The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c6.s1.11

c6.s1.11

This new scepticism of "searching and impetuous souls", the Browningite faith that "men seem made for something better than the times produce", could not but have invaded the systematized bodies of knowledge nursed by academies. A revision of encyclopaedias is, therefore, the order of the hour.³ But while all other social sciences have accordingly been undergoing a comprehensive *Aufklärung* owing to the impact of "intensive" studies in anthropology, the expansion of the bounds of psychology, and the materialistic conception (that generally passes for the "economic interpretation") in history, the science of oriental lore is still in its non-age. Scholars, both in the West and the East, still take their cue from pioneer orientalists like Max Müller and Maine, and are used to interpreting the Indian "view of life" in terms of other-worldliness and pessimism, and appraising India's social, juristic, political and economic existence as but a web of archaic institutions alleged to be essentially distinct from the western. The discrepancy between the retarded growth of *indianisme* and the "geometrical" progression in the advance of other human sciences is almost as wide as that between the moral and natural philosophies of today of which Korzybski with his rigorous logic of the engineer rightly complains in the *Science and Art of Human Engineering*.