ABSTRACT
The peculiar product resulting from the Western development can hardly be compared with what yoga means in India. In the West, Eastern teaching encountered a special situation, a condition of mind such as the earlier India, at any rate, had never known. European science paid no attention to these hopes and expectations. It lived its intellectual life unconcerned with religious needs and convictions. The numerous purely physical procedures of yoga are a physiological hygiene as well, which is far superior to ordinary gymnastics or breathing exercises in that it is not merely mechanistic and scientific but, at the same time, philosophical. Yoga was originally a natural process of introversion, with all manner of individual variations. Introversions of the sort lead to peculiar inner processes which change the personality. The split in the Western mind therefore makes it impossible at the outset for the intentions of yoga to be realized in any adequate way.
