India is an abstraction.... India is no more a political personality than Europe. India is a geographical term. It is no more a un...ited nation than the Equator.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The prosecution of [Warren] Hastings, though he should escape at last, must have good effect. It will alarm the servants of the Co...mpany in India, that they may not always plunder with impunity, but that there may be a retrospect; and it will show them that even bribes of diamonds to the Crown may not secure them from prosecution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pale and pinched-up faces hovered about the windows where was tempting food; hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded by on...e thin sheet of brittle glass--an iron wall to them; half-naked shivering figures stopped to gaze at Chinese shawls and golden stuffs of India.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We men know very little a priori, and have our senses to thank for nearly all our knowledge. Through experience we know only appea...rances ..., but not the modum noumenon ..., not things as they are in themselves.... God knows all things as they are in themselves a priori and immediately through an intuitive understanding.... If we were to flatter ourselves so much as to claim that we know the modum noumenon, then we would have to be in community with God so as to participate immediately in the divine ideas. To expect this in the present life is the business of mystics and theosophists. Thus arises the mystical self- annihilation of China, Tibet, and India, in which one is under the delusion that he will finally be dissolved in the Godhead. Fundamentally Spinozism could just as well be called a great fanaticism as a form of atheism. For of God, the one substance, Spinoza affirms two predicates: extension and thought. Every soul, he says, is only a modification of God's thought, and every body is a modification of his extension. Thus Spinoza assumed that everything existing could be found in God. But by making this assumption he fell into crude contradictions. For if only a single substance exists, then either I must be this substance, and consequently I must be God (but this contradicts my dependency); or else I am an accident (but this contradicts the concept of my ego, in which I think myself as an ultimate subject which is not the predicate of any other being).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The centuries-long wars with the Saracen, when everything of the East was the enemy, and the subsequent, now over, era of Western ...imperialism, when Eastern cultures were despised by us, have caused a block in European thinking, making it hard for us to acknowledge what we all owe to the East. Two great religions have influenced Europe, we say: Christianity and Judaism, but we scarcely mention Islam, which has been the third. We are the heirs, we claim proudly, of Greece and Rome, but seldom think of the Arabs, the Persians, the Moors, who, through Spain, fed culture into a Europe that was considered a poor and backward place, with a culture far below the dazzling civilizations of the cities of North Africa, Spain, the Middle East, India.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we affect to condemn savages, we should remember that by doing so we asperse our own progenitors; for they were savages also.... Who can swear that among the naked British barbarians sent to Rome to be stared at more than 1500 years ago, the ancestor of Bacon might not have been found?--Why, among the very Thugs of India, or the bloody Dyaks of Borneo, exists the germ of all that is intellectually elevated and grand. We are all of us--Anglo-Saxons, Dyaks and Indians--sprung from one head and made in one image.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »