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Í Vol. V
and fly to the utmost reaches of the stratosphere, but he staggers at have the transcendental flights of the Indian philosophers His eyes been trained to seek the truth through the microscope and the telescope, his mind has sought to study life in the laboratory through vivisection In the result, he has succeeded in enslaving matter; but the slave (matter) has also been holding the conqueror (Spirit) in bondage. Not so the Indian, where he has not ceased to be truly Indian.
THE JAINA ANTIQUARY.
Drunk with the pride of conquest the European may mock at what he considers to be our futile and inane philosophy But we have reason to believe that the inebriated Western people are getting more and more entangled in the labyrinth of their own making. If their titanic struggle may be best illustrated by the statue of Laocoon desperately caught in the coils of a deadly tangle of reptiles, the Spirit of ancient India is well represented by the colossal calm of the image of Bahubali rising high over every other human structure, breathing freedom in its great silence. The superficial observer is likely to interpret this contrast in a different way: Does not the naked figure of Gommata show rather the static inactivity of the stagnant East, and the struggling Laocoon group the palpitating dynamism of the progressive West? But I should think that the real contrast is more like that of the restless maelstrom diving into the greater restlessness of the agitated Atlantic, on the one side, and the placid calm of the profound Pacific on the other.
However, this is only one aspect of the situation The human Spirit, which knows not the dychotomy of East and West, may be said to have gone to one extreme in India and naturally swung back to another extreme in Europe Truth hes not in the Golden Mean, not midway between the two extremes, but rather in the full amplitude of the swing of the pendulum of Life The midpoint represents only death, the Jaina philosophy does not stand for that It has been misrepresented as a philosophy of stagnation, seeking death rather than life The Jaina monuments are an eloquent refutation of this libel.