Again, social progress is, and must be, if I may so call it,
a continuous development. The development in the past offers to you a rich inheritance, though it is also attended with peculiar dangers. In the great mass of general principles underlying the social system
in this country, and many of which are the products of exigencies felt in archaic and other stirring times of which we can
now have but an imperfect notion, there will assuredly be a
mixture of error which may operate on men's minds with the
traditional power of immemorial prescription, and may, from
the very reverence due to their age, easily obtain dominion over
you. It would be folly either to abandon from indolence or
self-complacency the advantage of your position and to build up
an entirely new social system even if it were possible to do so, or to
accept what is as the best that can be had on the authority of prescription. To avoid the danger it is necessary to examine anew
the whole body of what has descended to you from the past, and
to question and trace each element to its origin. The proper
spirit in which such work should be undertaken, is, to borrow
from a philosophic jurist, one of intellectual freedom, of independence of all authority, but this sense of freedom should not
degenerate into arrogant dogmatism, but should be tempered
by that feeling of humility which would result from an unbiased
contemplation of your limited individual powers. Thus, gentlemen, the revision of the labors of the past, in order to gradually
eliminate what is unsuited to the requirements of modern culture
and appropriate what is suited to them as your permanent posses-
sion, is necessary to enable you to deal with the great problems of
social life which will confront you before India is regenerated. In
calling your attention to the revival of Sanscrit literature and
philosophy in connexion with progress, I desire that you should
recognise it as a means whereby you may improve the vernacular
literature, and I may say -that until this work of revision is taken
in hand by the graduates of the University, and until the results of
their research and criticism are presented to the reading public
through the vernacular medium, it would be premature to talk of
regenerated India or of carrying the people with you when you suggest changes for the improvement of your social system. To such
of you as may have a predilection for natural and physical science,
I have to say a word. It is a general complaint in the country that
the knowledge which you pick up at school is neither augmented
nor even kept up, and that it is scarcely used in furthering the advancement of the people. The only reason I can imagine for this
comparative neglect is, that it is, perhaps, not found to be directly instrumental in securing , success in the professions which you
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1882. — The Honorable Mr. Justice Muthusami Iyer.
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