In Darmstadt they have a gathering of people from all parts of Germany to meet me. We have our meeting in the Grand Duke of Hesse’s garden, where my audience will bring before me their questions. I give them monologues in answer, and Count Keyserling translates them into German for those who cannot follow my English.
Yesterday I reached this place, and in the afternoon we had our first meeting.
The first question put to me by a Canadian German was, ‘What is the future of this scientific civilisation?’
After I had answered him, he again asked me, ‘How is the problem of over-population to be solved?’
After my answer, I was asked to give them some idea about the true character of Buddhism.
These three subjects took up fully two hours. It is delightful to feel the earnestness of these people. They have the habit of mind to think out the deeper problems of life; they deal seriously with ideas. In India, in our modern schools, we merely receive our ideas from text-books, for the purpose of passing examinations. Besides that, our modern school-masters are Englishmen; and they, of all the western nations, are the least susceptible to ideas. They are good, honest and reliable, but they have a vigorous excess of animal spirits, which seek for exercise in racing, fox-hunting, boxing-matches, etc., and they offer stubborn resistance to all contagion of ideas.
Therefore our English educationalists do not inspire our minds. We do not realise that ideas are necessary in order to enable us to live a true life. We do not have a genuine enthusiasm, but rather are losing our gift of aspiration, which is the gift of the soul. Our principal object and occupation are going to be the dissipations of politics, whose goal is success, whose path is the zigzag of compromise—that politics, which in every country has lowered the standard of morality, has given rise to a perpetual contest of lies and deceptions, cruelties and hypocrisies, and has increased inordinately rational habits of vulgar vain-gloriousness.
Germany to-day has received a violent check on her political ambitions. This has produced an almost universal longing in her midst to seek for spiritual resources within, in place of external success. Germany appears now to have set out on a voyage of spiritual adventure. And in spite of her dire poverty, she is not thinking merely of the spinning wheel or of some new move in the political game of gambling, but rather of the achievement of that inner freedom, which gives us power to soar above the vicissitudes of circumstance.
The other day, I met the British Ambassador in Berlin. While alluding to the enormous appreciation of my works in Germany, he expressed his feeling of gratification at the possibility of my supplying some philosophy, which might bring consolation to these people. He was glad, I am sure, from his British point of view. He seemed to me to imagine that philosophy was a soothing draught, which might lull the restless activity of the German nation into sleep, affording the victors a better security in their enjoyment of material benefits. He would gladly concede the possession of soul and God to these people, only keeping for the share of his own nation, the possession of the worldly goods. He seemed to smile, as it were, in his sleeve and to imagine that his own British people would be the gainers in the bargain. Well! Let them laugh and grow fat! Only let us have the good sense not to envy them their material successes.