Villagers still worship at shrines dedicated to gods and goddesses with roots in the Stone Age.12 Compared to this unequaled staying power, the British Raj seemed very transitory — like every other ruler or conqueror in Indian history. Gandhi made his own view plain in 1909, in his Hind Swaraj. "History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of love or of the soul," he wrote, "a record of the interruption of the course of nature."
One could say that Aristotle had turned Plato on his head. Instead of the individual being a pale copy of a more real abstract form, the universal is less real (indeed only a copy) of the individual.15 This reversal left Aristotle's philosophy with a built-in bias in favor of the individual: in science, in metaphysics, in ethics, and later in politics.
No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion . . . Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.