ADDITIONAL REMARKS

WHEN DISCUSSING Western interpretations, we have purposely confined ourselves to general questions as far as possible in order to avoid raising personal matters that are often irritating and moreover without purpose if one is adopting a strictly doctrinal point of view, as in the present case. It is strange what difficulty most Westerners find in understanding that considerations of this nature prove nothing whatsoever either for or against a conception; this clearly shows how far intellectual individualism, as well as the sentimentality that is inseparable from it, has been carried. In practice, one knows the importance attributed to the most insignificant biographical details in what purports to be a history of ideas, in keeping with the common illusion which makes people believe that they possess real knowledge by the mere fact of having ascertained a name or a date: how could it be otherwise in a society where facts are valued above ideas? It is after all only natural that the appraising of ideas should be affected by a person's knowledge of the characters and actions of the men to whom they are ascribed, when once those ideas are no longer valued for their own sake, but have come to be looked upon merely as the invention and property of this or that individual, and when, in addition, people let themselves be influenced and even dominated by all sorts of moral or sentimental irrelevancies; in other words, sympathies or antipathies felt for the men who conceived them are carried over to the ideas themselves, as if their truth or falseness could be dependent on such contingencies.

Under these circumstances people are perhaps still prepared to admit, though with reluctance, that a perfectly honorable individual may have formulated and defended more or less foolish ideas; but there is one thing they positively refuse to agree to, namely that some other individual, who is considered unworthy, may nevertheless have possessed intellectual or even artistic qualities amounting either to genius or to talent of some sort; and yet such cases are by no means unusual. If there is one quite unfounded prejudice especially dear to the upholders of 'compulsory education', it is the notion that real knowledge is inseparable from what is usually called 'moral worth'; there is no logical reason for supposing that a criminal is necessarily an idiot or an ignoramus, or that a man cannot make use of his intelligence and his skill for the injuring of his neighbors, as on the contrary quite often happens; nor can we see why the truth of a conception should depend on whether it was put forward by such and such a person; but nothing is less reasonable than sentiment, although some psychologists have gone so far as to speak of a 'logic of the feelings'. So-called arguments influenced by personal considerations are entirely valueless: that they should be employed in the field of politics, where sentiment plays a major part, is understandable up to a point, when one comes to think of it, although it is hardly a compliment to address one's appeals to a person's sentimentality alone; but to introduce similar methods of discussion into the intellectual field is totally inadmissible. We have thought fit to underline the point, not only because this tendency is so general in the West, but also because, had we not made our position clear, certain critics might be tempted to blame us for an attitude which seemed to them too vague and lacking in precise 'references', even though we have adopted such an attitude of set purpose and quite deliberately.

We hope, however, that we have now replied adequately and in advance to most of the likely objections and criticisms; even so, this will quite probably not prevent their being raised, but in that case it will simply be from lack of understanding. For example, we shall perhaps be accused of failing to submit to certain methods reputed to be 'scientific', but such a suggestion would be quite off the mark, since the methods in question, which are really purely 'literary' in character, are the very ones the inadequacy of which we have tried to demonstrate; for reasons of principle already given, we consider it both impossible and inadmissible to apply those methods to the subject of our present study. But the mania for texts, 'origins', and bibliography is so widespread today, because it answers to the general craving for systematization, that many people, especially among the 'specialists', will suffer a real sense of discomfort at not meeting with anything of the sort here, as always happens with those who have fallen under the tyranny of a set habit; and at the same time they will find it very hard to understand—if indeed they ever manage to do so, even supposing they give themselves the trouble—how it is possible to adopt, as we have done, a standpoint which is not that of erudition, since that is the only attitude they have ever conceived of. It is not to these 'specialists', however, that our remarks are chiefly addressed, but to people of a less narrow-minded outlook, more free from prejudice, and unaffected by the mental distortion that inevitably accompanies the practice of certain methods, a distortion which gives birth to the disease which we have called 'intellectual myopia'. It would be a mistake to see in these remarks an appeal 'to the public', for we put no trust in its competence to judge, and have moreover a horror of anything that savors of 'popularization', for reasons we have already given; but neither do we commit the error of confusing the true intellectual elite with the professional men of learning. A power of wide understanding is worth incomparably more in our eyes than mere scholarship, which is nothing but an obstacle to understanding as soon as it is turned into a 'speciality', instead of remaining, as it normally should remain, simply an instrument in the service of that understanding, that is to say an adjunct of pure knowledge and genuine intellectuality.

While we are still occupied with explaining our attitude toward possible criticisms, there is yet another detail, in itself of small interest, which might however arouse some comment: in regard to the use of Sanskrit terms, we have not thought it necessary to avail ourselves of the strange and complicated method of transcription used today by orientalists. Since the Sanskrit alphabet contains many more letters than the European alphabets, one is naturally compelled to represent several distinct characters by one and the same letter, choosing the one that is most closely akin in sound to the Sanskrit letter in question; it must not be concluded that the differences thus slurred over are not appreciable, but they simply cannot be rendered exactly in the European tongues with their scantier resources. Therefore no transcription can be really faithful, and it would be far the best thing not to resort to any; but apart from the fact that it is extremely difficult to obtain Sanskrit characters of correct form for use in a work to be printed in Europe, the reading of these characters would present quite an unnecessary difficulty to those readers who are unacquainted with Sanskrit, but yet who are not for that reason less qualified than others for the understanding of the Hindu doctrines; besides, unlikely as it may appear, there even exist some 'specialists' who are hardly able to read Sanskrit texts except in 'romanized' transcriptions, and editions are to be had published under that form expressly for their use. It is doubtless possible, by means of a few artifices, to make up to a certain extent for the orthographic ambiguity resulting from the fact that the Latin alphabet is short of letters; this has been precisely the intention of the orientalists, but the method of transcription they have hit upon is far from being the best possible one, since it makes use of too many rather arbitrary conventions; had it been a matter of any importance for our present purposes, it would not have been difficult to devise a different and preferable method which would not disfigure the words so much and which would approximate more closely to their real pronunciation. However, those who possess some knowledge of Sanskrit will have no trouble in recovering the exact spelling, while others will not need to do so in order to understand the ideas, which alone are of fundamental importance. Accordingly, we decided that there could be no serious objection to doing away with all artifices of spelling and typographical complications, and we have adopted the transcription which seemed to us both the easiest and the nearest in pronunciation; those who may be specially interested in the details of the subject can refer to the technical books.^[1]

Howbeit, we owed at least this amount of explanation to the analytically-minded inquirers, always eager for discussion—it is one of the rare concessions to their mental habits that we are prepared to make, as is demanded by that courtesy that should always be shown toward people of good faith; it is likewise prompted by a wish to forestall misunderstandings that bear only on points of secondary importance and on accessory questions, and that do not immediately arise from the irreducible difference between the traditional and metaphysical point of view here expounded and that of its possible critics; for the latter we can do nothing, since there is unfortunately no means of supplying to them those powers of discernment that they lack. After saying this, we can now go on to draw from our study certain conclusions in which questions of erudition obviously play no part at all; in so doing we shall point out, though without abandoning a certain indispensable reserve, the essential and effective benefit that must result from a real and deep knowledge of the Eastern doctrines.