The Arts and Crafts of India and Ceylon (review)

182 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY lute' with the 'Community' in his metaphysical system" (p. 135). Such replacement, if one supposes it to have taken place, could scarce suffice to bear out the contention that the relation of the Roycean metaphysics to the Roycean ethics was one of irrelevance. Could it not be rather taken as affirming a close connection between Royce's ethics and Royce's metaphysics , since they do "appear to meet," but only if his metaphysics be deemed to have become purged of absolutism? To this issue the author addresses himself in the appendix. The title of the appendix is "A Guess and a Riddle." The riddle is whether or not in his later years Royce had abandoned the absolutism of his earlier philosophical idealism; and the guess is that, in substituting the "Community of Interpretation" for the "Absolute Mind" or the "Absolute Will," Royce did in effect abandon it. This is a large theme, requiring, as the author acknowledges, "another full-length work." But the problem raised is too intriguing to be ignored. Royce himself failed to explain clearly the extent to which his later position differed from the earlier. The author's sketch of the evidence in support of his guess is challenging . One wonders whether Royce's abandonment of his absolute idealism is a surmise capable of being convincingly entertained. Royce certainly deviated in some respects from his former position. This admits of little doubt. But deviation is not the same as abandonment. That in exalting the Community Royce had forsaken or renounced the Absolute is certainly questionable. There is Royce's own statement that his deepest problems and motives had always centered about the idea of the community. And there is Royce's own conception of the Absolute which must be distinguished from the caricatures of it offered by the critics. Not lacking are good grounds for believing that Royce saw no difficulty in thinking of the Absolute and the Community as notions interpretable in terms of each other. At any rate, the riddle in Royce, if such it be, provokes more than one guess. But all this is rather peripheral and should rightly be left where the author placed it. Matters appended to the body of a work are as a rule not meant to be read as integral parts of it. Whether extraneous or subsidiary, they may add to but cannot detract from the value of the finished product. And this study in Royce is a product of a high order to be commended especially for its meticulous scholarship and lucid diction. J. LOEWENBERG University of California, Berkeley The Arts and Cra#s o] India and Ceylon. By Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. (New York: The Noonday Press, introduction and index copyright 1964, by Dofia Luisa Coomaraswamy.) Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, for many years Research Fellow in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, agreed with Meister Eckhart that religion and art are "not related, but the same" (Trans]ormation o] Nature in Art, p. 62). He discussed this identity particularly in three collections of essays, two of which have been released recently in paperback editions.I In the preface to the third collection, Figures o] Speech or Figures o] Thought (London: Lusac and Company, 1946), he says "whoever makes use of these three books and of the sources referred to in them will have a fairly complete view of the doctrine about art." The present volume provides these sources. It discusses some 225 representative works from India and Ceylon, arranged in two parts, Hindu and Buddhist Art, and Mughal Art, with chapters devoted to sculpture, painting, architecture, and other crafts. First published in 1913, its reissue makes available once again a very fine introduction to the world of Indian art and a helpful companion volume to the three works mentioned. In the first chapter, entitled "Character and History," Coomaraswamy discusses the religious tradition of Hinduism with reference to its implication for the theory and practice of art. He is concerned with the whole spectrum of man's existence, believing that art should be studied not as a product of peculiar individuals called artists, but as the most adequate expression of 1The Transformation o] Nature in Art...