A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

PREFACE.THE following pages are the result of an attempt onthe part of the publishers to bring together in a collectedform all that is valuable and of abiding interest in thespeeches and writings of the late Swami Vivekananda. TheSwami came to public notice almost suddenly at the greatParliament of Religions held at Chicago in the year 1895.The Indian public followed with great interest his briefbut memorable career during the few short years that heJived after that great gathering. He preached the religionof his Master in America and in England and afterwardsin the land of his birth. The last, but not the least, of theH-^ges of India, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa,the Saint ofDakshineswar, was the prophet of a universal religionwhich found adequate utterance from the lips of his greatdisciple Swami Vivekananda. The collected works of theSwami cover the whole field of Hindu Religion and Philosophy and present to the "Western world, in a lucid* andattractive form, the abstruse doctrines of Eastern Religious Philosophy. To the Eastern reader, they present in ahandy compass much that can only be gleajied fromnpndeptms tomes, after infinite research. The necessarilyscattered nature of the addresses and writings involvessome repetition, but the publishers have felt constrained tooverlook such repetitioneven at the risk of adding largely to this volume in the conviction that the seeker aftertruth would welcome the diversified forms of presentation,now under the guise of an allegory, and now of a beautifulsi T* ale or metaphor, but always conveying the intensity ofthtrauthor s conviction in the profound truths to which he