As observed above, present-day Inter-religious and Inter-faith enterprises should necessarily be also Inter-philosophical because of questions of the nature of the final achievement growing out of these efforts. Firstly, the concept of the ultimate purpose of life, though its very existence has been overshadowed by social conditions, has to be accepted as the primary determinant conditioning every effort of man in the world. No one will do anything for nothing. And what is the aim? The lesser aims, such as a comfortable life of economic and political security, may not cut ice before the more basic troubles of life which are not merely political or economic but are largely superphysical, and emanations from the very structure of the universe itself.

In all fairness and without any preconceived notion, it should be admitted that the all-embracing outlook of life, which under historical circumstances goes by the name of Hinduism, as a philosophy and religion of inclusiveness, takes into consideration life's different levels, not only the evolution of life by stages, but also the degrees of outlook in knowledge and experience. Today we have a question of the relation between science and religion, arising due to the assumption that the objectives of science and the aims of religion are irreconcilables. But Hinduism, if it is to be understood in the true spirit of its internal structure and without emphasising peripheral non-essentials, is fully awake to the levels of perception and knowledge available to the human individual. The epistemological background behind the philosophy of such a religion recognises the relative value of sense-perception and rational investigation, observation and experiment, as an acceptable avenue of knowledge, though it holds that direct intuition is the final test of absolutely valid knowledge. Science comes under the field of sense and reason, and Hinduism accepts the value and utility of the findings through these means of knowledge in practical life, provided that they do not contradict the ultimate value of all life, namely, the realisation of universality in direct experience. The manner in which this attitude of religion would affect the life of modern man should, thus, be clear and obvious; that is, the spirit of Hinduism is so accommodating that it does not reject the matter-of-fact value or the practical effectiveness of the findings of modern science. The most interesting outcome of this general outlook of Hinduism is that, in its concept of the degrees of reality, any degree, such as the relation of scientific findings to human life, is part of the total outlook of an integrated philosophy and religion. One should say that Hinduism as a religion and a philosophy introduces a new spirit of positivity and enthusiasm even into the field of physical science, rather than look upon it as something alien to itself.

Why do people differ from one another? This, again, is due to their narrow outlooks of the very purpose of life, which is wrongly limited to body, family, community, language, cultural background, tradition, or over-insistence on the revelatory character of religion. All this adds to the problem of the relationship of the way of living in the world with the idealistic concept of the final aim of existence, because it is seen that while the ideal would be expected to be one of uniformity and freedom from struggle, the world is involved in so much of an opposite character that to bring the two positions into a state of harmony a cosmological scheme may have to be clear before the mind, which unfortunately is not available to the stages in which modern ideologies of philosophy and religion stand in the varied stations of life. Indeed, it would be futile to expect such a uniformly acceptable cosmological scheme which would happily collate the disturbances of practical life with the unitariness and harmony of the ideal to be realised at the end. Though both in Greece and in India the supreme power of reason as a good ambassador of universal life has been recognised, since the degrees in which this reason manifests itself in man are several, one should not expect that all men should think in the same way the world over. The evolution of life is also the evolution of reason and spirit, and the multitudes, the varieties and differences which Nature spreads out in the process have shown that there are upper and lower limits of such degrees, and the world does not contain one thing only but many things. We can, therefore, have a comity of philosophies, religions, faiths, and national requirements, by a broad classification of the general groups of mankind into which they can be classified. But it cannot be that everyone in the world should be forced to think one thought only, whether in respect of the ultimate reality, the creation of the world, social customs and manners, governmental systems, ethics, morality, religion or philosophy. The greatness of man should then be in his capacity to accept that difference in viewpoint is unavoidable but that these differences are capable of being pyramid-like arranged into a structure of wholeness, even as the army will march as a single entity in spite of its being constituted of several levels of function, from the Field Marshal to the soldier on foot. The world has somehow managed to be a unity in variety due to the nature of the way of evolution. We have, perhaps, in these assurances answered the first four questions which were raised in a paragraph above. The remaining issues are such that they may suggest the following solutions:

While religion certainly relies on a scripture, a founder or a prophet, it is essential to note that it is man who has to understand the meaning of the scripture or the teachings of the prophets, for scriptures do not speak by themselves, and teachings do not drop from the skies. The teachings are articulated through the intelligence of man, and their import would be only to that extent as the extent of the inner capacity in man to contain their proclamations. A child, an untutored labourer, a trained specialist or a genius in handling the highest potentials of mind and reason would make out different meanings from the very same scripture or the dictations of the same founder or prophet; else how would we account for a score of apparently divergent understandings of the philosophy and religion of the same scripture or prophet by people, whether they are Hindu, Christian or Muslim? If the Prophet spoke a word, there are dozen different commentaries cropping up from his followers for understanding what was spoken, all which is the outcome of the basic difference in the very structure of human understanding, emotional need, and practical pressure in social life. It is said that either one behaves according to a decided opinion accepted by the majority, due to inability on one's part to decide things for oneself, or one stands above the social multitude and determines things by oneself, exceeding others, not as one person among many but as a principle of understanding capable of sifting and absorbing the views of others in a wider comprehension of the meaning of spiritual, cultural and social welfare. It is well known that man cannot survive by trying to destroy another man due to a disagreement in ideology, because the tendency to hate can act and react upon itself, and if allowed to grow indefinitely will point to the possibility of a universal destruction of value. That hate breeds hate is not merely a moral maxim, but a principle on which Nature works, because what is known as love is the expression of the coordinating activity of the internal composition of Nature in its varied expressions, however vast they may be. It, therefore, stands to reason that love of one's own physical existence to the exclusion of others should expand itself to love of family, community, province, nation, the world, and finally the very universe, of which all the lesser degrees are integrally subsumed parts.

