THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

TwoEpistles from AbroadFriend and Brother,I am as yet among the unregenerate. Insteadof my eccentric notions of life changing under the pressure ofvictorious European enlightenment, they seem to harden and fixtheir hold. Here I am in Paris, the centre of civilisation, and Iam still the same dark-skinned barbarian you knew. Neither thecomplexion of my face nor the complexion of my thoughts hasimproved. I still believe in God and Vedanta, in India and impossibilities.Man is still to my eyes divine and not an animal. Ibelieve in the soul and am afflicted with the imagination that ithas a past and a future, that it neither came ready made into theworld out of the mother's womb nor will disintegrate at the endwhether on the pyre or in the coffin. That our first stage is anembryo and our last worms or ashes, is a creed I hold to be stillunproved and unprovable. I believe that nothing in this world ismade, but everything grows; that body cannot create soul andthat a mass of cells is not Buddha or Napoleon. And if you askfor my ground of belief, I shall still refuse to base it on the logicalreason which can only argue and cannot see, and I shall givethe answer of the visionary, the victim of hallucinations, that Ihave seen my soul and talked face to face with my Creator.There are excellent logicians in Paris. One of them spokethe other day of the power of telepathy and, while admitting itto be a fact, argued that to develop the power would be to goback to the savage; it would be a denial of Science and civilisation.The civilised man sees with his eyes, talks with his tongue;to see with the soul, mind to talk with mind is a thing weird andbarbarous. That is what the logical reason is. It can support thegrossest absurdity under the sun and yet satisfy its user. Thesavage had the power, the civilised man has renounced it as anencumbrance or a superstition; to develop the power is to goback from civilisation to the savage. The argument is undeni-