Since ideals rule speech and action, it stands to reason that life is moulded by one's outlook of life, as things take the shape of the crucible into which they are cast. Mutual relation among people being an indispensable factor in personal as well as social life, mutual concern follows automatically as a consequence of this unavoidable structure of humanity. To have concern for another is to be able to appreciate the circumstances of the life of the other, and to share adequately in the conditions of life in general. The determining factors of life are also the deciding issues in the survival of humanity. In a mood of historical stress it may be held for a while that economic conditions determine the lives of people, but it is also apparent that there would be no economic conditions if there are no people involved in those conditions. It would be futile to identify the human being with material forces, an offshoot of which is the economic set-up made much of many a time under the exigencies of overweight on one side of the balance of social existence, brought about sometimes by peculiar historical and political conditions. It cannot be said that these stages in human history are the permanent values of life, because they pass away, giving way to newer conditions. But man, the human being, has an element of consistency not capable of being swept away so easily as the commonly observed procedure of the temporal march of world history. It does not mean that man lives only for food and drink, clothing and shelter, and even necessary physical security at its best, which are summed up broadly in the so-called economic conditions, though they are absolutely necessary aspects of physical existence. But is man only physical, a concatenation of material, the components of physical nature? Is mental peace identical with material possession or social status? The hopes of man do not give him rest, since the dimensions of his personality seem to cross the borders of material needs and social relations. Often his inner being seems to be looking up to the skies, the starry heavens, where he would like to seek his abode of a less articulated but more pressing satisfaction, of not only possession, but also the character of endurance. What is the length of the period of life of an economically secure person who has absolutely no complaint against prevailing conditions? The phenomenon of death is not a metaphor or a fairy-tale which well-established economic conditions can ignore and to which they can afford to pay scant respect. If 'sceptre and crown tumble down,' and king and beggar lick the same dust of the earth as the crowning glory that ends their lives, the vainglorious conclusion that military power, economic conditions and industrial advancement are the fruits of progress may have to be shed as early as possible.

The survival of humanity seems to be more in mutual understanding and feelingful appreciation than money or power, or anything of that kind. The question is: What are the conditions which would enable one person to appreciate another? Even Cain could not love Abel, and he told God that 'he is not his brother's keeper.' But if we are not our brothers' keepers, and if this analogy is a description of the fate of man, mutual love and regard would be less real than a chimera. The whole situation is that man is not merely a brother of another man whom he can keep or reject at his will, but every man is potentially more than a brother or a friend in the social sense. The permanency of values and conditions of life in general, which everyone hopes for, cannot be attributed to conditions of the physical body, for brotherly feeling is not a relation between masses of matter. That mental conditions and psychological circumstances rule life more than other obvious factors needs no special mention. Happiness is an intriguing and not easily describable fact of life, and it is difficult to know where it actually lies. Since external conditions are subject to natural changes, nothing in the world which is wholly external to man can be said to be the source of his happiness. Even one's body is not a reliable source of satisfaction, as it can pass away as anything else can pass away. If Nature as a whole is a process of transmutation, and history is a movement of ups and downs of the governing forces of all life, if the body itself is not a permanent associate, then where does happiness lie, for the sake of which it is that everything is endeavoured to be done and the world is so busy from creation onwards ? The indubitability of the presence of something that is more permanent than the visible world of persons and things is too obvious to need reiteration.

Concepts and ideas do not always arise from external occurrences. Modern science tells us that events do not take place in space, and so, perhaps, they do not also take place in time. The modern physical theory of the quantum, especially David Bohm's and John Bell's discovery of simultaneous action and unbroken wholeness in a non-spatial universe, has become an eye-opener recently to all dogmatism of local conditions deciding the values of life or the very meaning of existence. Ideas determine things, and they are more universal than the particular objects in the world. If our thoughts are a balance of coordinated ideas, and feelings commingle in a fraternity of mutual dependence, there would be a greater chance of our survival in the world, and better possibilities of recognising a deeper significance in our existence. We have these days Interfaith Conferences, Inter-cult Organisations, and Inter-religious dialogues undertaken and initiated by well-meaning persons with the purpose of knitting the world together into a fabric of enduring values and secure foundations. However, though cults, creeds and religions are important, and healthy international relations absolutely necessary, all these endeavours and the round-table talks thereon started with noble intentions have mostly been seen to end up with the same fears and reservations which motivated the very enterprise of the conferences. Mere intentions will not do; intentions should also yield the fructification of their purpose.

