THE PAGAN ETHIC 95 



the activities of the West, but always with essentially 

 the same meaning under all the forms, have any per- 

 manent place of authority in evolving civilization. 



" Western Science," said P. Raman athan, 

 Solid tor-General of Ceylon, speaking some years 

 ago of its teaching in relation to the causes of 

 efficiency in civilization, " is ignorant knowledge." l 

 It was a saying so daring that the Western mind 

 merely passed it by. But it is a saying likely to 

 arrest the thought of the West long into the future. 



The revolutionary changes that have taken place 

 in recent times have left the essentially pagan and 

 unimaginative mind of the West in a state of 

 indescribable collapse as regards its higher faculties. 

 The fighting male of the West, the product of war 

 long before history has account of him, has turned 

 in our time, bored beyond the last degree of sus- 

 tenance, from all the problems of the intellect. 

 From the blasphemies of his superman ; from those 

 sterile quests after the nature of the Absolute which 

 represent the exhausted residuum of mediaevalism ; 

 from the hopeless efforts of the intellect to hold the 

 mind of youth at our centres of learning in the West 

 like those displayed in the appalling records of the 

 Moral Science Tripos for the last two generations 

 at Cambridge University, England; from the 



1 " The Miscarriage of Life in the West," Hibbert Journal, 7. I. 



