Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches — 1909-1910
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 17th July 1909 — No.4
Facts and Opinions
Faith and Deliberation
The next point is the question of mature deliberation.
The Bengalee here tries to avoid confession of its error by altering the meaning of language.
The mature deliberation of which it spoke applies only to particular acts and, even then, it was not one man or a dozen but the whole self-conscious part of the country which took part in these mature deliberations.
The facts do not square with this modified assertion.
The majority even of the particular steps taken in pursuance of the ideas which swept over the country were not taken in pursuance of mature deliberation but were the result in some men of a faith which defied deliberation and in others of a yielding to the necessity of the movement.
The National Council of Education came into existence because Sj. Subodh Chandra Mullik1 planked down a lakh of rupees and was followed by the zamindar of Gauripur, an act of faith, because the Rangpur schoolboys and their guardians refused to go back on their action in leaving the Government school and established a school of their own, also an act of faith, and because some leading men of the country recognised that something must be done on the spot to prevent the honour of the nation being tarnished by abandonment of this heroic forlorn hope while others thought it a good opportunity to materialise their educational crotchets.
Was this mature deliberation or a compound of faith, idealism and risky experiment?
The Boycott came into existence because of the wrath of the people against the Partition and the vehement advocacy of a Calcutta paper which, supported by this general wrath, bore down the hesitations of the thinkers, the politicians and the economists.
Almost every 
step towards Swadeshi, every National school established was an act of faith in the permanence of the movement, a faith not justified by previous experience.
These were acts of boldness, often of rashness, not of mature deliberation.
Mature deliberation implies that having consulted the lessons of past experience and weighed the probabilities of the future and the possibilities of the present, we take the step which seems most prudent and likely to bring about sure results.
The Bombay millowners deliberated maturely when they said, “This movement born of a moment's indignation will pass like the rest; go to, let us raise our prices and make hay while the sun shines.”
The leaders deliberated maturely when they said, “The rush towards National Education will not last and if encouraged it will mean the destruction of private institutions and the payment of a double tax for education.”
So they stopped the students' strike, withheld their moral support and by this mature deliberation put, like the Bombay millowners, almost insuperable obstacles in the way of the movement.
It was the unconsciously prepared forces in the country that made their way in spite of and not because of the mature deliberation.
It was a minority convinced of the principles of self-help and passive resistance, full of faith, careless of obstacles, believing in the force of ideas, and not the whole self-conscious portion of the country, which mainly contributed, by its eloquence, logic, consistency, self-sacrifice and the impact of its energy on the maturely-deliberating majority, to the permanence of the movement.
These are the facts.
As for the conclusion from them we never made the absurd statement evolved out of the Bengalee's imagination that God is everywhere except in the conscious and deliberate activities of men.
What we say and hold to is that the Divine Force manifests itself specially when it effects mighty and irresistible movements which even the ignorance and egoism of man is obliged to recognise as exceeding and baffling his limited wisdom and his limited strength.