________________
Presidential Address
825
in Europe, but in India it is much older still, being well known in the schools of Sankara Vedānta as a distinction between Ātman as fg and Atman as 57, between the परिणामिन् अहम् and the कूटस्थ आत्मन्.
In the light of this distinction, the charge of solipsism which has been laid against Gentile's philosophy seems unjustified. I will quote one more passage even at the risk of wearing you with quotations, to show how Indian Philosophy would feel at home even in other lands. Discussing the problem of Immortality in that remarkable work of Italian NeoIdealism, "the Theory of Mind as Pure Act", Gentile writes :
"The conclusion is that if we think of ourselves empirically as in time, we naturalize ourselves and imprison ourselves within definite limits, birth and death, outside of which our personality cannot but seem annihilated. But this personality through which we enter into the world of the manifold and of natural individuals, in the Aristotelian meaning, is rooted in a higher personality in which alone it is real. This higher personality contains the lower and all other empirical personalities, and as this higher personality is not unfolded in space and time we cannot say that it is before the birth and after the death of the lower, because "before" and "after" applied to it would cause it to fall from the one to the many and by destroying it as the one we should thereby also destroy the manifold. But this personality is outside every "before and after". Its being is in the eternal, opposed to time, which it makes to be. This eternity, however, does not transcend time in the meaning that it stands
૧૦
