________________ K. C. BHATTACHARYYA 667 of coexistence which tolerates alternative principles without compromising one's own. Theoretically, one form of the Absolute is distinguished from another but nowise relative to the other. The Absolute, first recognized as the Indefinite underlying the manifold of definite objects, then as the Subject with which the Indefinite is identified, finally as the Alternation emerging from the Subject's incompatible functions, is spoken (alternatively contemplated, asserted, or enjoyed) in a symbol which refuses to deny the richness of its meaning by claiming a transcendent consistency beyond the actual consistency of each form. The Self finds its absoluteness in alternative ways-by denying itself, by denying the not-self, or by denying their separation. The Absolute is Truth, or Freedom, or Love, and the important word is or. Neo-Vedanta, a fruit of the Indian philosophical renaissance of the twentieth century, is a mature philosophy. The youthful philosophical enthusiasm which pursues the metaphysical will-o'-the-wisp of an Absolute which has everything issues too often in an uncritical satisfaction that this has been attained or an overcritical rejection of metaphysics as futile. Neo-Vedanta is existentially oriented but phenomenologically grounded in experience. It seeks the Absolute not through a monistic category of understanding but through an analysis of the cognitive, conative, and emotional aspects of experience, and it recognizes that this can be done in different ways. As a way of thinking its accomplishments are impressive and its possibilities unlimited. "In a great and tangled movement of men and their ideas, the world is making itself over ... and we have to reach for ideas big enough to grasp the magnitude of what is taking place."122 The Absolute as Alternation is an idea at once profound and comprehensive, and, peculiarly relevant in a world which is many in concerns and ideologies but one in a no longer divisible destiny. says Kalidas Bhattacharyya, "Alternative Forms of Politics," Calcutta Review, 3rd Series, 86 (1943), 37. 122 H. R. Isaacs, quoted in A.A.U.P. Bulletin, 52 (1966), 52.
