Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines

modes of reasoning, which derive from general modes of thought and serve to formulate them, are different among the Greeks than among the Easterners; one must always be careful of this when pointing out certain analogies—real though they may be—such as that of the Greek syllogism syllogism: a form of logical argument where a conclusion is drawn from two premises (e.g., All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal)., for example, with what has been called, more or less accurately, the Hindu syllogism. One cannot even say that Greek reasoning is distinguished by any particular rigor; it only appears more rigorous than others to those who are exclusively accustomed to it, and this appearance arises solely from the fact that it always confines itself to a more restricted, more limited, and therefore better-defined domain. What is truly specific to the Greeks, on the other hand—though little to their advantage—is a certain dialectical subtlety of which Plato's dialogues offer numerous examples. In these, we see the need to indefinitely examine the same question from every angle, approaching it from the most trivial sides, only to arrive at a more or less insignificant conclusion; one must believe that modern Westerners are not the first to be afflicted with "intellectual myopia" intellectual myopia: a metaphor for "nearsightedness" of the mind, or the inability to see the "big picture" of universal truths beyond small, logical details..

There is perhaps no reason, after all, to excessively reproach the Greeks for having narrowed the field of human thought as they did; on one hand, this was an inevitable consequence of their mental constitution, for which they cannot be held responsible, and on the other hand, they at least placed within the reach of a portion of humanity certain knowledge that might otherwise have remained completely foreign to them. It is easy to see this by observing what Westerners are capable of today when they find themselves directly in the presence of certain Eastern conceptions and attempt to interpret them according to their own mentality: everything they cannot reduce to "classical" forms escapes them entirely, and everything they do manage to reduce, for better or worse, is thereby distorted to the point of being rendered unrecognizable.

The so-called "Greek miracle," as its enthusiastic admirers call it, reduces down to very little in the end; or at least, where it implies a profound change, that change is a downfall: it is the individualization of conceptions, the substitution of the rational for the pure intellectual, and of the scientific and philosophical point of view for the metaphysical point of view. It matters little, moreover, whether the Greeks knew better than others how to give certain knowledge a practical character, or whether they drew consequences of such a character from it, whereas those who had preceded them had not The sentence ends abruptly here, likely continuing on the following page to explain that earlier civilizations prioritized pure knowledge over practical applications.