Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches — 1909-1910
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 24th July 1909 — No.5
Facts and Opinions
The Bengalee and Ourselves
The Bengalee has answered our facts and opinions with its facts and comments.
Unfortunately we find in our contemporary's answer all comment and no fact.
For the most part he is busy trying to prove that we were really inconsistent and contradictory, or, if he misunderstood us, it was due to our uninstructed use of language.
In the first place we did not expressly say that we saw God in everything and only specially in special movements.
Of 
course we did not.
As we pointed out we could not be always guarding ourselves against gratuitous misconceptions, and the omnipresence of God is such an obvious fact that it has not to be expressly stated.
It is curious that our contemporary's powerful intelligence seems still unable to grasp the point about leadership.
If the movement were the result of human calculation or guided by human calculation, or even if every constructive step were the result of mature deliberation, there would be no point in insisting that the movement was created and led (we beg pardon, we mean specially created and led,) by God and not by human wisdom.
We pointed out that none of these statements could be advanced in the face of the facts, and our contemporary has not been able to meet our arguments; he has simply restated his previous unsupported assumption.
Secondly, we were unfortunate enough to use in one place the word “His” where our contemporary thinks we should have used the word “that”.
With all submission we think our language was perfectly clear.
We said His purpose and we meant His purpose, the purpose of raising up India.
Then again we were unfortunate enough to indulge in an ironical repetition of our contemporary's phrase “mere” faith, within commas inverted and our contemporary with portentous1 seriousness insists on taking this as our own epithet and seriously meant.
We have pointed out that in our idea of faith it includes the logical analysing reason, it includes experience and exceeds it.
It exceeds logical reason because it uses the higher intuitive reason; it exceeds experience because experience often gives the balance of its support to one conclusion where faith using intuition inclines to the opposite conclusion.