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GEORGE BURCH
found in his present teaching and in the article, "Pursuit of Truth through Doubt and Belief," in Contemporary Indian Philosophy, is a critical realism. Reason is the only philosophical method. By reason we can know the physical world more or less clearly. But the deeper we penetrate into reality, the more obscure we find it. This is not because there is no deeper reality, as positivists assert. Metaphysical reality certainly exists; the study of this reality is the most important thing both for theoretical interest and practical guidance; metaphysical truth is attainable, and the world is making progress toward attaining it; but it has not yet been attained. Whatever philosophy we hold we should hold lightly, realizing our uncertainty about it. The great rationalist systems, both Indian and Western, are dubitable just because they cannot stand up against rational criticism. Advaita Vedanta is not rational: its Brahman is unintelligible; its method is not really dialectical; and its thesis that the world is illusory is at best shown to be possible, never shown to be true. The teaching of K. C. Bhattacharya is a resolute attempt to penetrate more deeply into reality, but it is difficult to follow. Das's own system of philosophy, described above, he does not repudiate, and still accepts as a working hypothesis for life, but he "holds it lightly." Not knowing the Absolute, we must be sceptics. Scepticism is candor, honesty, and humility. Philosophy is not a theory but the clarification of ideas.
The concept of illusory, so glibly used by Vedantists, is in Das's opinion particularly refractory to logical analysis. Illusory is a predicate which never has a subject. Nothing is illusory except when you are talking about something else. It is meaningless to call the world, or anything, illusory. Das accepts the world as given, refusing to discriminate between its simply perceived aspect as sense data and its understood aspect as object, as he finds no such distinction in his experience of things. Our problem is to understand the world, not to deny it. Morally the world can be denied or called illusory in the sense of having no value for us, but this is a moral, not a metaphysical, judgment. What the world lacks is not reality but value.
The concept most important to clarify is that of the self. Our concept of the self is based on the body, but it goes beyond