is the principle of beauty in practical arithmetic. Driven to bewilderment, life began to seek for a pause in her insanity of endless multiplication. All forms of ambitious power are obsessed by this delirium of multiplication. All its steps are steps towards augmentation and not completeness. But ambitions, that rely solely upon the suggestion of their tails and armour, are condemned to carry out their own obstruction till they have to stop.
In its early history, life, after its orgies of megalomania, had at last to think of disarmament. But how did she effect it? By boldly relinquishing the ambition to produce bigness—and man was born helplessly naked and small. All of a sudden, he was disinherited of the enormity of flesh, when apparently he was most in need of it. But this prodigious loss gained for him his freedom and victory.
Then began the reign of Mind. It brought its predecessor of gigantic bulk under subjection. But, as often happens, the master became the parasite of the slave, and mind also tried to achieve greatness by the bigness of materials. The dynasty of mind followed the dynasty of flesh, but employed this flesh as its Prime Minister.
Our history is waiting for the dynasty of Spirit. The human succeeded the brutal; and now comes the turn of the Divine. In our mythology, we have often heard of man taking the side of the Gods, and saving Paradise from the dominion of Giants. But in our history, we often notice man holding alliance with Giants and trying to defeat the Gods. His guns and ships of huge power and proportion are turned out from the arsenal of the Giant. In the fight of bigness against goodness man has joined the former, counting coins of his reward in number and not in quality—in lead and not in gold.
Those who are in possession of material resources have become slaves of their own instruments. Fortunately for us, in India, these resources are beyond all immediate possibility of realisation. We are disarmed, and therefore we have no option but to seek for other and higher sources of power. The men who believe in the reality of brute force have made enormous sacrifices in order to attain and to maintain it. Let us, in India, have faith in moral power in man and be ready to sacrifice for it all that we have. Let us do our best to prove that Man has not been the greatest mistake in Creation. Let it not be said, that, for the sake of happiness and peace in the world, the physical brutes were preferable to intellectual brutes who boast of their factory-made teeth and nails and poison fangs.