What critics like Douglas Ainslie call my "commercialization" of Hindu philosophy is really my democratization of it. For I have attempted to bring it down out of the rarefied atmosphere of academic circles into the common air of plain men and women, where alone it can help them. I have tried to make easily understandable what the academics and mystics have made ponderously incomprehensible. Moreover, it may be said that those who know well what they are talking about may have the temerity to simplify it, whereas those who do not know find it safer to mystify it! The first can really help truth-seekers, whereas the second can only hamper them. The reward of my efforts has been a larger circulation of my books than that achieved by writers like Ainslie himself--hence their envy and malice. I seek to serve the masses, not the classes, the many and not the few. I seek to make philosophy's message plain to the untutored mind of common people. At the same time, it will automatically be made plainer to the cultured intelligence of better educated people. If therefore my books are popular and those of the academics are not, that is not to be charged to my commercialistic spirit but to my democratic sympathy. Douglas Ainslie's article is not a genuine book review but a sorry exhibition of personal animus. The self-conceit from which Douglas Ainslie seems to think I suffer is simply the attempt to give a human feeling and personal value to ideas which have too often been ignored and neglected by non-mystical people because they seemed too inhuman and so impersonal. The deep conviction of my own importance, on which he comments so sarcastically is his mistaken reading of the deep importance which I attach to the ideas which I have sought to describe intensely and put forward for the benefit of the few real seekers after truth among mystical people. If, in all these ways, I have succeeded in giving actuality to such ideas, if I have brought them to some life, then the results have adequately justified the means.
-- Notebooks Category 12: Reflections > Chapter 5 : The Literary Work > # 89
