110 ESSAYS IN NATIONAL IDEALISM.

:system ignored or opposed. The aim should be to develop
the people's intelligence through the medium of their own
.national culture. For the national culture is the only
Amsichtspunkt from which, in relation to a wider lands-
cape, a man can rightly sick am DenJcen orientiren. To
•this culture has to be added, for those brought into contact
with the modern idea, some part of that wider synthesis
that should enable such an one to understand what may be
the nature of the prospect seen from some other of the
great headlands, the other national cultures, wherefrom
humanity has gazed into the dim sea of the Infinite
Unknown. To effect this wider synthesis, are needed
signals and interpretations, rather than that laborious
backward march through the emptiness of a spiritual
desert where one may perish by the way, or if not
so, then weary and footsore arrive at last upon one
of those other headlands, only to learn, it may be,
that there is to be found a less extensive prospect and a
more barren soil.

As has been well said, "Western knowledge is necessary
for India, but it must form. f°r her, (and especially for her
women) a ^ostf-graduate course.

6 Every man who is capable of judging' knows that
the educational system of modern India requires re-casting.
'The task may be Herculean ; the more reason to begin
before it becomes impossible. The work must be done by
Indian hands. It is true, as Professor Geddes wrote to
me lately, that:

"The trouble is not only with the vested interests of the
official class (which are sure to be protected in any change), but in
the wooden heads, the arrested minds, the incompetent hands, etc.,
•etc., of those who have gone through this machine, whether' here
or with you in India. It lies in your thousands of barristers and
clerks and crammers, who know all the programme of the Univer-
sity of London in its darkest days.........but who know nothing of