What is generally known as philosophy is the concept of the final ideal of life, which creeps through the veins of every mental mood, and it finally decides upon what one would like to say or do. There are certain questions of the following category:

1. What is one's concept of the ultimate aim of life?
2. What is the view held about the creation of the world?
3. What is the idea about the true nature of man?
4. What should be the relation between man and man?
5. To what extent is the influence exerted in life by:
1. Reliance on scripture.
2. Belief in theological traditions.
3. Concepts of ethics and morality.
4. Rituals and ceremonies, festivals, diversions and holidays among communities of people?
6. What is one's idea of a stable political government?
7. What should be the pattern of an exemplary educational system?
8. What is the influence exerted by language and the cultural background into which one is born?
9. What is one's attitude towards other religions, cultures and ways of living?
10. Why should one exist at all?

These are not merely philosophical questions, but the very bricks of the structure which one would like to build for life in the world.

Philosophy was always, and perhaps even now is, considered as being divided into the Western and the Eastern schools, so that one often speaks of Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy. It is indeed doubtful if 'the twain shall never meet'. The difference between the world views of Plato and Aristotle, between the rationalist block of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, and the empirical one of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, between Kant and Hegel, between idealism and realism, is not such an unbridgeable gap as it is unnecessarily made to appear. There can be inter-philosophical dialogue even among the Continental a-priorists and the British a-Posteriorists. It finally amounts to a question of being able to reconcile the two phases of a single fact. Plato's idealism, lifting the region of the archetypes above the world of sense, is not in any way different from Aristotle making a distinction between form and matter. The only point that we have to understand is that the archetypes are as much immanent in the sensory realm as Plato seems to have made them look transcendent; the same is the case with Aristotle's form and matter relation, because the form, while it is potential in matter, is also transcendent, without which feature there would not be the unfolding of form from matter through evolution into pure form, which is, in the end, identical with Plato's 'Idea of the Good.' The Prime Mover of Aristotle, the Unmoved Mover, as he calls it, is the same as the Supreme Idea of Plato. The difference is one of description, epigram, and style of presentation. The dualism of matter and mind that is attributed to Descartes may get mellowed down into a more appreciable inter-relation between them, if only we can go a little deeper into his 'Cogito ergo sum': 'I think, therefore, I am'. The 'I am' is the crucial issue. It would be difficult to believe that Descartes' thought objects to the mutual dependence of the world of matter and the deeper reservoir of consciousness from which the 'I' emanates as an offshoot. The internality of the mind is dependent on the externality of the world, and the externality of the world equally depends on the internality of the cognising mind. Spinoza makes it more clear when he takes the position of matter and mind being two wings of the bird of the Ultimate Substance, the two attributes of the Primary Existence. The windowless monads of Leibniz are saved from their concentration camps by their immortality which frees them from an apparent individualism characteristic of temporality in timeless Eternity, which alone can be immortal beyond time. Also, there would have been no Hegel but for a Kant, though they seem to be antitheses, as between agnosticism and the self-conviction of reason. The interdependence of the phenomenon and the noumenon in Kant's thought, whether known to himself or not, is the point from which Hegel raises his structure of the Absolute Reason, which is, in the end, the only noumenon, or the thing-in-itself. The consciousness of everything being phenomenal repudiates the view that one can know only phenomena. Later thinkers in the West, whether they are Hegelian idealists or Neo-realists, Pragmatists, or theologists have found it necessary to align themselves with the unavoidable necessity to find a common ground from which issues of life rise, and, if 'no man is an island,' no thought, too, can be an island. It is not just that in Carl Jung we have a blend of psychoanalytic thought overstepping the limits of Freud and Adler, but present psychoanalysis has tended to become unavoidably religious and spiritual, stepping over the subliminal layers of the mind, and even the collective unconscious or the common psychological ground of the species. Else, how does one explain the present-day tendency in the world to work for a more secure togetherness of world opinion and human value?

