India therefore has very little outlet for her industrial originality. I
personally do not believe in the unwieldy organizations of the present
day. The very fact that they are ugly shows that they are in discordance
with the whole creation. The vast powers of nature do not reveal their
truth in hideousness, but in beauty. Beauty is the signature which the
Creator stamps upon His works when He is satisfied with them. All our
products that insolently ignore the laws of perfection and are unashamed
in their display of ungainliness bear the perpetual weight of God's
displeasure. So far as your commerce lacks the dignity of grace it is
untrue. Beauty and her twin brother Truth require leisure and
self-control for their growth. But the greed of gain has no time or
limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to produce and consume. It
has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings. It is
ruthlessly ready without a moment's hesitation to crush beauty and life
out of them, moulding them into money. It is this ugly vulgarity of
commerce which brought upon it the censure of contempt in our earlier
days, when men had leisure to have an unclouded vision of perfection in
humanity. Men in those times were rightly ashamed of the instinct of
mere money-making. But in this scientific age money, by its very
abnormal bulk, has won its throne. And when from its eminence of
piled-up things it insults the higher instincts of man, banishing beauty
and noble sentiments from its surroundings, we submit. For we in our
meanness have accepted bribes from its hands and our imagination has
grovelled in the dust before its immensity of flesh.
But its very unwieldiness and its endless complexities are its true
signs of failure. The swimmer who is an expert does not exhibit his
muscular force by violent movements, but exhibits some power which is
invisible and which shows itself in perfect grace and reposefulness. The
true distinction of man from animals is in his power and worth which are
inner and invisible. But the present-day commercial civilization of man
is not only taking too much time and space but killing time and space.
Its movements are violent, its noise is discordantly loud. It is
carrying its own damnation because it is trampling into distortion the
humanity upon which it stands. It is strenuously turning out money at
the cost of happiness. Man is reducing himself to his minimum in order
to be able to make amplest room for his organizations. He is deriding
his human sentiments into shame because they are apt to stand in the way
of his machines.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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