ABSTRACT
This indifference to ethics, politics, and other social sciences is the vulnerable point in Indian philosophy. A philosophy, if it is to satisfy fully the demands of human life, should not only provide us with a principle on which we can base our conception of the world, but also attempt to develop from it the sciences that are incident to social life. True, a synoptic view of the universe, an intellectual construction of it, should not be the sole aim of philosophy. It is the ability to rise above such an attitude that most of the Western systems are lacking. Their dominant attitude is one of intellectual curiosity rather than of a serious search after the solution of life's problems. On the other hand, we should not fail to notice that life's problems include the ethical and social. They should be related to the same principle which is to explain the nature of the world. It is very often said that the outlook of Indian philosophy is practical, that philosophy, for the Indian, is not a way of thought, but a process of life. But philosophy, if it is to be a process of life, must be a process, not of blind, but of conscious life, of a life that thinks. Studies like ethics, etc., form part of our conscious life. Our life cannot avoid thinking about them. Nor can it sunder itself into discrete and unrelated parts, and treat social sciences as having nothing to do with its theory of the world. Life is a whole, a unity, and its various phases cannot be left in isolation.
