ABSTRACT
Price, indeed, gives expression to a dogma, one which by his time had acquired the status of an orthodoxy, but which has its roots in an earlier period. Most likely, it was transmitted to Price, directly or indirectly, by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who lived and taught in Oxford in the late 1930s, and whose representations of India's intellectual past were almost universally and uncritically accepted by his English philosophical audience. According to Radhakrishnan,
Indian philosophy is "essentially spiritual", dominated by the spiritual motive, stimulated by the problems of religion, subjective, speculative and synthetic (1923: 24-30). "The whole course of Hindu philosophy", he says, "is a continuous affirmation of the truth that insight into reality does not come through analytical intellect" (1937 [1977: 65]). His own antipathy towards logic is grounded in his belief that logic has nothing to do with the real purpose of philosophy, namely the attainment of spiritual insight:
With its profound sense of spiritual reality brooding over the world of our ordinary experience, Indian thought may perhaps wean us moderns from a too exclusive preoccupation with secular life or the temporary formulations in which logical thought has too often sought to imprison spiritual aspirations ("Fragments of a Confession", p. 7).
