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therefore, imply each other: only truth is known, and only the known is true (II 154). Truth, thus distinguished from its content, is known as such, and as such is the ultimate reality present in all things.28
This affiliation of epistemology and metaphysics is developed more explicitly in the article "Fact and Thought of Fact” (1931). The coherence, correspondence, and pragmatic theories ("the characterization of fact as what stands in a constant system of relations or as what is given and not constructed by the mind or as what conditions and constitutes successful willing") are summarily rejected on the ground that they already assume some fact. Fact is defined as what is believed: "what a person believes is a fact to him” (II 169). The concepts fact, thought, speakable, thinkable, assertable, and existent are carefully distinguished and analyzed. Fact does not imply existence. Non-existence is also fact; the moral "ought,” neither existent nor non-existent, is also fact-provided they are believed. But a fact is thought only when a question of existence is involved (II 170)—and the article is largely concerned with the defense of this existential thesis. A content abstracted from its possible existence is a significant speakable but has no objective meaning even as "subsistent.” An unreal content may or may not have been previously believed, but it is false only if it was previously, but no longer, believed to be at least possibly existent (II 173). Here as always Bhattacharyya emphasizes negation, falsity, unreality. We advance in wisdom not by discovering new existences existence is obvious and does not need to be discovered-but by discovering new non-existences, that is, by rejecting what we formerly thought to be existent.
These logical considerations form a framework27 for Vedanta metaphysics. To deny subjectivity is meaningless, but to deny objectivity, to say an objective content is neither existent nor nonexistent, is merely unthinkable. It is not meaningless to suggest that objectivity, including both existence and non-existence, is unreal. It is, to be sure, impossible and motiveless for logic. The suggestion acquires value only through a spiritual feeling or experience of such unreality-—"a spiritual feeling of the symbolistic character of the object or of its unsubstantiality in itself or both, of the vanity of the
26 This interpretation of the article, for which I am indebted to Kalidas Bhattacharyya, may "go beyond" the text a little (representing, as he said, his own rather than his father's philosophy).
27 I say framework, not foundation. He says elsewhere (II 115) that logic is based on metaphysics.
