RESPONSE IN THE LIVING AND NON-LIVING 87 



For he had become fully aware of the commonly 

 held belief in the West that while the East excelled in 

 metaphysical speculations even to subtlety, it had no 

 special aptitude for methods of exact science. In fact 

 the capacity for concrete investigation was at that 

 time commonly reckoned as due to some phreno- 

 logical ' bump ' absent from the Indian make-up, and 

 towering dome-like upon the Western skull alone. Hence 

 Bose had, from his earliest days of physical work and 

 teaching, the ambition at once of justifying and reviving 

 the scientific aptitude of his countrymen, who moreover, as 

 their old art and commerce show, are not without practical 

 and skilful hands, and cannot have heads so exclusively 

 religious and metaphysical as the concentrated study of 

 Sanskrit literature had induced others to think. The 

 experimental rigour of Bose's work, and the exquisite refine- 

 ment, yet simplicity, of his apparatus, from this first wave- 

 transmitter and receiver to the unprecedentedly delicate 

 and exactly recording apparatus which his workshop keeps 

 increasingly turning out to this day, are thus explained. 

 And, as a matter of fact, the one criticism of the apparatus 

 and research in the Institute which the writer has ventured 

 to make from time to time is, that one might sometimes be 

 fruitfully enough working with this or that instrument 

 without the delay of demolishing and reconstructing it 

 for the sake of some, after all, minute percentage of extra- 

 exactitude. Yet he cannot but respect this also, and bear 

 his testimony to the physicist's precision, which can endure 

 no trace of inaccuracy. 



Let us return, however, to the new investigation, into what 

 we may now begin to call ' the Response of the Living and 

 Non-Living,' since that became the title of the volume of 

 two years later, in which all these studies are summarised. 

 It yielded such abundant and surprising results that Bose, 

 for whom there was still no scientific public in India, nor 

 even a single colleague with whom he could discuss his 

 problems, was feeling the need of a new journey to Europe. 



