his mind with a settled philosophical agnosticism. After the wearing out of his first
emotional freshness and naivete, he was beset with a certain dryness and incapacity for
the old prayers and devotions. He was filled with an ennui which he concealed,
however, under his jovial nature. Music, at this difficult stage of his life, rendered him
great help; for it moved him as nothing else and gave him a glimpse of unseen realities
that often brought tears to his eyes.
Narendra did not have much patience with humdrum reading, nor did he care to absorb
knowledge from books as much as from living communion and personal experience.
He wanted life to be kindled by life, and thought kindled by thought. He studied
Shelley under a college friend, Brajendranath Seal, who later became the leading
Indian philosopher of his time, and deeply felt with the poet his pantheism, impersonal
love, and vision of a glorified millennial humanity. The universe, no longer a mere
lifeless, loveless mechanism, was seen to contain a spiritual principle of unity.
Brajendranath, moreover, tried to present him with a synthesis of the Supreme
Brahman of Vedanta, the Universal Reason of Hegel, and the gospel of Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity of the French Revolution. By accepting as the principle of
morals the sovereignty of the Universal Reason and the negation of the individual,
Narendra achieved an intellectual victory over scepticism and materialism, but no
peace of mind.
Narendra now had to face a new difficulty. The 'ballet of bloodless categories' of Hegel
and his creed of Universal Reason required of Naren a suppression of the yearning and
susceptibility of his artistic nature and joyous temperament, the destruction of the
cravings of his keen and acute senses, and the smothering of his free and merry
conviviality. This amounted almost to killing his own true self. Further, he could not
find in such a philosophy any help in the struggle of a hot-blooded youth against the
cravings of the passions, which appeared to him as impure, gross, and carnal. Some of
his musical associates were men of loose morals for whom he felt a bitter and
undisguised contempt.
Narendra therefore asked his friend Brajendra if the latter knew the way of deliverance
from the bondage of the senses, but he was told only to rely upon Pure Reason and to
identify the self with it, and was promised that through this he would experience an
ineffable peace. The friend was a Platonic transcendentalist and did not have faith in
what he called the artificial prop of grace, or the mediation of a guru. But the problems
and difficulties of Narendra were very different from those of his intellectual friend.
He found that mere philosophy was impotent in the hour of temptation and in the
struggle for his soul's deliverance. He felt the need of a hand to save, to uplift, to
protect — shakti or power outside his rational mind that would transform his
impotence into strength and glory. He wanted a flesh-and-blood reality established in
peace and certainty, in short, a living guru, who, by embodying perfection in the flesh,
would compose the commotion of his soul.
The leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, as well as those of the other religious sects, had
failed. It was only Ramakrishna who spoke to him with authority, as none had spoken
before, and by his power brought peace into the troubled soul and healed the wounds