What is good and what is not is not just one tenet that we can expect to form as a fruit dropped from a tree, but the point is a malleable circumstantial conduct which is to be adjusted in terms of the next higher stage of achievement, under the special conditions in which such a decision has to be made. The infinite should permit, indeed, infinite ways of approach, and, like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, life reveals itself as a kaleidoscopic presentation of a numberless variety emanating from a single unit. All this applies to every form of belief - religious, social, economic or political. These essays have been endeavouring to place before people some ideas by which one could collate principles that go to contribute in forming a sagacious system of cooperative existence in terms of its components such as education, cultural progress, economic equity, political administration, religious aspiration, and a philosophical foundation for the substantiation of one's very existence.

It is sometimes held in an over-democratic fashion that religion and politics should be kept apart, under the impression that political life is for the welfare of all and religious life may not be a uniform way of everyone's living. This conception of politics and religion is basically erroneous, because while it is true that religion interpreted wrongly as a family issue or a communal necessity may hinder the way of a peaceful life of people, it is to be remembered that this would be to call a dog a bad name and then try to hang it. Such dichotomous tendencies in a community should not be considered as a true religion, for religion is the aspiration of man for universal existence. How could political security and sound administration be possible without a universally applicable aim before the rationality at the back of the constitution of a governmental system? If politics is the body, religion is the soul of man. How would one keep the body and the soul in two different compartments? Religion is an inner directing principle of life as a whole on whose sanctions national government also have to found themselves if the country is to be not only outwardly secure but also inwardly satisfied and happy. There are no doubt national forms of government which try to make a particular form of religion the rock-bottom of political administration under compulsions of a certain militant religious leadership wanting to make the religion of an ethnic group or a geographical circumstance the religion of the whole world. Unsound as this attitude would be accepted to be even by the protagonists of such a creed, fanaticism which defies all reasonable definition assumes an ownership of wisdom denied to others who are relegated to the realm of the uncultured or even of a lower species in creation. The results of such erupting occurrences in human history are the well-known causes of clashes and wars both in word and deed. People can sometimes co-exists in an apparent state of harmony, not because they love each other equally, but because they fear each other equally. There can be peace born of goodwill or hatred when they mature into a considerable measure of force. The state or the world today as it stands at present may not be far removed from what appears to be the expected follow-up of a misreading of the relation between religious life and political government. While it is true that religion should not interfere with politics, since interference is always obstructive, it is also true that politics has no meaning without an aim before it, which is what is known as the religious ideal. Religion is the reaction of the whole of man in respect of the whole universe. To assume at the very outset that the world and God are two different things would be to strike at the root of there being any meaning at all either in the concept of God or in the possibility of any such thing as world welfare. A life which is without God and without a world to ground itself on would, indeed, be interesting.

To imagine that political government is different from the religious outlook and yet to govern a country on the on the basis of religious traditions or revelations would be to present a view of life which is neither here nor there. How could a thing which is different from another thing influence it, guide it or determine it. Religious fundamentalism, when it becomes the framer of a governmental constitution, may not be fully aware whether it is trying to import God into man, or man into God, drive the unseen into the realm of the seen, or take the seen to the unseen, a strange way of mixing up what is either difficult to understand or not in consonance with the needs of developing human nature. Such a view either wishes to limit the world to its view of God or limit God to its view of the world. On the other hand, a total estrangement of political life into a system of mechanised changes frequently required to be made in the nature of the national consciousness, and the consequent working out of it, would not know whereto it is moving and what it is trying to achieve.

All this is to say that life in the world is not so simple an affair as a temple-worship, a church-going or a bread-and-butter issue merely. Our eyes are not our only friends. Mostly our eyes mislead us and give us a wrong reading of things which they see with the spectacles organic to their structure. Philosophy is an endeavour to rectify the results of mere sense-perception and conclusions drawn on the basis of a mechanistic view of life that follows from the reports of the senses. Sense, reason and intuition form an ascending order in the educational process of right perception. Indian thought corroborates that scripture, reason and direct experience are mutually harmonious. The ladder of ascent from the different forms of the imperfections of the world to the perception which is the avowed aspiration of humanity should consist of elements inclusive not only of all the sides and phases of human nature, but also of the very nature of the universe. To look outward, to behold within, and to wonder at the above are the three channels through which the complete integration that is life attempts to know itself truly.