The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c14.s9.t10.4

c14.s9.t10.4

What little Rāmachandrapant has to say about dealings with other princes or feudatory chiefs shows that the realism of Spinoza (1634-77) is in his grain. Passages from the *Tractatus Politicus*⁹ (I. 5) of Spinoza like the following would be congenial to Rāmachandrapant’s spirit: “Men are of necessity liable to passions and so constituted as to pity those who are ill and envy those who are well off and to be prone to vengeance more than to mercy;” “And so it comes to pass that, as all are equally eager to be first, they fall to strife, and do their utmost mutually to oppress one another.” Rāmachandrapant would, therefore, like Spinoza spurn a rosy view of interstatal relations. The Spinozistic statement that such persons as persuade themselves that the multitude of men distracted by politics can ever be induced to live according to the bare dictates of reason must be dreaming of the poetic golden age or of a stage-play can also be taken as Rāmachandrapant’s.