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K. C. BHATTACHARYYA
grades: empirical thought, pure objective thought, spiritual thought, transcendental thought. Their contents are respectively fact, selfsubsistence, reality, truth. Science deals with fact, which is only contingently speakable, need not be spoken, is spoken of as information. Philosophy, which is not a body of judgments but elaboration of the self-evident (II 103), deals with the others, which are intelligible only as spoken, pure thought of a self-evident content not distinguishable from the thought although independent of any individual mind (II) 103); it has consequently three grades-philosophy of the object, of the subject, and of truth. Fact is literally spoken of as meant; the selfsubsistent is literally spoken as meant; reality is literally spoken as symbolized; truth is spoken symbolically (II 105).
(1) Empirical thought, as Bhattacharyya defines it, is "the theoretic consciousness of a content involving reference to an object that is perceived or imagined to be perceived, such reference being part of the meaning of the content" (II 102.). Fact, its content, "is perceivable or has necessary reference to the perceivable, is speakable in the form of a literal judgment and is believed without reference to the speaking of it" (II 107). Only scientific beliefs about fact are "formulable as judgments and literally thinkable" (II 106); in this the positivists are right. But science does not recognize any mystery, or any sacredness, in its perceived or imagined objects. For science the object is intrinsically knowable; there is nothing in the object to make it known; it is just what is known or at least knowable (II 108). It is not only knowable but also usable, and it is this "wrong spiritual attitude of science toward the object," not any inadequacy in scientific theory,
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Only empirical facts are literally thinkable (II 106, 113), but the philosophical entities are objects of thought.
98 What is not literally thinkable may still be literally spoken, not ineffable. 99 What may be considered a long footnote to this sentence is the short article "Objective Interpretation of Percept and Image" published in the Philosophical Quarterly the same year. The author assumes the objective attitude to translate these subjective terms into objective terms (II 263). To perceive is to apprehend "a spatial object with a spatial outside," to be conscious "of a definite shape and of an outside," though the outside itself may not be definite. The object is perceived as existent when it defines its outside. This occurs when the object appears, as a scar on a man's face when he approaches-the object emerging in time but existing in space, or disappears, as a flame going out the field emerging in time but the object existing in space. To have an incipient image is to know an object as persistent but not as existent (II 266). To have an image proper is to know an object as persistent and not existent (II 267). Existence and persistence are the objective interpretations of percept and image respectively.
