Why do we create? Rabindranath Tagore sought to answer this question, not only through his essays, but also in his plays, poetry, and stories. "Construction is for a purpose, it expresses our wants; but creation is for itself, it expresses our very being." For Tagore, creativity is actually a deep soul-connecting process, through which we strive to relate our souls to the wholeness of life – to different cultures, to Nature, and to the Divine. Creators "infuse the colors and music of their souls into the structures of existence."

According to Tagore, an attitude of freedom and emotional sensitivity are central to creativity. We must free ourselves to go beyond the constraints of the world presented to us to try to discover our real selves – only then are we able to freely create new realities. In addition, we must allow space for the expression of our feelings and senses in order to give ‘intimate’ life to the world around us. Engaging in processes of creation, not only construction, is critical to the meaningful development of both personality and human relationships. "When humanity lacks this music of soul, then society becomes a mechanical arrangement of compartments, of political and social classifications."

Tagore saw abstractions, such as ‘survival of the fittest’ (where people are animals), analytical science (which privileges machines/material production over humans) and efficient bureaucracy (where people are statistics) as destructive for humanity. He warned, "If profit and production are allowed to run amuck, they play havoc with our love of beauty, of truth, of justice, and with our love for our fellow-beings."

Tagore held faith "in the principle of life, in the soul of man," not in trite educational ‘methods’. Indeed, he believed that schooling accentuates the break between intellectual, physical, and spiritual life, as it is concerned only with pouring lifeless information into children. "The ultimate truth in man is not in his intellect or in his material wealth; it is in his imagination of sympathy, in his illumination of heart, in his activities of self-sacrifice, in his capacity for extending love far and wide across all barriers of caste and colour, in his realizing this world not as a storehouse of mechanical power but as a habitation of man’s soul with its eternal music of beauty and its inner light of a divine presence."