The News of the Month

 

L'IDEE NOUVELLE

                        IN CLOSE connection with the intellectual work of synthesis undertaken by this Review a Society has been founded in French India under the name of the New Idea, (L'ldée Nouvelle.) Its object is to group in a common intellectual life and fraternity of sentiment those who accept the spiritual tendency and idea it represents and who aspire to realise it in their own individual and social action.
                      The Society has already made a beginning by grouping together young men of different castes and religions in a common ideal. All sectarian and political questions are necessarily foreign to its idea and its activities. It is on a higher plane of thought superior to external differences of race, caste, creed and opinion and in the solidarity of the spirit that unity can be realised.
                       The Idée Nouvelle has two rules only for its members, first, to devote some time every day to meditation and self-culture, the second, to use or create daily at least one opportunity of being helpful to others. This is, naturally, only the minimum of initial self-training necessary for those who have yet to cast the whole trend of their thought and feeling into the mould of a higher life and to enlarge the egoistic into a collective consciousness.
                       The Society has its headquarters at Pondicherry with a reading-room and library. A section has been founded at Karikal and others are likely to be opened at Yanaon and Mahe.

 

AN INDO-FRENCH COMMITTEE IN PARIS

An Indo-French Committee (Comite Franco-Hindou) has been founded in Paris and M. Pierre Loti has been invited to become its Honorary President. The Committee proposes to develop intellectual, scientific, artistic and economic relations between France and India. It is a good deal for one Committee! Let us at least hope that it will be able to carry out the first item of its

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programme. No doubt, everything that brings men and nations nearer to each other help in the formation of a general intelligence more synthetic and comprehensive than the old divided mind of humanity; but it is above all in the realm of thought and by the exchange of ideas and the deeper experiences that the best fruits are likely to be borne. Every new tie, especially every tie of the spirit between Europe and India, between the West of today and the East of yesterday and tomorrow, is a welcome sign of the times for those who know how much the world's progress depends on their union.
                  M. Pierre Loti, in a letter addressed to the President of the Committee, thus expresses his veneration for India:-
                 "And now I salute thee with awe, with 'veneration and wonder, ancient India of whom I am the adept, the India of the highest splendours of Art and Philosophy, the India also of monstrous mysteries that terrify, India our cradle, India where all that has been produced since her beginnings was ever impetuous and colossal. May thy awakening astonish that accident, decadent, mean, daily dwindling, slayer of Nations, slayer of gods, slayer of souls, which yet bows down still, ancient India, before the prodigies of thy primordial conceptions."
                 We cannot but subscribe to the sentiment, if not to all the phrases, of this fine piece of literature.
                 But what are these monstrous and terrifying mysteries of which M. Loti speaks? Terror is no longer in the mode, the age of mysteries is over and the age of monstrosity has never been. Ignorance is the only monstrosity.
                                                                                                                                                           Arya, August 1914

THE WAR

The "Arya", a Review of pure Philosophy, has no direct concern with political passions and interests and their results. But neither can it ignore the enormous convulsion which is at present in progress, nor at such a time can it affect to deal only with the pettier happenings of the intellectual world as if men were not dying in thousands daily, the existence of great empires threatened and the fate of the world hanging in the ba- 

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lance. The War has its aspects, of supreme importance to a synthetic Philosophy, with which we would have right to deal. But now is not the hour, now in this moment of supreme tension and widespread agony. Therefore, for the time, we suppress this heading in our Review and shall replace it by brief notes on subjects of philosophical interest, whether general or of the day. Meanwhile, with the rest of the world, we await in silence the predestined result.

Arya, September 1914

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