Evolution of Form. 147 



sensitive, although the sensation be widespread, 

 that which is called massive in character. 



Forgive me if for a moment I here digress, 

 to say that this fact is one of the reasons why we 

 owe a duty to the vegetable world, not needlessly 

 to cause sensations of dawning suffering. We 

 live too carelessly, my brothers, in this world 

 which is all-living, where there is no atom that is 

 dead, and especially is this sad here in India, 

 where once there was so strong a reverence for 

 life. That is now, alas, beginning to pass away. 

 You are forgetting that all life is Ishvara, that ac- 

 cording to the stage of His lower self-evolution is 

 the power of response that is given to the form. In 

 the old days, I remember how, when man took his 

 food, he met the food with gracious greeting because 

 it was sacrificing its life in order to build, through 

 that sacrifice, his own. Though it did not possess 

 the higher powers of sensation as we find them in 

 the animal, but only the lesser sensation powers of 

 the vegetable world, still, even then, he met it with 

 reverence, as a sacrifice which was being made to 

 him, and took it with gratitude and with love ; that 

 lower life was yielding itself up to him for his up- 

 building. But to-day, so lost is that gentle grace in 

 many of our Hindu people, that they not only dis- 

 regard the sacrificed lives of the vegetable kingdom 



