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Updated: May 2, 2025
Gandhi had fallen under the spell of Tolstoian philosophy, and he has admitted only quite recently that for a time he was so much impressed with the doctrines of Christ that he was inclined to adopt Christianity; but the further study of the spiritual side of Hinduism convinced him that in it alone the key of salvation could be found, and all his teachings since then have been based on his faith in the superiority of the Indian civilisation rooted in Hinduism to Western civilisation, which for him in fact represents in its present stage only a triumph of gross materialism and brute force.
In England, France, and Germany, social betterment means giving to a greater number security of bare life, upon which alone the good life can be built. It will be seen that I imply a disagreement with the Tolstoian conception of reform; in so far as that involves a neglect of food and clothing and generally of what are called material goods.
Thus I have always felt that brutal Imperialism and Tolstoian non-resistance were not only not opposite, but were the same thing. They are the same contemptible thought that conquest cannot be resisted, looked at from the two standpoints of the conqueror and the conquered. Thus again teetotalism and the really degraded gin-selling and dram-drinking have exactly the same moral philosophy.
"I don't know about the royalty, but he's a prince in good standing in his own land, and he is also an excellent blacksmith." The Lieutenant chuckled a little. "He and his sister have both been touched a good deal by Tolstoian doctrine. Jack is the most wonderful inventor, I think, that is at present on the earth, Edison notwithstanding.
Hence come his economic heresies in regard to rent and interest, and capital and usury, his denunciations of the division of labor, his Tolstoian impoverishment of himself for the benefit of his fellow-man, and his dictum that the wealth of the nation should be its own, and not accrue to the individual.
The whole is the history of one continuous and sublime conversation. Thousands of rules have been deduced from it before these Tolstoian rules were made, and thousands will be deduced afterwards.
The Tolstoian and Kiplingite are nowhere more at one than in maintaining this. They have, I believe, some small sectarian quarrel with each other, the one saying that courage must be abandoned because it is connected with cruelty, and the other maintaining that cruelty is charming because it is a part of courage. But it is all, thank God, a lie.
We are fully aware of the immense social danger in the desire for riches; but that is no objection to the desire for bread and clothing and the bare necessities of human life. And the seemingly materialistic enthusiasm which will gradually transform our semi-bestial civilization is no less poetic or religious than any Eastern aloofness or Tolstoian simplicity.
The whole is the history of one continuous and sublime conversation. Thousands of rules have been deduced from it before these Tolstoian rules were made, and thousands will be deduced afterwards.
Did it not occur quite in the beginning of the world's history that there lived on earth two brothers, Cain and Abel, two farmers, without any burden of culture, and with all the Tolstoian simplicity of life? Yet is it not reported that one killed the other? Life is a drama, a tragic drama even, and not at all a metaphysical immobility or a quasi-mobility, or even an eternal circulus viciosus.
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