HINTS ON PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY - 8. Swami Vivekananda.

27/01/2017.

(Delivered at the Home of Truth, Los Angeles, California )

8.1
"Fifty years ago," said Ingersoll to me,

"you would have been hanged in this country if you had come to preach. You would have been burnt alive or you would have been stoned out of the villages."

8.2
So there is nothing unreasonable in the supposition that civilisation existed fourteen hundred years before Christ. It is not yet settled whether civilisation has always come from the lower to the higher.

8.3
The same arguments and proofs that have been brought forward to prove this proposition can also be used to demonstrate that the savage is only a degraded civilised man.

8.4
The people of China, for instance, can never believe that civilisation sprang from a savage state, because the contrary is within their experience.

8.5
But when you talk of the civilisation of America, what you mean is the perpetuity and the growth of your own race.

To be continued ...