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Presidential Address
765
"'in India all the Vidyās, poetry as well as philosophy live in a joint family. They never have the jealous sense of individualısın maintaining the punitive regulations against trespass that seem to be so rife in the West". Mr. Yeats has said, "Whatever of Philosophy has been made poetry is alone permanent ". And may I not ask with Dean Inge, “Have not the profoundest intuitions of faith been often wrapped up in poetical myths and symbols, which dogmatism turns into flat historical narratives and rationalism as ponderously rejects ?... ...And have not the greatest philosophers been more than half poets ? We value Spinoza not for his geometrical metaphysics but for the flashes of vision in which the amor intellectualis makes him a 'God-drunken man' ? Plato is for ever unintelligible till we read him as a prophet and prose-poet, and cease to hunt for a system in his writings". Is there less philosophy, I would ask, in that one word ' gate' which declares that the sun and all that it stands for is the 'singing forth' of the Divine Musician, than in all the speculations of the schools regarding the origin of world and its relation to God ? Much ridicule has been poured over Sāyaṇa for his alleged failure to see that 'कस्म' in "कस्मै देवाय हविषा विधेम" in the famous "Whoish" Hymn of Rg Veda. Sanhita means "to whom ?" and not "to Prajāpati". But the Oriental scholar has not cared to ask the further question : How did '' come to mean yorgfa, as it un. doubtedly did at a later date ? The passage in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa, where the question is asked and answered, is not unknown to the Orientalist, but it
