FROM TIME TO TIME this Journal has published articles giving broad outlines of the general field of comparative philosophy and suggesting approaches to most fruitful work in this area. Sometimes these have been full-length articles, sometimes the briefer summary statements" On Philosophical Synthesis" by outstanding philosophers of East and West. In all cases, these articles have been oriented toward ways and means of producing significant comparative philosophy. One of the latest of these was Professor Huston Smith's" Accents of the

World's Philosophies."'According to Smith, this is one more essay in what is already a fairly long series of similar ones, some of which are in fact explicitly mentioned and well-summarized by Smith. What all of these writings have in common, of course, is the desire to distinguish Eastern from Western philosophy, to characterize the attitudes or intentions of the East as reflecting certain aspirations or limitations of outlook as contrasted with very different ones in the West. To be sure, this East-West dichotomy has recently become modified into the trichotomy of the Far East (China), the Middle East (India), and the West (the last evidently including the Near East as well). In an earlier issue there appeared an article entitled" A Key to Comparative Philosophy," by the present writer. 2 In that essay, I tried to offer an alternative kind of theory. I suggested that there were certain perennially recurring types of philosophy which were to be found equally in the" East" and the" West" and that such a typology of philosophies could be constructed without any essential need to refer to either geographical or temporal factors. For the purposes of that article, a threefold classification was offered, namely," naturalism,"" moralism," and" idealism"; and individual philosophies or