Insofar as the intrinsic relation between Western philosophic thought and the Eastern conception of life is concerned, it does not require much time to note that the foundational thought of Plato, for instance, centred around a Universal Idea, easily corresponds to the Brahman of the Vedanta system, his Demiurge is the Creative Hiranyagarbha, and his World-Soul is the Virat of the Upanishad and Vedanta ideal. The manner in which Plato's world of reality informs the world of opinion, as he describes it, is the same as , the all-pervading Ishvara determining and yet standing above the created beings, who become more and more a tendency to non-being as they descend downward into the realm of sense. The same analogy applies to Aristotle, with his doctrine of form as the soul of matter, which evolves into the Perfect Form, and the world is redeemed by God as things are pulled in the direction of a magnet. Aristotle's, fourfold classification of causation as the 'formal,' 'material,' 'efficient' and 'final,' 'does not in any way dissimilarly correspond to the degrees of reality corresponding to the Absolute (Paramarthika) and relative (Vyavaharika) standpoints envisaged by the philosopher Sankara. The doctrine of the universality of reason, which is the high watermark in Aristotle as well as in Plato, meets in conformity with the great reaches and the heights of rationality on which the Vedanta doctrine is founded. There is no need to go into the almost identical doctrine of Philo and Plotinus of Alexandria in the religious summits that they have reached, and in the manner Plotinus describes the vision of the One in terms of the experiences attributed to souls in Brahmaloka, where each is all and all is each, and everything is everywhere. The ontological argument of St. Anslem and Descartes, wrongly formulated and misunderstood by Kant, is reasonably a proper result that would follow from the affirmation of the 'Cogito ergo sum' of Descartes, if only it is to be interpreted as the Vedanta affirms the indubitability of the 'I' as something which no one can deny or suspect as being there and traces its deeper implications which may not be obvious. The 'henological' argument of St. Thomas Aquinas for the existence of God is the same as the outcome of the degrees of more and more of generalities (samanyas) supposed to reach their pinnacle in the Absolute-General of Brahman as held in the Vedanta. The other arguments for the existence of God adumbrated by St. Thomas are the same as those that one can find in the commentaries of Sankara. The epoch-making contributions of T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet are the highest points that Western metaphysics has reached, which astoundingly embrace the Vedanta doctrine of universal existence ruling over the particulars and the specials of the world of experience, though couched specially in the philosophical logic peculiar to Western analytic thought. The trend of Western thought has been individualistic and empiricist, outwardly oriented, active, progressive, and characterised by an onward movement to more and more achievement, while Eastern thought has been considered to be universalist, idealistic, self-poised, perfectionist, emphasising being rather than becoming. This distinction often made, though not without substance, can be overcome in the same way as Continental rationalism and British empiricism can be brought together in a single forum. That geographical conditions and the impact of climate are partly responsible for Western activism and Eastern pacificism is more secondary as a cause than an essential element differentiating Western culture from the Eastern way of life. It is also not that the East is more religious and the West can afford to manage without an inward enthusiasm. The essence of the matter is that apart from geographical and historical circumstances and racial delimitations of behaviour, there is also the accepted view of a cyclic movement of culture which presents different phases in a succession of historical movement. Culture moved from the Babylonian, Assyrian and Egyptian region to Greece and Rome, to Europe, England and America. It is also held that the sun of culture moves from the East to the West. From India and China, which have been the repositories of the most ancient of cultures, culture moved westward to Persia and to the further Western points gradually, culminating in the present-day economic and power blocs of the world, too materialistic, to say the least, but incapable of standing on their legs for long, if it is true that matter has an inherent tendency to overcome externality in an internal search for the universal.