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Presidential Address
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829
nature holds the field. We have transcended the moral atomism of Kant and Mill's philosophy of the greatest number, and have learnt to base Ethics not entirely upon a study of the individual but also upon that of man in organic relation with society, state, world-state and even the "Kingdom of God". It would seem as if the ancient doctrine of citizenship of the "Kingdom of God," of the solidarity of all life in Nārāyaṇa or Purusha was going to return as the ruling principle of ethics, sociology and politics. It should be borne in mind that this whole is not a blank negation without parts; the whole in the parts, that is, one in the famous Purusha Sūkta which speaks of the four classes of society as limbs of the Purushax; similarly, the Bhagavadgītā uses the collective noun 'cäturvarnya' (and not 'catvāro varņāh') to indicate the unity of society in the plurality of the classes In Politics the rights of the whole have so completely overshadowed those of the individual composing it
prin chorne in notit parts puru
* The locus classicus of the four varnas-Brāhmaṇa, Rājanya, Vais'ya, and Sūdra—which occurs in the Purusha Sūkta is sometimes cited as the Vedic authority for the four castes. Interpieted according to the principles of Mimāmsā, the passage is not a urdhi but only an anuvāda of the four divisions, the vidhi being the unity of the four. A vidhi conveys something new; anuvāda reiterates what is already known from another source; and it is the vidhi that should count as an independent pramān. The four Varnas had arisen as a result of economic forces and is a fact of nature Śruti just takes note of this fact, but the new truth which it declares is that they are parts of one stupendous whole-the social organism, the social expression of the Purusa who is the subject matter (the devatā) of the sūkta.
