5. The East is profoundly spiritual and religious, the West profoundly practical and political, but in the main, irreligious and materialistic. Both have to learn a great deal from each other. Swami's great ambition was to set up a commerce in ideas between the East and the West, analogous to the exchange of commodities between the nations. He would say : " Send a ship-load of doctors and teachers out to India, and we shall send you mission aries of religion." He would also say : " For clear thinking and sound idealism the Greeks ; for effi ciency, business reliability and the love for personal and national freedom the English ; but for audacity in religious thinking and for philosophical acumen the Indians." 6. He had a bold vision of a spiritual federation of humanity, heedless of caste, colour and creed. He was grievously disappointed at the treatment meted out to the negroes in America. Once or twice he was himself mistaken for a negro ; but he did not express any resentment, accepted with great enthusiasm the hospitality of negroes, who acclaimed him as their great leader, and expressed pride that he should achieve such distinction as a member of their race ! When his American friends apologised, he resumed friendship as if nothing had happened, and pro phesied a great future for the despised race.
7. The fundamental unity of mankind he perceived in the central fact of the common relation all bore to the Immanent Life. He had great veneration for Christ and spoke of Him as " a disembodied, unfettered soul." He would ever and anon speak of the " Christ in you," the " kingdom of heaven in your heart " and so on.
8. But finally his lasting achievement was to infuse a spirit of active philanthropy and social co-opera tion into an individualistic scheme of abstract philosophy. He called it " practical vedantism " or New Vedantism, the idea being that reunion with the Divine Life is best accomplished through selfless service and devotion to man.
On his return from America he launched a most ambitious scheme of reforms. Miss Margaret Noble tells us that his desire was to spread a net-work of schools, monasteries, hospitals and philanthropic institutions for which he wanted But the support given, even by those who lost their heads in unstinted praise of him, was at best very meagre and grudging. Still he succeeded in founding the Rama Krishna Mission in connection with which there is a monastery for training ascetics, who engage in active philanthropic service, at Belur near Calcutta, another at Mayavati near Almora, and the third in Madras. All these Vivekananda founded on h is return from America. There are five institutions for affording medical relief to pilgrims in Benares, Cawnpore, Allahabad. Murshidabad and Madras
which have sprung up entirely as the result of his efforts.
The last three decades of the nineteenth century initiated an epoch of renascent self-respect and sense of national dignity in India. We do not suggest thereby that the political consciousness was then fully developed, or a sense of national solidarity in the modern acceptation of the term, but only that among the Hindus, a pride in their past became a dominant consciousness, and especially pride in their religious achievements in the past. This was in part due to the rediscovery of India's philosophical and religious heritage through the patient and elaborate researches of Western orientalists into India's ancient religions and schools of philosophy. The late Professor Max Miiller of Oxford laid the world of scholarship under a deep obligation by publishing his well known commentaries on the Hymns of the Rig Veda between 1845 and 1879. The discovery of Sanskrit and a prolonged study thereof by European savants, and of the marvellous treasures buried in its ancient literature, coupled with the recognition that Sanskrit was a suitable vehicle of expression for the subtlest and profoundest of ideas, revolutionised the science of language in Europe. It is, no doubt, true that Sir William Jones published in 1789 a translation of Sakuntala, an Indian drama written by Kalidasa who may aptly be described as the Shakespeare of India. Likewise, Warren Hastings ordered a trans lation and codification of Hindu laws and customs in 1776, and Prinsep and Cunningham did pioneer work in Indian epigraphy, art, and literature. But these achievements of Western scholars did not arouse the Indian imagination to the splendours of the past nor stimulate, till later, that intense, passionate reverence for Indian traditions and pride in their hoary antiquity, which is a prominent characteristic of the awakened Indian mind to-day. In the early seventies of the last century, how ever, fixed ideas and obsessions in reference to India's mental and moral degeneracy were replaced by a dawning sense of pride and independence, and people began to feel for the first time since the British advent into India, that whatever the acci dents of the political connection, India had every right to hold her head high, in the sphere of intellect and religion, as an inheritor of immortal renown, and instead of despising her heritage, to treasure it as of unique value, as something that constituted her birth-right to occupy a foremost place of honour in contemporary and ancient civilisations.