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hensible, and according to Bhattacharyya it is not one Incomprehensible but three Incomprehensibles.
There are, then, three ways to the Absolute, not converging but diverging. This study will be concluded with a separate discussion of each.98
Absolute Knowing
The process of knowing which leads to the Absolute as Truth is analyzed in the article "The Concept of Philosophy,"94 the last and best known of the works published in his lifetime, which was K. C. Bhattacharyya's contribution to the volume Contemporary Indian Philosophy, in which thirteen eminent Indian philosophers stated their philosophical positions.95 He begins by contrasting his position with Kant's. For Kant the self is a necessity of thought but not knowable. For Bhattacharyya the self is unthinkable but knowable without thinking, "demanding to be known without being thought” (II 107), there being "a demand, alternative with other spiritual demands, to realize such knowledge” (II 100). On the critical side he goes beyond contemporary positivists in denying not only metaphysical but even logical thinking, since he considers logical forms as mere "shadows of metaphysical symbolisms” and logic a philosophical, not scientific, subject. The extension of thought beyond experience or the possibility of experience is only "the use of the verbal form of thought as a symbol of an unthinkable reality, such symbolizing use not being thinking.” On the speculative side, however, he rejects Kantian and positivist agnosticism to assert that the contents of metaphysics are contemplated as true in the faith that only by such contemplation can absolute truth" be known (II 101).
Thought or theoretic consciousness is "the understanding of what can be spoken ... as known or to be known" (II 102). It has four
93 "The theory of truth ... recognises the possibility of elaborating a primary theory of each of them" (II 117).
94 The title does not mean that the article is concerned with philosophy in general in all its three branches, although these are briefly mentioned at the end. It means that, within the context of knowing, philosophy is distinguished from science. I am indebted to Professor Rasvihary Das of the University of Calcutta for reading this article with me in 1953, as well as for first calling my attention to K. C. Bhattacharyya's philosophy.
95 London, Allen & Unwin, 1936. A second edition in 1952 added eleven younger philosophers.
96 absolute truth (Cont. Indian Phil., 2nd ed., 106); the Absolute (II 101). 97 This is the wider or symbolic use of thought, not synonymous with thinking.
