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Presidential Address
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philosophy. Bergson regarded life as the true reality, and intuition the true method of knowing it, intellect being relegated to a later and inferior stage in the order of evolution. "To phenomenalism” says Olle Laprune, " I oppose what ? Not the idea, but that which everyone in his inner consciousness and apperception can point to as the deepest, the most permanent, most continuous principle of all diversity; the act.” Blondel, too, applying the principle to religious life says : "At the very moment in which we seem to be grasping God by a stroke of thought, He eludes us unless we embody Him in actionWhenever we stand still, He is not; whenever we hasten ourselves, He exists." With a similar perception of man's religious needs and his true nature, and also of the nature of Reality, the ancient Mīmāmsakas regarded the mandates of the Brāhmanas (the second stage in the evolution of the Vedic religious literature known by that name) as the central in the doctrines of 'niyoga and Kriyārthavāda', that is, Religion is Act and not Fact. The religion of the Bhagavadgītā is a marvelous synthesis of thought, will (act) and emotion, but at the centre of the three ( neither as the root nor as the fruit) it places the will to act, since it is the common Man--the Nara-Arjuna of the Mahābhārata and the Purāņas-to whom is addressed the great Sermon. The modern man, crushed beneath the burden of knowledge which is hourly growing, and with which his moral life finds it difficult to keep pace, exclaims:
"Knowledge we ask not-knowledge thou hast lent, But, Lord, the will—there lies our bitter need,
