The following essay by Dr Coomaraswamy is offered to Black- friars readers for the very high degree of interest which attaches to the approach from an unfamiliar standpoint to the familiar problem of the relation of science to religion.

The metaphysical focus of the essay may perhaps be best obtained from the brilliant paragraph on the Cogito of Descartes. Here the startling character of the thought is due to the contrast of the respective ways in which the imagination of East and West lends support to the concept of being. If the West, especially in that caricature of itself which is called modem philosophy, has tended to imagine reality in terms of visible solids, thus colouring the concept of being with an externality and a rigidity of outline not wholly its own, the imagination of the East has generally been more suggestive of a conception of being as an act, personal or impersonal as the point of view changes.

For St Thomas also, being is an ‘act’ to which, ultimately, even substance among the categories is potential, and, to that extent, relative. From no other position available to the West can fruitful contact be made with the tradition Dr Coomaraswamy represents.

From a deepened understanding of the principles of St Thomas’s metaphysics, it may be possible, now that Eastern writers are more readily available to explain their own thought to us, to carry the understanding of Eastern tradition further than the position outlined in the De Unitate Intellectus contra Averrhoistas. In any case it is certain that the unity, or rather the non-duality, of consciousness of which Dr Coomaraswamy speaks, has nothing to do with the evolutionary and sentimental conceptions of theological modernism.