[KALKI]

401. Henri Frédéric Amiel (1821 - 1881) was a Swiss philosopher, poet and critic. Born in Geneva in 1821, he was descended from a Huguenot family driven to Switzerland by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Losing his parents at an early age, Amiel traveled widely, became intimate with the intellectual leaders of Europe, and made a special study of German philosophy in Berlin. In 1849 he was appointed professor of aesthetics at the academy of Geneva, and in 1854 became professor of moral philosophy.

Amiel refers to the Hindu streak in him. He writes:

“There is a great affinity in me with the Hindu genius – that mind, vast, imaginative, loving, dreamy and speculative, but destitute of ambition, personality and will.

Pantheistic disinterestedness, the effacement of the self in the great whole, womanish gentleness, a horror of slaughter, antipathy to action – these are all present in my nature, in the nature at least which has been developed by years and circumstances. Still the West has also its part in me. What I have found difficult to keep up a prejudice in favor of my form, nationality or individuality whatever. Hence my indifference to my own person, my own usefulness, interest or opinions of the moment. What does it all mater?

Sensing that India possessed a great richness of spiritual unity, Amiel, a contemporary of Alfred-Victor de Vigny and Victor Hugo, saw the need of ‘Brahmanising souls’ for the spiritual welfare of humanity.

It is not perhaps not a bad thing,’ he says, ‘that in the midst of the devouring activities of the Western world there should be a few Brahmanical souls.”

(source: Amiel's journal: The Journal intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel - By Henri Frederic Amiel p. 159 161, 224. and 269 and Eastern Religions & Western Thought - By. Dr. S. Radhakrishnan p. 248).