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seem incompatible with my character; my environment seems incomprehensibly unnatural; in short, 
the effect of the narrative is to suggest that by some jugglery the life of a totally different 
individual has intruded upon my own. 
Now, years afterwards, it still seems to me as if for the whole period of the initiation I had been 
transported into an unfamiliar world; their history is a magical history in the most comically 
complete sense. Its events are neither real nor rational --- save only in relation to the condition of 
an experiment, exactly as a candidate in freemasonry sees, hears, speaks and acts with his normal 
senses, yet in a way which has no relation to his previous experience. The stolid old gentleman in 
evening dress is really King Solomon. He hears a rigmarole both false and meaningless in itself, 
which he must understand as conveying something entirely other than it apparently implies. His 
words are put into his mouth, and produce an effect neither expected, desired, nor understood. He 
performs a series of gestures neither comprehensible in themselves, nor even (so far as he can see) 
calculated to assist his purpose. And even when, at the end, he finds that he has complied with the 
prescribed conditions and achieved his object, he is unable to bring what has taken place into 
rational relation with his ordinary life. The situation is only the more bewildering that from first to 
last each incident in itself is perfectly common place. 
Such is my own point of view with regard to my adventures in America. They are all perfectly 
probably in themselves, perfectly intelligible regarded 
{723} 
as details of a ritual; but they contradict every probability of human life as commonly understood. 
The chain of my career snaps suddenly; yet it continues as if it had never been broken from the 
moment that my initiation is over. The effect is to persuade me that this period of my life is in the 
nature of a dream. I meet strange monsters; one phantom succeeds another without a shadow of 
coherence. Even those incidents which help me to recognize that I am the central figure of the 
dream complete my conviction of its unreality. 
{724} 
75 
It is one of the regular jokes in India that people on the strength of the season in Calcutta write a 
book about the peninsula, but even the tourist of genius, like Charles Dickens, is far more 
presumptuous when he tackles the United States. India indeed is huge and varied beyond hope of 
human comprehension, but America, though its population is only a third of that of Hindustan, is 
composed of elements infinitely more varied, besides which India does at least stand still and allow 
one to look at it, whereas the United States undergoes a revolutionary change continually. I passed 
through the country in 1900. In 1906 I found it unrecognizable. My third visit in 1914 gave me 
another surprise, and during the following five years when I was actually resident the panorama 
shifted with kaleidoscopic swiftness. 
I have now learnt enough to realize that any attempt at description must inevitably be futile and 
that any opinion cannot but be presumptuous and misleading. Yet the subject is by far the most 
important in every respect which I have ever had to consider and I cannot possibly offer my 
autohagiography to the impatient public without doing my best to set down what I think. 
Intellectual generalizations must be discarded as insulting to my own intelligence as much as to the 
reader's. There is only one possible procedure; to state boldly a number of striking facts which came 
under my direct observation, leaving their significance and importance to fight for their own ends, 
but also to call upon the only testimony of equally assured liability, my spiritual intuition. 
I admit frankly that the whole of my intellectual opinion and practically all my personal prejudice 
combine to condemn the United States wholesale with absolute contempt and loathing and this 
attitude will undoubtedly manifest itself whenever the subject crops up in the course of these 
reminiscences, for my normal conscious self is generally speaking as the writer of these pages.