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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY culmination of animalness, the magnificent monument of spiritual elevation, stands not on the imaginary foundation of any divine essence, but on the bedrock of an objective truth,-man's physical being, an outcome of biological evolution; his brain and nervous system are but more complicated forms of the sensitive and reflex organs possessed also by lower animals: his unconscious mind is the store of experience acquired throughout the countless stages of organic evolution.
I dispute the superiority of man, so that he may be provoked to take up the challenge, and cast a critical glance at himself. In the light of my own experience, I shall show that human beings I have come in touch with (and they represent practically the entire Indian people) have travellei very little on the road of real spiritual progress. Indecd, tyranny of words has degraded them below the level of animals--naturalness-to an artificial life of ignorance, falsehood and hypocrisy. Their sense of superiority is a castle in the air. Under the illusion of a spiritual existence, distinct from, independent of and unattached to, the physical being, they have turned their whole life into a travesty of falschood. Dominated by the extreme egoism of imagining himself identical with the "divinc essence of the world, they have forsaken all sense of reality, frankness and truth. I do not recognise them to be superior to me, because they cannot feel as freely as I do, cannot enjoy as
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