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RECENT VEDANTA LITERATURE
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ideal is total absence of subjectivity. "The peculiar serenity of aesthesis consists precisely in de-subjectivising whatever emotion arises in the mind” (p. 248). Feeling can thus be identified with the objective attitude. The levels of conation are instinctive and other unreflective activity, voluntary will, and moral will. Each reveals a gradual perfection of the dialectical process, the ideal being that perfect morality in which the world is neither rejected nor ignored but conquered. Conation is the dialectical attitude. Provisionally each attitude tolerates the others as subordinate, but ultimately each denies the others absolutely. "Cognition demands ultimate rejection of object, feeling demands complete indifference to subjectivity, and conation demands ultimate absorption of negative objectivity in a richer subjectivity" (p. 339).
The final chapter shows the association of the three standpoints with the traditional three ways of Hindu religion (knowledge, devotion, and action), and concludes by raising the problem of the relation between the three alternative philosophies and the reality to which they claim to refer. This problem also has three alternative solutions. It may be that there is no reality beyond the philosophies, which are therefore ultimate. It may be that the very nature of reality itself is to be alternative. It may be that there is a transcendent reality which the alternative philosophies represent in various inadequate ways. These hypotheses are characteristic of Buddhism, Jainism, and Vedanta respectively. Each judges the others as false, but there is no higher philosophy from which all can be judged. The very realization of the alternation, however, is a sort of higher philosophy, although without content, and Bhattacharya, a Vedantist at heart, concludes with the statement that perhaps the Upanishads "are speaking of the very fact of the alternation."
The importance of this book as an original work of philosophy goes beyond the theory of knowledge with which it is chiefly concerned. It represents a new approach to philosophy involving a new kind of logic. The logic of alternation based on disjunction (two contradictories alternatively true) differs from the traditional logic based on contradiction (one contradictory true, the other false) and also from the Hegelian logic based on conjunction (both contradictories true in a higher synthesis). This way of thinking,
