O~%UR task is the understanding of ~~the existence of philosophy in culture primarily as this concerns culture and only secondarily as it concerns philosophy. Men will not be happy, poverty and wars will not be abolished, until there is a better comprehension of the nature of the conditions of their living together, until they know what social groups are like in themselves, how institutions are composed, and even the nature of entire societies. Our theme is that the possession of a philosophy as such is essential to the continuance of all social organizations. To show their constitution in this regard is another matter. These are the tasks of social science, and it is no help to suppose that we have solved them already. History is the account of past cultures; it is the study of cultures conceived developmentally. The flux of cultures may be likened to a number of broad rivers, each containing side currents and eddies, some flowing on the surface, others lying at much deeper levels. The surface currents are perceived most vividly and seem to be the only ones; these are the currents of political and economic events. But far below, and with longer cycles exercising pulls, lie the currents of the ethe, the philosophical currents. How to probe and chart these more powerful subsurface influences is one problem in the analysis of cultures. Philosophy, not as expounded abstractly by philosophers but as imbedded in human cultures where it furnishes the necessary consistency, is the variety of cultural influences with which we are here concerned. Yet the argument here is that something akin to what the philosophers study abstractly as technical philosophy-under the headings of logic, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics-exists concretely in human societies as assumed by them, and in this silent form determines their structures and activities. Such a function is not explicit but implicit, not overt but covert, not recognized by those who live in cultures or even by those who make them but assumed by all types of social organization and by all social actions. Despite the highly diverse number of artifacts and events which are included in what we term culture, there is a certain consistency at work in it; otherwise we should find it difficult to recognize the existence of culture itself or to differentiate between different types of cultures. Given the variety of enterprises and activities, the arts and the sciences, the practical techniques, the customs and institutions which together make up a culture, it is difficult enough to claim a common frame for them; yet we do know that in some ways, at least, the religions of India have more in common with other things Indian than they have, say, with the religions of Europe. Nothing less than a systematic metaphysics -an ontology-could function as a set of axioms so broad that every aspect of culture assumes it. Ontology, then, can be said to be that which furnishes the consistency of culture. A culture is,