CHAPTER XVII 



FRIENDSHIPS AND PERSONALITY 



THOUGH parents, kindred, and home surroundings cannot 

 but count for much in every life, Eastern and Western, 

 it is an old and standard observation of comparative 

 psychology that these influences are even deeper and 

 more enduring in the communal family systems of 

 the Orient than in the smaller and more individualistic 

 family systems of the West, with their greater dis- 

 persiveness. Hence, though every happily educated and 

 productive life must rightly and gratefully recognise its 

 early and formative influences, these tend in the East to 

 be more frequently and clearly remembered, indeed more 

 enduringly in evidence. Thus Bose's father's character 

 and example, so full of varied activities and bold initiatives, 

 has been a great impulse and continual inspiration through- 

 out his son's life ; while only second to this has been the 

 deep affection of his mother, strongly returned, while her 

 settlement of her son's studies in England, in spite of the 

 decision of the family council on them, seems to have been 

 the emphatic incident of her gentle, purposive guidance. 

 Both parents, too, lived with the Boses after their retirement, 

 ' and to the last the father dying at sixty-two, when Bose 

 was thirty-two, and the mother at about the same age two 

 years later. 



Bose's eldest sister, later Mrs. A. M. Bose, was his 

 constant friend and companion in childhood, and that her 

 influence too must have been helpful is evidenced not 



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