Personality: Lectures Delivered in America

Rabindranath Tagore

7 chapters · about 3 h

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The opening

WHAT IS ART?

WE are face to face with this great world and our relations to it are manifold. One of these is the necessity we have to live, to till the soil, to gather food, to clothe ourselves, to get materials from nature. We are always making things that will satisfy our need, and we come in touch with Nature in our efforts to meet these needs. Thus we are always in touch with this great world through hunger and thirst and all our physical needs.

Then we have our mind; and mind seeks its own food. Mind has its necessity also. It must find out reason in things. It is faced with a multiplicity of facts, and is bewildered when it cannot find one unifying principle which simplifies the heterogeneity of things. Man’s constitution is such that he must not only find facts, but also some laws which will lighten the burden of mere number and quantity.

There is yet another man in me, not the physical, but the personal man; which has its likes and dislikes, and wants to find something to fulfil its needs of love. This personal man is found in the region where we are free from all necessity, — above the needs, both of body and mind, — above the expedient and useful. It is the highest in man, — this personal man. And it has personal relations of its own with the great world, and comes to it for something to satisfy personality.

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About this edition

The words
The author's text, copied word for word.
Left out
  • Page numbers and running heads from the printed pages, in 11 places
  • The scanning library's bookplate (“UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY”, “WILLIAM H. DONNER COLLECTION”) (4 blocks)
  • The title page and opening pages before chapter 1, in 3 places
  • Notes and pages added by translators, editors or publishers
  • Pictures and their captions, in 2 places
  • Other material that isn't the author's, in 2 places
  • Sheet signature at the foot of the page (read as “c”)
  • A speck at the head of the page, read as “,”
  • Sheet signature at the foot of the page (7 blocks)
  • A speck at the foot of the page, read as “-”
  • A speck at the foot of the page, read as “•»”
  • Sheet signature at the foot of the page (read as “i”)