APPENDIX ' 201
in
SOUL FORCE IN ACTION
Satyagraha or Soul Force — The Law of Truth
26. The term Satyagraha was coined by me in.
South Africa to express the force that the Indians there
used for full eight years. Its root meaning is holding OR
to Truth. I have also called it Love-force or Soul-force,
27. In the application of Satyagraha, I discovered
in the earliest stages that pursuit of Truth did not admit
of violence being inflicted on one's opponent.
28. For what appears to be Truth to the one may
appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-
suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of
Truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but
on one's self.
29. But on the political field, the struggle on behalf
of the people mostly consists in opposing error in the
shape of unjust laws. When you have failed to bring-
the error home to the law-giver by way of petitions and
the like, the only remedy open to you, if you do not wish
to submit to error, is to compel him by physical force to
yield to you or by suffering in your own person by invit-
ing the penalty for the breach of the law. Hence Satya-
graha appears to the public as Civil Disobedience or Civil
Resistance. It is civil in the sense that it is not criminal.
Satyagraha as Direct Action — How it Works
30. It is a force that works silently and apparently
slowly. In reality, there is no force in the world that is
so direct or so swift in working.
31. The hardest heart and the grossest ignorance
must disappear before the rising sun of suffering without
anger and without malice.
32. And when once it is set in motion, its effect, if
it is intensive enough, can overtake the whole universe.
It is the greatest force because it is the highest expression
of the soul.
33. Since Satyagraha is one of the most powerful
methods of direct action, a satyagrahi exhausts all other