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GEORGE BURCH
which has many applications, avoids the dogmatism which insists that one view is right and all others wrong. It also avoids the superficial liberalism which compromises various views by having each sacrifice something to the others, the hierarchical liberalism which would have different philosophies true at different levels, and the sentimental liberalism which seeks to harmonize views really incompatible. Bhattacharya says (p. 154):
The best form of reconciliation is our Alternative Absolutism. Let everyone develop his doctrine from his base-point, let him attack and reject the views of others as he must, but let him realise that the standpoints of others are also alternatively correct, that while he is understanding the world in one language there are equally other alternative languages, and that each such language is alternatively final.
It is curious that the book contains no acknowledgment of its principal source, perhaps because the author thought this indebtedness would be so obvious to his Indian readers as to need no mention. The principal source of Bhattacharya's philosophy is the teaching of his own father, K. C. Bhattacharya, who was mentioned above as one of the outstanding philosophers of modern India. His theory of alternative absolutes (truth, freedom, value) is set forth most completely in a 1934 article “Concept of the Absolute and its Alternative Forms,” which differs considerably, however, from his son's book. K. C. Bhattacharya was, at least in this article, a realist in epistemology (Kalidas a subjectivist), and he associated knowing, willing, and feeling with the objective, subjective, and dialectical attitudes respectively (Kalidas with the subjective, dialectical, and objective). “I never agreed with my father about that," he said in a conversation when I remarked on this discrepancy. Between his retirement in 1938 and his death in 1949 K. C. Bhattacharya spent a great deal of time with his son, and it was during these conversations that the logic of alternation was developed into a system. The book under review was actually written in 1945, during this period. Kalidas does not consider his own philosophical thought to be an original system influenced by his father's but rather to be a continuation of his father's, organically one with it.
It is unfortunate that a book so substantial in content and so clearly written should be marred by occasional digressions and
