mood with the object of arriving at the truth but in order to inflict a defeat on opponents and to establish the ascendency of some particular school of thought.  It was often a sense of personal victory and of the victory of the school of thought to which the debater adhered that led him to pursue the debate.  Advanced Sanskrit philosophical works give us a picture of the attitude of mind of these debaters and we find that most of these debates attempt to criticize the different schools of thinkers by exposing their inconsistencies and self-contradictions by close dialectical reasoning, anticipating the answers of the opponent, asking him to define his statements, and ultimately proving that his theory was inconsistent, led to contradictions, and was opposed to the testimony of experience.  In reading an advanced work on Indian philosophy in the original, a student has to pass through an interminable series of dialectic arguments, and negative criticisms (to thwart opponents) sometimes called vita@n@da, before he can come to the root of the quarrel, the real philosophical divergence.  All the resources of the arts of controversy find full play for silencing the opponent before the final philosophical answer is given.  But to a modern student of philosophy, who belongs to no party and is consequently indifferent to the respective victory of either side, the most important thing is the comprehension of the different aspects from which the problem of the theory of knowledge and its associated metaphysical theory was looked at by the philosophers, and also a clear understanding of the deficiency of each view, the value of the mutual criticisms, the speculations on the experience of each school, their analysis, and their net contribution to philosophy.  With Vedanta we come to an end of the present volume, and it may not be out of place here to make a brief survey of the main conflicting theories from the point of view of the theory of knowledge, in order to indicate the position of the Vedanta of the S’a@nkara school in the field of Indian philosophy so far as we have traversed it.  I shall therefore now try to lay before my readers the solution of the theory of knowledge (prama@navada) reached by some of the main schools of thought.  Their relations to the solution offered by the S’a@nkara Vedanta will also be dealt with, as we shall attempt to sketch the views of the Vedanta later on in this chapter.

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The philosophical situation.  A Review.

Before dealing with the Vedanta system it seems advisable to review the general attitude of the schools already discussed to the main philosophical and epistemological questions which determine the position of the Vedanta as taught by S’a@nkara and his school.