William Quotes - page 7
But with the passing of time, a peasant became a tribal and from tribal a beast. William Finch, writing at Agra about 1610 C. E., describes how Jahangir and his nobles treated them - during Shikar. A favourite form of sport in Mughal India was the Kamargha, which consisted in enclosing a tract of country by a line of guards, and then gradually contracting the enclosure until a large quantity of game was encircled in a space of convenient size. "Whatever is taken in this enclosure” (Kamargha or human circle), writes Finch, "is called the king's shikar or game, whether men or beasts... The beasts taken, if man's meat, are sold... if men they remain the King's slaves, which he sends yearly to Kabul to barter for horses and dogs: these being poor, miserable, thievish people, that live in woods and deserts, little differing from beasts.”89 W. H. Moreland adds: "Other writer (also) tell it besides Finch.”.
Jahangir
The vitality of the individual... depends on his success in fashioning a character resistant to the narrowing of experience, to the rigidity of response, and to the consequent constriction of possibility that surrender to a hardened version of what the self implies. "He was so extremely natural," said Santayana of William James, "that there was no way of telling what his nature was, or what came next." It is an observation that states an ideal, suitable to the ambitions of personality under democracy. The point is not to make war against habit or to make war against one self. It is to fashion a style of existence, a mode of the self, in which we lower our defenses enough to strengthen our readiness for the new, our attachment to life, and our love of the world.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger