Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan citations

Page 3

“Psychic experiences are a state of consciousness beyond the understanding of the normal, and the supernormal is traced to the supernatural.”

“In any concrete act of thinking the mind’s active experience is both intuitive and intellectual.”

“We are grown-up infants, and God is a sort of 'wet nurse' to humanity.”

“We invent by intuition, though we prove by logic.”

“All art is the expression of experience in some medium.”

“If the new harmony glimpsed in the moments of insight is to be achieved, the old order of habits must be renounced. Moral intuitions result in a redemption of our loyalties and a remaking of our personalities.”

“The idea of God is an interpretation of experience.”

“The violent extermination of Buddhism in India is legendary. Buddhism grew weaker as it spread wider. The spirit of compromise which breathed in the Xllth Edict of Ashoka that there should be no praising of one's sect and decrying of other sects but on the contrary a rendering of honour to other sects for whatever cause honour may be due to them was its strength and weakness. It accommodated too much. Divinities and heavens slipped into Buddhism from other creeds with the spread of the religion.”

“In emotional vibrancy experience is recollected not in tranquility… but in excitement.”

“The readjustment [of previously known facts] is so easy that when the insight is attained it escapes notice and we imagine that the process of discovery is only rational synthesis.”

“[Radhakrishnan describes the state of dejection he experienced as a student at Madras Christian College:] 'I was strongly persuaded of the inferiority of the Hindu religion to which I attributed the political downfall of India…. I remember the cold sense of reality, the depressing feeling that crept over me, as a causal relation between the anaemic Hindu religon and our political failure forced itself on my mind.”

“The moral hero, guided as he or she is by the ethical experience, who carves out an adventurous path is akin to the discoverer who brings order into the scattered elements of a science or the artist who composes a piece of music or designs buildings.”

“Religious intuition informs, conjoins, and transcends an otherwise fragmentary consciousness.”

“Logical knowledge is indirect and symbolic in its character. It helps us to handle and control the object and its workings.”

“Religion in terms of “personal experience is an independent functioning of the human mind, something unique, possessing and autonomous character. It is something inward and personal which unifies all values and organizes all experiences. It is the reaction to the whole of man to the whole of reality. It may be called spiritual life, as distinct from a merely intellectual or moral or aesthetic activity or a combination of them.”

“Creative insight is not the final link in a chain of reasoning. If it were that, it would not strike us as inspired in its origin. Intuition is not the end, but part of an ever-developing and ever-dynamic process of realization. There is continual system of “checks and balances” between intuition and the logical method of discursive reasoning. Cognitive intuitions are not substitutes for thought, they are challenges to intelligence. Mere intuitions are blind while intellectual work is empty. All processes are partly intuitive and partly intellectual. There is no gulf between the two.”

“It takes centuries to make a little history; it takes centuries of history to make a tradition.”

“The art of discovery is confused with the logic of proof and an artificial simplification of the deeper movements of thought results. We forget that we invent by intuition though we prove by logic.”

“Intuitions are convictions arising out of a fullness of life in a spontaneous way, more akin to sense than to imagination or intellect and more inevitable than either.”

“Wars of religion which are the outcome of fanaticism that prompts and justifies the extermination of aliens of different creeds were practically unknown in Hindu India.”

“Religious intuition is a unique form of experience. Religious intuition is more than simply the confluence of the cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical sides of life. However vital and significant these sides of life may be, they are but partial and fragmented constituents of a greater whole, a whole which is experienced in its fullness and immediacy in religious intuition.”

“Man is a paradoxical being-the constant glory and scandal of this world.”

“It is for philosophy of religion to find out whether the convictions of the religious seers fit in with the tested laws and principles of the universe.”