The wide range of forms belonging to Hinduism may be bewildering to some minds, but could never mean that Hinduism sanctions error, as is in fact done by modern philosophy, where "genius" and "culture" count as much as, or more than, truth and where the very idea of truth is even called into question by some people.

The modems have reproached the pre-Socratic philosophers—and all the sages of the East as well—with trying to construct a picture of the universe without asking themselves whether our faculties of knowledge are at the height of such an enterprise; the reproach is perfectly vain, for the very fact that we can put such a question proves that our intelligence is in principle adequate to the needs of the case.

It is not the dogmatists who are ingenuous, but the sceptics, who have not the smallest idea in the world of what is implicit in the “dogmatism” they oppose. In our days some people go so far as to make out that the goal of philosophy can only be the search for a “type of rationality” adapted to the comprehension of “human realism”; the error is the same, but it is also coarser and meaner, and more insolent as well.

How is it that they cannot see that the very idea of inventing an intelligence capable of resolving such problems proves, in the first place, that this intelligence exists already—for it alone could conceive of any such idea—and shows in the second place that the goal aimed at is of an unfathomable absurdity? But the present purpose is not to prolong this subject; it is simply to call attention to the parallelism between the pre-Socratic—or more precisely the Ionian— wisdom and oriental doctrines such as the Vaisheshika and the Sankhya, and to underline, on the one hand, that in all these ancient visions of the Universe the implicit postulate is the innateness of the nature of things in the intellect(1) and not a supposition or other logical operation, and on the other hand, that this notion of innateness furnishes the very definition of that which the sceptics and empiricists think they must disdainfully characterize as “dogmatism”; in this way they demonstrate that they are ignorant, not only of the nature of intellection, but also of the nature of dogmas in the proper sense of the word. The admirable thing about the Platonists is not, to be sure, their “thought”, it is the content of their thought, whether it be called “dogmatic” or otherwise.

The Sophists inaugurate the era of individualistic rationalism and of unlimited pretensions; thus they open the door to all arbitrary totalitarianisms. It is true that profane philosophy also begins with Aristotle, but in a rather different sense, since the rationality of the Stagyrite tends upwards and not downwards as does that of Protagoras and his like; in other words, if a dissolving individualism originates with the Sophists—not forgetting allied spirits such as Democritus and Epicurus— Aristotle on the other hand opens the era of a rationalism still anchored in metaphysical certitude, but none the less fragile and ambiguous in its very principle, as there has more than once been occasion to point out.

Modern philosophy is a liquidation of evidences, and therefore fundament ally of intelligence; it is no longer in any degree a sophia, but much more like a “misosophy”.

A science that is called “exact” is in fact an “intelligence without wisdom”, just as postscholastic philosophy is inversely a wisdom without intelligence.

In order to get a firm grasp of the dominant tendencies of contemporary philosophy it is important to note the following: everything which does not derive either from intellectual intuition or from revelation is of necessity a form of "rationalism," because man disposes of no other resource outside the intellect.

One criterion of rationalism, even when disguised, is thinking in alternatives, which results from the fact that spanning antinomical realities is beyond the scope of reason; reason has no consciousness of analogies which exceed its radius of action, even though it is aware of them through their reflections on the physical plane; the discursive mind, beyond a certain level, sees only "segments" and not the "circle."

Let us say at once that a consciously rationalizing thought, the content of which is true, is worth infinitely more than an anti-rationalist reaction which only ends in destroying the ideas of intelligence and truth: rationalism properly so called is false not because it seeks to express reality in rational mode, so far as this is possible, but because it seeks to embrace the whole of reality in the reason, as if the latter coincided with the very principle of things.

In other words, rationalism does not present itself as a possible — and necessarily relative — development of a traditional and sapiential point of view, but it usurps the function of pure intellectuality. But there are degrees to be observed here, as for example with Aristotle: his fundamental ideas — like those of "form" and "matter" (hylomorphism) — really flow from a metaphysical knowledge, and so from supra-mental intuition; they carry in themselves all the universal significance of symbols and become rational — and therefore "abstract" — only to the extent that they become encrusted in a more or less artificial system.

There is a close relationship between rationalism and modern science; the latter is at fault not in concerning itself solely with the finite, but in seeking to reduce the Infinite to the finite, and consequently in taking no account of Revelation, an attitude which is, strictly speaking, inhuman; what we reproach modern science for is that it is inhuman — or infra-human — and not that it has no knowledge of the facts which it studies, even though it deliberately ignores certain of their modalities. It believes that it is possible to approach total knowledge of the world — which after all is indefinite — by what can only be a finite series of discoveries, as if it were possible to exhaust the inexhaustible. And what is to be said of the pretentiousness which sets out to "discover" the ultimate causes of existence, or of the intellectual bankruptcy of those who seek to subject their philosophy to the results of scientific research?

A science of the finite cannot legitimately occur outside a spiritual tradition, for intelligence is prior to its objects, and God is prior to man; an experiment which ignores the spiritual link characterizing man no longer has anything human about it; it is thus in the final analysis as contrary to our interests as it is to our nature; and "ye shall know them by their fruits." A science of the finite has need of a wisdom which goes beyond it and controls it, just as the body needs a soul to animate it, and the reason an intellect to illumine it. The "Greek miracle" with its so-called "liberation of the human spirit" is in reality nothing but the beginning of a purely external knowledge, cut off from genuine Sophia.