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It is comprehensive enough to suit the modern taste, especially the modern Western taste which, while appreciating the simplicity and purity of a life like the best Indian yogi's--its freedom from desires and its indifference to possessions--nevertheless feels that it cannot and should not deny its own inclinations toward a fuller, more comfortable, and more artistic external life. Such a complete ideal, uniting the seeming opposites of contemplation and activity and combining apparently incongruous items like self-discipline and susceptibility to beauty, is more attractive and better justified to us. Without undue asceticism and without undue abnegation of the world, it yet inculcates the following of virtue and the pursuit of wisdom not less ardently than does the Indian ideal.

-- Notebooks Category 20: What Is Philosophy? > Chapter 1 : Toward Defining Philosophy > # 50