________________
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVOLUTION
Soul, Divine Providence, First Principle, Final Cause etc.) becomes the supreme object and the inexhaustibic source of all knowledge. Intellectual and spiritual activity of man becomes a long, disinal search for a light which always recedes before any approach, luring the unfortunate votary into a confusion confounded progressively by the vanity of virtuc. But there have been candid souls who would rather admit dcfeat than seek the questionable glory of self-deception or fraudulent victory. For instance, the venerable Roman philosopher, Seneca, pathetically declared that the longer he contemplated Plato's sublime conception of the Triad (the First Cause, the Logos and the Universal Soul), the less he could grasp of it. In such vain pursuit, philosophy degenerates into a dreary record of endless dispute, or pedantic dissertations about the nature of an hypothetical being which must always remain a hypothesis, since it could never be verified by the vulgar, but the only reliable, test of experience.
Ideas, ideals, institutions and traditions, that are fondly cherished as the token of the supposed superiority of India's culture, belong to the dark ages of humanity, when prejudice parades in the garb of piety, ignorance claims the sublimity of virtue, and idle speculation puts on the dignity of philosophy. The spell is broken ultimately by the first conquests of science.
273
18
