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THE MEETING OF EAST AND WEST now the twentieth century feels that only by intense and extensive planning and organization can our human civilization hope to be saved.
The frailty of human life does not really obsess us, as it did our ancestors in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We feel more sheltered than did they against vicissitudes, better insured against setbacks; decay and decline do not fill us with such despair and resignation. We believe that it is we ourselves who constitute our providence-as we all press onward in the historic human battle to dominate the earth and its elements, to control its mineral, vegetable, animal, and even sub-atomic kingdoms. The secret forces of existence, the complex chemistry and organic alchemy of the life process, whether in our own psyches and physiques or in the world around, we are now gradually unveiling. No longer do we feel caught in the meshes of an unconquerable cosmic web. And so, accordingly, we have our logic of science, experimental methods, and psychology, but no metaphysics.
The airy flights do not really interest us any more. We do not found our lives on fascinating or consoling total interpretations of life and the universe, along lines such as those of traditional theology or meditative speculation; rather, we have all these questions of detail in our numerous systematic sciences. Instead of an attitude of acceptance, resignation, and contemplation, we cultivate a life of relentless movement, causing changes at every turn, bcttering things, planning things, subduing to schedule the spontancous wild growths of the world. In place of the archaic aim of understanding life and the cosmos as a whole, by means of general speculation, we have for our thought the ideal of a multifarious, ever more refined activity of highly specialized understandings, and the mastery of concrete details. Religion and philosophy have become transformed into science, technology, and political economics. Since this is so, and since the main object of Indian philosophy, on the other hand, is
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| SR No. | 007309 |
| Book Title | Philosophies of India |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell |
| Publisher | Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd |
| Publication Year | 1953 |
| Total Pages | 709 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 34 MB |