Dr. Coomaraswamy does well to show how they still exist in great measure in the East, and it may be that the East, in her wisdom, and with her profound conservative instinct, will not allow them to be destroyed. She has, as Sir Geo. Birdwood puts it, let the races and the peoples for 3,000 years come and pass by; she may have taken this from one and that from another, but the fundamental democratic order of her society has remained, and it appears improbable, on the face of it, that we English shall materially change it when so many others before us have left it undisturbed. To compass the destruction of commercialism and regulate and delimit the province of industrial machinery for the benefit of mankind, is now the work of the Western reformer. There has come over Western civilization, in the last 25 years, a green sickness, a disbelief, an unrest; it is not despondency, for in the finer minds it takes the form of an intense spiritual hopefulness; but it takes the form also of a profound disbelief in the value of the material conditions of modern progress, a longing to sort the wheat from the chaff, the serviceable from the useless, a desire to turn from mechanical industry and its wastefulness, and to look once more to the human hand, to be once again with Mother Earth. "It behoves us," said Heraclitus, in the time of the beginnings of Hellenic civilization, "it behoves us to follow the common reason of the world; yet, though there is a common reason in the world, the majority live as though they possessed a wisdom peculiar each unto himself alone." This is so profoundly modern that it might almost be a comment upon English or American industrialism, did we not know that it applied equally to the peculiar intellectual individualism of Hellas, which disintegrated and destroyed her culture. But the "common reason of the world," if the words of Heraclitus are to be taken at their face value, includes the reason of the East, and with it the social order that has stood there unshaken for 3,000 years, and hence stood there long before the days of Heraclitus himself. For our immediate purpose, too, the purpose of this book, the "common reason of the world "includes and defines the Indian craftsman and the Indian village community; it gives them a definite and necessary place not only in the Indian order of things, not only in the culture of the East but in the world. It shows them to be reasonable and right, and it shows them, what is still more important, to be the counterpart one of the other. Here once more we are learning from the East. The English craftsman and the English village are passing, or have passed away; and it is only in quite recent times that we have discovered that they, too, are the counterpart one of the other. Industrial machinery, blindly misdirected, has destroyed them both, and recent English land legislation has been trying, with allotment and small-holdings acts, to re-establish the broken village life. C. R. ASHBEE.
About the Author: Ananda Kentish Muthu Coomaraswamy was a Ceylonese Tamil philosopher and Metaphysicist, as well as a pioneering historian and philosopher of Indian art, particularly art history and symbolism, and an early interpreter of Indian culture to the West. Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) was one of the great art historians of the twentieth century whose multifaceted writings deal primarily with visual art, aesthetics, literature and language, folklore, mythology, religion, and metaphysics. His most mature works adeptly expound the perspective of the perennial philosophy by drawing on a detailed knowledge of the arts, crafts, mythologies, cultures, folklores, symbolisms, and religions of both the East and the West. Along with René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy is considered as a leading member of the Traditionalist or Perennialist school of comparative religious thought. Born in Ceylon in 1877 of a Tamil father and an English mother, Coomaraswamy was brought up in England following the early death of his father. He was educated at Wycliffe College and at London University where he studied botany and geology. As part of his doctoral work Coomaraswamy carried out a scientific survey of the mineralogy of Ceylon and seemed poised for an academic career as a geologist. However, under pressure from his experiences, while engaged in his fieldwork, he became absorbed in a study of the traditional arts and crafts of Ceylon and of the social conditions under which they had been produced. In turn, he became increasingly distressed by the corrosive effects of British colonialism. In the years between 1900 and 1913, Coomaraswamy moved backward and forwards between Ceylon, India, and England. In India, he formed close relationships with the Tagore family and was involved in both the literary renaissance and the Swadeshi movement. All the while in the subcontinent he was researching the past, investigating arts and crafts, uncovering forgotten and neglected schools of religious and court art, writing scholarly and popular works, lecturing, and organizing bodies such as the Ceylon Social Reform Society and, in England, the India Society.