The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c15.s1.18

c15.s1.18

The best that can be said about all writers of the history of philosophy is that they are correct translators, paraphrasers or summarizes of old "philosophical" texts. But unless they are at the same time interested in and have devoted considerable attention to the thousand and one others items of life it cannot be safe for any scholar dealing with the *Gestalt* of culture and the trends as well as fluctuations of civilization to use them as authorities for data or interpretation. Such historians of philosophy, in so far as they are correct translators or objective summarizers, may perhaps be quite good so far as their own data, circumscribed as they happen to be, are concerned. But they require to be appraised, supplemented, and modified by evidences from the "thousand and one" other sources. One can simply be misled if interpretations by historians of philosophy, such as have not cared to study the other interests of life, about the "view of life," "ideals of culture," "spirit of civilization" etc., based as they are on very limited sources, are accepted as the chief or exclusive evidences for dissertations about the life-history of whole regions, nay, entire subcontinents not only for decades and generations, but even for centuries and millenniums. In regard to the sensate aspects of the Indian peoples Sorokin's *Social and Cultural Dynamics* has been shunted off the tracks of dependable sociology or philosophical and comparative culture-history because he has given undue importance to the translators of a particular type of texts in the extensive domain of Indian philosophy. He has thereby virtually depended on those authors who have the least to say about sensatism, or who are professionally or intellectually incapable of doing justice to sensatism *vis-à-vis* ideationalism, especially when it is a question affecting Indian culture.