Sri Aurobindo
The Harmony of Virtue
Early Cultural Writings — 1890-1910
Epistles from Abroad [2]
I am as yet among the unregenerate. Instead of my eccentric notions of life changing under the pressure of victorious European enlightenment, they seem to harden and fix their hold. Here I am in Paris, the centre of civilisation, and I am still the same dark-skinned barbarian you knew. Neither the complexion of my face nor the complexion of my thoughts has improved. I still believe in God and Vedanta, in India and impossibilities. Man is still to my eyes divine and not an animal. I believe in the soul and am afflicted with the imagination that it has a past and a future, that it neither came ready made into the world out of the mother's womb nor will disintegrate at the end whether on the pyre or in the coffin. That our first stage is an embryo and our last worms or ashes, is a creed I hold to be still unproved and unprovable. I believe that nothing in this world is made, but everything grows; that body cannot create soul and that a mass of cells is not Buddha or Napoleon. And if you ask for my ground of belief, I shall still refuse to base it on the logical reason which can only argue and cannot see, and I shall give the answer of the visionary, the victim of hallucinations, that I have seen my soul and talked face to face with my Creator.
There are excellent logicians in Paris.
One of them spoke the other day of the power of telepathy and, while admitting it to be a fact, argued that to develop the power would be to go back 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 and barbarous.
That is what the logical reason is.
It can support the grossest absurdity under the sun and yet satisfy its user.
The savage had the power, the civilised man has renounced it as an encumbrance or a superstition; to develop the power is to go back from civilisation to the savage.
The argument is undeniable.
Whether it is not worth while, in this respect, to go back to the savage, is a question my logical friend refuses to discuss.
To entertain it would be an insult to civilisation.
Another gentleman of equal clarity poohpoohed the idea of considering the existence of God and immortality on the ground that the very motion would be retrograde.
“It would be going back,” he cried, “it would be going back.
We have got rid of God; we have finished with the superstition of immortality.
Will you deny the progress of enlightenment?
My friend, let these ghosts rest in their shadows.”
And nothing would induce him to give God a chance.
Darwin and Huxley and Haeckel had settled the Creator's hash for Him; it was res judicata.
It is wonderful how easily man tramples on one formula merely to bow reverently before another.
Nature replaces God, Progress dethrones Immortality.
Yet, in fact, these are merely different names for one thing in its varying aspects.
Nature is God manifest in Matter; Progress is possible because the soul of man is immortal.
This talk wearies you. You would prefer perhaps that I should write of the municipality in Paris, the merits and defects of the sewer system, the latest plays at the theatres, a description of boulevard and café or the debates in the Chamber or some hint as to whether I have made acquaintance with any of the French Academicians. “Plague take the fellow!” you will cry, “he is like the Englishman who marches about in the full panoply of Europe in the heats of a Calcutta summer; wherever he goes he takes India with him.” Pardon me, my friend; that is not wholly correct. I have forgotten for the time what a detective looks like. I no longer look round at every fifty yards to see how many policemen in plain clothes are following me. Dacoits and approvers are growing as far away from my mind as Titus Oates or Tiberius. I no longer pant to know our excellent Baikuntha Babu's latest blank question or withdrawn resolution in Bengal's new Parliament or what Bengal's only Maharajadhiraj thinks about English coolies. I have left India behind; I have not brought it with me.
But in the sense you mean, I have brought India with me, that which is eternal in India.
Danton, when pressed to escape from the coming doom to Switzerland, answered, “One does not 
carry one's country away with one on the sole of one's shoes.”
That is the materialist's answer, to whom the body is all.
No, one cannot carry it on the shoe-soles, but one can carry it in one's heart and one can carry it in one's soul.
When I listen to the nightingale singing on English river-bank or garden-reaches or see the Seine flowing through the modern gaiety of Paris, I can hear again the manifold noise of the birds on an Indian morning and see rather Ganges flowing grandiose and leonine to her Eastern seas.
The body is bound to its surroundings, but the heart exceeds them, and I carry the love of India with me even to the coldest climes.
The soul is yet more free.
It will be well when every Indian, instead of taking a waxlike stamp from his foreign surroundings, is able to carry India with him wherever he goes.
For that will mean that India is destined to conquer and place her stamp upon the whole world.
Circa 1910
Later edition of this work: The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.- Set in 37 volumes.- Volume 1.- Early Cultural Writings (1890 — 1910).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2003.- 784 p.