The Hindu emphasis on inner life seems to many leaders of our generation, apostles of success and efficiency, a sheer waste of time. We are asked to go out and do something. The man who bakes bread or builds a house is said to be doing something useful, while he who paints pictures or composes music is doing something selfish. A variation of this astonishing doctrine animates the work of social uplifters. The royal road to the Golden Age is the road of economic reform or military conquest or armed revolution or the dictatorship of the proletariat; all these methods insist on social machinery and organization. They have resulted in a coarsening of fibre and a cheapening of life. Humanity is plunged to the depths in external things, class and nation, State and society […] The emphasis on negative virtues such as gentleness and love, passivism and lack of aggressiveness, which makes one surrender one’s rights rather than fight for them, appears to those engaged in the busy life of politics and sport to be weakness and cowardice. (Eastern Religions and Western Thought)