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THE MEETING OF EAST AND WEST
cally opposed and sometimes overtly antagonistic to the first, who cherishes a hope that contemporary philosophy may some day utter a word to him somewhat different from the communications continually coming from all departments of the sprawling scientific workshop. Touring as a searching student through the laboratories, peering through the various instruments, tabulating, classifying, and becoming very tired of the infinitude of minutely specialized responses to questions of detail, he is seeking an answer to some query that the research fellows seem not to be concerned with and that the comprehensive philosophers are systematically avoiding. Something beyond critical reasoning is what he requires; something that someone of adequate mind should have realized intuitively as a Truth (with a capital T) about man's existence and the nature of the cosmos; something to enter the breast and pierce the heart with what Baudelaire called "the steely barb of the infinite," la pointe acérée de l'infinie. What he requires is a philosophy that will confront and resolve the task once performed by religion; and this is a need from which no number of college courses on the validity of inference can emancipate him.
Philosophy as the handmaid of empirical research, thought wearing the blinders of the standards of contemporary science, and metaphysics open to rational criticism from every quarter --in short, reason infallible: this is the ideal and requirement of the practical-minded thinker. Whereas the other is simply not convinced by all the plausible searching and discovering. Neither is he unwilling to accept the reproach of being somewhat mysterious in his personal demands. He does not ask that a philosophy should be comprehensible to every level-headed contemporary; what he wants is a response (if only so much as the hint of one) to the primary questions in his mind.
The sages of India side with the second of these two points of view. They have never intended their teachings to be popu
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