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PHILOSOPHY AS POWER
philosopher's reputation had collapsed in Germany, and the He. gelian tradition in southern Italy, which culminated in the work of Benedetto Croce, secm insignificant in comparison with the weight of Hegel's influence on modern world affairs. For Hegel's system was the inspiration of Karl Marx; his dialectical thinking inspired the political and psychological strategy of Lenin. Also, his thinking was the inspiration of Pareto, the intellectual father of Fascism. Thus the practical impact of Hegel's ideas upon the non-democratic powers of Europe-and that means, of course, on the affairs of the whole modern world-is perhaps second to none. At the present moment it is comparable in magnitude to the power of the lasting authority of the philosophy of Confucius in China–which shaped the history of that land from the third century B.C. to the revolution of Sun Yat-sen; or to the force of Aristotle's thought in the Middle Ages and (by virtue of the influence of the Jesuits) in modern times. Though philosophers, to their neighbors, almost invariably seem to be harmless stay-at-homes, unaggressive, perhaps even shipwrecked academic teachers, despicable to the hard-headed man of action-sometimes they are far from being so. Ghostlike, rather, and invisible, they are leading the battalions and nations of the future on battlefields of revolution, soaked with blood.
India, dreamy India, philosophical, unpractical, and hopclessly unsuccessful in the maintenance of her political freedom, has always stood for the idea that wisdom can be power if (and this is an "if” that must be kept in mind) the wisdom permeates, transforms, controls, and molds the whole of the personality. The sage is not to be a library of philosophy stalking about on two legs, an encyclopedia with a human voice. Thought itself is to be converted in him into life, into flesh, into being, into a skill in act. And then the higher his realization, the greater will be his power. The magic of Mahātma Gandhi is to be understood, for example, in this way. The force of his
