THE POSITIVE CONTRIBUTION OF HINDUISM TO ETHICAL THOUGHT (Hindu Ethics)

The criticism which has been offered in this work has necessarily been largely of a negative and destructive kind. We have found reason for believing that Hindu philosophical thought furnishes no satisfactory basis for an ethic, while the system of dharma rests on no sure intellectual supports. Biit the impression must not be left that India has nothing to contribute to the study of the great questions connected with the moral life and no suggestions to make for its conduct, that its search for a true way of life has been utterly vain, and that thinkers may pass by its achievements in the ethical sphere merely as phenomena having a certain historical interest but without significance for serious ethical thought. That would be a profound mistake. The spiritual history of India is closely connected with its most fundamental thought, and it is inconceivable that a culture such as that which for millenniums has floiunshed in India could have rooted itself so deeply and maintained itself so persistently if it did not contain within it elements of great and abiding value.

In considering the contribution which Hindu thought has made, and which it may be believed it has yet to make, it must be borne in mind that w.e have to deal with something more than a system or systems of thought. We have to deal also with the culture of a people. We shall consequently have to take into account not only the ethical conceptions with which they have worked, but the expression of these in actual life and the psychological significance of this expression. It is necessary also to bear in mind that the value of ethical conceptions or of forms of practice is not necessarily dependent on their consistency with each other or with fundamental principles, or on our estimate of the validity of these fundamental principles themselves. To take a parallel case from Western thought, few of those who reject the Utilitarian theory of morals would deny that its exponents have made a great contribution to ethical thought or that their principles have had great practical value. 

Looking, then, at Hindu thought and culture with these considerations in mind, we may claim for them that they contain elements which are of great value in themselves, and which may serve to enrich .the thought and culture of the world. 

We may take' first the Hindu system of dharma. Enough has already been said about it to make clear the weaknesses that belong to it. But, at the same time, we must recognize how great an asset India had and still has in the stable social order which it reflects, and how strong and yet tender are the ties that may bind together members in various relationships within that order. In a restless age in which the whole structure of Western society is in danger of being reduced to chaos, it is not strange that the eyes of many should be directed to the more stable conditions that govern Hindu society, where each man has his place and function irrevocably assigned to him.

This is not to say that the Hindu social organization, with its caste and its other unnatural distinctions, can serve as a model in a day of social reconstruction. In its concrete form it is an anachronism which can be accounted for only by the comparative removal of India down through the ages from the nfluence of the great currents that were moving in the life of the wider world. But it is an equally great mistake to t*egard it as if it expressed a spirit in which there was nothing worthy.

Where the system of caste, considered as a social institution, has been chiefly wrong, has been in its fixing of men to a particular position of society from which there is no escape whatever may be their individual capacity. Where it has perhaps been strongest has been in its development of a certain sense of vocation, whatever the sphere in which the individual has found himself. This sense of vocation means much for the stability and usefulness of any society and for tlie worth and dignity of the individual life, and it may be that in time to come the world will learn something from India of the benefits of its exercise. It may also be hoped that when justcr conceptions of individual liberty come to prevail in India, her long social discipline will be proved to have tempered the mind of her people, so that liberty will not lead to licence.

Further, it should be observed that, while Hindu society has been so organized that impassable barriers have been erected between different sections of it, there has been on the other hand, as an almost natural consequence of these same conditions, a strong sense of the sacredness of the ties that bind individual to individual within th.eir more restricted communities. The most attractive features in Hindu social life are to be found in the family 'affections, the mutual devotion of parents and children and of brothers and sisters, in the respect for elders, and in the sense of the identity of the interests of the individual with those of the community, which are so common in Hindu society. A people of whom this can be said is not morally bankrupt. It has great reserves of moral wealth which may 3^ct be turned to the service, not merely of the narrow communities on which it is now lavished, but of the community at large. For the realization of this end great and even fundamental changes of social organization are no doubt necessary, but it may be found that Hindusociety has provided a valuable training ground for the public affections. 

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When we turn our attention, on the other hand, to Hindu asceticism, we shall find elements m it which have abiding worth. We have found grounds for condemning the theoretical basis on which it rests, and we believe many of its practical expressions to be evil; yet we cannot deny all value to the spirit which has animated it or to the discipline which its practice has involved. It has been the expression of a sense of the supremacy of the spiritual over the material,' of the eternal over the temporal, and however much we may disagree with Hindu conceptions of the nature of the spiritual and the eternal, it means much that there should have been so many who have sought resolutely and fearlessly and at all costs to pursue the highest that they knew. There is reason to believe that with truer conceptions of the nature of reality, witli the conviction that the phenomenal is not the negation of the real, but that it may be turned to account in the realization of the real, we should find in India, as a result of the^ discipline to which many of her people h