________________
THE CLAIMS OF SCIENCE
I find myself? What is this process carrying me on, together with the earth? Whence has it all proceeded? Whither is it tending? And what is to be my role, my duty, my goal, amidst this bewildering breath-taking drama in which I find myself involved?" That is the basic problem in the mind of men when they start philosophizing and before they reduce their aspirations to questions of methodology and the criticism of their own mental and sensual faculties. "All this around me, and my own being": that is the net of entanglement called māyā, the world creative power. Māyā manifests its force through the rolling universe and evolving forms of individuals. To understand that secret, to know how it works, and to transcend, if possible, its cosmic spell-breaking outward through the layers of tangible and visible appearance, and simultaneously inward through all the intellectual and emotional stratifications of the psyche-this is the pursuit conceived by Indian philosophy to be the primary, and finally undeniable, human task.
3.
The Claims of Science
WHEN I was a student, the term "Indian philosophy" was usually regarded as self-contradictory, a contradictio in adjecto, comparable to such an absurdity as "wooden steel." "Indian philosophy" was something that simply did not exist, like a "mare's nest," or, as Hindu logicians say, like the "horns of a hare" or the "son of a barren woman." Among all the professors holding permanent chairs in philosophy at that time
27
