Machine summary:
" The religion of Rabindranath Tagore is to my mind the most striking feature in his personality, his poetry, his educational ideals, and his life.
It would be futile to seek labels for him or to compare and contrast him with other poets or teachers either in India or in the West, If we must relate him back to formative influences in his own life and surroundings or his heritage and racial or cultural strains, it will not be necessary to dwell long on (I) A Paper read to the Royal Society of Literature, London, these.
But the Vcdanta postulates a great impersonal Being, the basis of all Reality, while Tagore's most characteristic note is that of a personal God imagined and described in glowing forms and colours.
Among the theses he tries to prove are : the utter bankruptcy of Western materialism ; the reconciliation of the old Vedanta doctrine with that of a personal God; arid the reconcilia• tion of modern science with Hindu philosophy through the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore.
But it is the paradox which lies at the very root of existences, It is for the poet to realise and reveal the mystery of the One with the Infinite, the mystery of how the Creator takes shape in His creation, and how we can feel in our own individual personality all His infinitude and all the wonderful life of Nature around us.
Perhaps Tagore, with his ideas of Beauty, Love and Personality, may not accept the Vedanta doctrine of the illusory nature of the phenomenal world.