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and obviously those on whose experience he founded his opinion must have been those wanting in sincerity. Nonetheless no one can accept that sincerity is the primary or the sole test. For sincerity is not enough. A great man must have sincerity. For it is the sum of all moral qualities without which no man can be called great. But there must be something more than mere sincerity in a man to make him great. A man may be sincere and yet he may be a fool, and a fool is the very antithesis of a great man. A man is great because he finds a way to save society in its hours of crisis. But what can help him to find the way ? He can do so only with the help of intellect. Intellect is the light. Nothing else can be of any avail. It is quite obvious that without the combination of sincerity and intellect no man can be great. Is this enough to constitute a great man? At this stage we, must, I think, make a distinction between an eminent individual and a great man. For I am certain that a great man is something very different from an eminent individual. Sincerity and intellect are enough to mark out an individual as being eminent as compared to his fellows. But they arc not enough to rake him to the dignity of a great man. A great man must have something more than what a merely eminent individual has. What must be that thing ? Here comes the importance of the philosopher’s definition of a great man. A great man must be motivated by the dynamics of a social purpose and must act as the scourge and the scavenger of society. These axe the elements which distinguish an ominent individual from a great man and constitute his titledeeds to respect and reverence.
IV
Was Ranade a great man ? He was of course great in his person. Vast in physique—he could have been called “Your Immense” as the Irish servant who could not pronounce Your Eminence used respectfully to call Cardinal Wiseman—his master. He was a man of sanguine temperament, of genial disposition and versatile in his capacity. He had sincerity which is the sum of all moral qualities and his sincerity was of the sort which was prescribed by Carlyle. It was not a conscious “braggart sincerity”. It was the natural sincerity, a constitutional trait and not an assumed air. He was not only big in his physique and in his sincerity, he was also big in intellect. Nobody can question that Ranade had intellect of a high calibre. He was not merely a lawyer and a judge of the High Court, he was a first class economist, a first class historian, a first class educationist and a first class divine. He was not a politician. Perhaps it is good that he was not. For if he had been, he might not have been a great man. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Politicians are a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people and who, to say the most of them are taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men.’’ Ranade though not a politician was a profound student of politics. Indeed it would be difficult to find in the history of India any man who could come up to Ranade in the width of his