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The Coming of the Subjective Age 27human progress. In India, since the great Buddhistic upheavalof the national thought and life, there has been a series of recurrentattempts to rediscover the truth of the soul and life andget behind the veil of stifling conventions; but these have beenconducted by a wide and tolerant spiritual reason, a plastic soulintuitionand deep subjective seeking, insufficiently militant anddestructive. Although productive of great internal and considerableexternal changes, they have never succeeded in getting ridof the predominant conventional order. The work of a dissolventand destructive intellectual criticism, though not entirely absentfrom some of these movements, has never gone far enough; theconstructive force, insufficiently aided by the destructive, has notbeen able to make a wide and free space for its new formation.It is only with the period of European influence and impact thatcircumstances and tendencies powerful enough to enforce thebeginnings of a new age of radical and effective revaluation ofideas and things have come into existence. The characteristicpower of these influences has been throughout — or at any ratetill quite recently — rationalistic, utilitarian and individualistic.It has compelled the national mind to view everything froma new, searching and critical standpoint, and even those whoseek to preserve the present or restore the past are obliged unconsciouslyor half-consciously to justify their endeavour fromthe novel point of view and by its appropriate standards ofreasoning. Throughout the East, the subjective Asiatic mind isbeing driven to adapt itself to the need for changed values oflife and thought. It has been forced to turn upon itself both bythe pressure of Western knowledge and by the compulsion of aquite changed life-need and life-environment. What it did notdo from within, has come on it as a necessity from without andthis externality has carried with it an immense advantage as wellas great dangers.The individualistic age is, then, a radical attempt of mankindto discover the truth and law both of the individual being andof the world to which the individual belongs. It may begin, as itbegan in Europe, with the endeavour to get back, more especiallyin the sphere of religion, to the original truth which convention