The ancient Indian lawgivers, who were also their spiritually enlightened sages and who laid down the foundations of their religion and mysticism, taught that caste was a fact in nature based on the growth of the quality of an individual through successive series of lives on earth. That the caste system was later used as a means for repression and exploitation is beside the point. Any good thing can be misused and abused and then becomes a bad thing. In any case, today even the Indians admit that caste has fallen into confusion and that the quality of a person is no longer entirely revealed by the kind of family into which he is born. Nevertheless, we must qualify this by saying that enough does still remain to give some indication of the probabilities of the inner worth of a person from the type of environment in which he was brought up.
-- Notebooks Category 15: The Orient > Chapter 2 : India Part 1 > # 247
