Although Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's longer works are not difficult to find, many of the best articles have been inaccessible to readers at a distance from major libraries. He wrote many hundred articles, reviews, and books, and contributed to Eastern and Western periodicals of every description. The present selection is a gathering of what was scattered so widely; it should now be possible to meet Coomaraswamy's mind as unknown, and to discover vividly, without doubt, what his full range was. The selection is drawn from the years 1932-1947, that is, from the last period of his life (1877-1947), when he had reached his unique balance of metaphysical conviction and scholarly erudition. To published writings of this period have been added six previously unpublished essays, at least one of which ("On the Indian and Traditional Psychology, or rather Pneumatology") deserves to be ranked among his masterpieces; the unpublished essays generally date into the 1940s and would have seen print in the normal course of things, had he lived longer. Soon after Coomaraswamy's death, Bollingen Foundation interested itself in sponsoring an edition of selected writings (cf. Editor's Note), but the project did not come to term until now, nearly thirty years later, when there exists a much broader public interest in the realms of knowledge that Coomaraswamy investigated. During the years when these essays were written, Coomaraswamy lived in the town of Needham, near Boston, Massachusetts; since 1917, he had been a curator in the Department of Asiatic Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The path is intricate that led from his birthplace, Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), to New England. Born of an eminent Ceylonese legislator and his English wife, Coomaraswamy was raised in England. The death of his father when he was only a few years old left his mother little reason to return to Ceylon. In his early twenties, after studying geology at the University of London, he went to Ceylon with the intention of surveying its mineral resources. His work prospered and gained government sponsorship, and his published findings served as a portion of the doctoral dissertation in geology that won him a D.sc at the University of London in 1905. Just at this point, however, he passed through one of the changes that occurred periodically in his life. They were not subtle changes leaving the surface smooth while the depths altered, but something far more inclusive and visible. Extensive travel in Ceylon on his geological mission convinced him that its traditional culture had been unjustifiably weakened by the English and Western culture exported to it by the British (Ceylon had been a colony since the early nineteenth century). He accordingly started a movement for cultural revival, similar in character to the nationalist movement in India known as swadeshi, but less political. He also found himself drawn toward study of the traditional arts and crafts of Ceylon, then still practiced to some extent, and evident in objects of art that had survived from the precolonial Kandyan kingdom. Coomaraswamy's inclination toward art had been prepared in youth by the influence of William Morris, the craftsman, poet, and humanitarian socialist who dominated an entire sector of Victorian intellectual life; as soon as Coomaraswamy began to write about art and its social setting, he seemed an Eastern William Morris. His life at this period can be best understood as an Imitation of William Morris, a missionary extension eastward of Morris's hardy rhetoric and intense concern for crafts (as opposed to industrial production). Coomaraswamy's professional interest in geology dropped away as art historian, writer, lecturer, and social reformer appeared.
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