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hand can only progress in a setthe gove: he cannot broaden the hase of human culture or enlarge
the bounds of science. any describes him as arh 20 we:! practised in Nture, a spirit boundd and poor, and the description is just. But a cultivated ce with ut a cultivated spirit makes by
KARMAYOGIN.
world, of such a nature was the eivilisation of old Atlantis, sub
merged beneath the Ocean when it gess on it kin beca..e 10h y a on the earth to bear, and our own legends of the Asuras represent a similar consciousness of a great but abortive development in humanity
The first and lowest of Art is the purely aesthetic, the second is the intellectured or eneative, the third and highest the spiritual.
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speaking of the aesthetic use as the lowest, we do not wish to mply that it is not of immense value to humanity, but simply assign to it its comparative value in relation to the higher uses. The aesthetic is of immense impestance and until it has done its work. mankind is not really tittel to make full use of Art on the h, he planes of human development. Aristotle assigns a high value to tragedy because of its purifying
force. He describes its effect as katharsis, a sacramental word of the Greek mystories which in the secret discipline of the ancient Greek Tantries, answered precisely to our chittasnddhi, the purifiention of the chitta or mass of established
ideas feelings and actional habits in a man either by sanyama, rejection, or by bhoga, satisfaction. or by both Aristotle was speaking of the puntication of dangerous. passions and emotions in the heart through imaginative satisfaction in poetry but the truth his idea con1urs of much wider application and castitates the ju dification of the aesthetic side of art. It pm ifies by bean The beautiful and th good are held by many thinkers to be the same and, though the idea may be wrongly stated, it is, when
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means the highest type of man. It is precisely the cultivation of the spirit that is the object of what is well called a liberal educaTon, and the pursuits best calenlat-By I to cultivate the growth of the spirit are langage, literature, the Artsmusic.panting, sculpture or the study of the se, philosophy, religion, history, the study and understand ing of man through his works and of Nature and man through the interpretative as well though the analytic facultie These are the pursuits whach l long to the intellectual activities of the right hand and while the ptance of most of these will be acknowledged, there is a tendency tignore Art and poetry as mere refinements, luxuries of the nich
and leisurely rather than things that are necessary to the mass of en or useful to life. This is Largely due to the misuse of these great instruments by the luxurious ew who held the world and it good things in their hands m the intermediate period of human progress. But the aesthetic faculties entering into the enjoyment of the world and the satisfaction of the vital instincts, the love of the beautiful in men and women, in
, in things, in articles of use and rticles of pleasure, have done more than anything else to raise man from the beast, to refine and purge his passions, to ennoble his cu Lions and to lead him up throughput the heart and the imaginations to the state of the intellectual man. That which has helped man upward, must be preserved in order that he may not sink below the level he has attained. For man intellectually developed, mighty in
from the right standpoint. nat only a truth but the fund amental truth of existence, According to our own philosophy the whole world came out of ananda and returns into ananda, and the tripple term in which ananda may be stated is Joy, Love Beauty, To
iatific knowledge and the mas tery of gross and subtle Nature, rvants using the elements as his and the world as his footstool, but loped in heart and spirit. bones only an inferior kind of Asura using the powers of a demi-road a to satisfy the nature According to tim tradi- reaching to Vidya through Avidya, tions and memories of the old to the One Pure and Divine through
diy me beauty in the whole world. man, li natmie, to love that which we have seen and to have pare unalloyed bliss in that love and that beauty is the appointed by which mankind as a race
of an must climb to God. That is the
"The Bengal soaps are the cheapest and
the manifold manifestat of Him. of which the Upanishad repeatedly speaks. But the bliss at be pe u unalloyed, unalloyed by felt te arding eroticns, unalloyed by pain and evil. The sense of god and bul beutiful and unbeant which aflicts our understan lin; and out senses, must be replaced by akhanda masa,undifferentiated and an abridged delight the delightfulness of things, before the highest can be reached. On the way to this goal full
use must be made of the lower and
abridged sense of beauty which seeks to replace the less beautiful by the more, the lower by the higher, the mean by the noble.
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At a certum stage of human development the aesthetic sense is of infinite va'ae in this direction. It ranges and punities conduct by instilling a distaste for the ease desires and pans of the savage, for the tough, uncouth and eve in action of manner, ani tes training both feeling and netoon by A striving afte the decent. the beautiful, the fit and my which received its highest expression in the manners of cultivated European Society, the elaborate ceremonious life of the Caen, the bareful achar and claquette of Hudum. At the present stage of proges this element is losing inch of its one all mport int value and, when overstressed ten pihamp. higher development by the ob-true tion of soulless ceremony and tor malam. Its great 114 W depline the l instincts of the the Loody vital instinct- arl the lower ferings in the heart Its dadsantage to progres that it 4 sto trammel the play bh of the higher for lings of the heart the workings of originality in thought. Born originally of a seeking after canty. it degenerates into an attachment to form, to exterior autormity, io precedent. to deal authority. In the future development of humanity it must be given at much lar place than in the part. Its laats must be recognized and the de Land of a higher truth, sincerity and free dom of thought and feeling must be give. pr.tity. Mankind is a to bind itself by attachment to the means of it, past progress forgetful of the aim. The da to
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formulas has to be outgrow and in this again it is the see of a
best in the market.,
