philosophers that were found at the meeting to be distinctive. The present writer does not at all wish to challenge any of these conclusions, but he does wish to suggest that such a comparison of the East and West will not be fruitful for the study of comparative philosophy, paradoxical as this may seem. For just as no one would contrast the whole of classical antiquity with the whole modern period of European philosophy unless he were interested simply in very vague generalizations, so also no one should imagine that a mere geographical or even linguistic separation is able to lend a unique character to all the philosophy in any single culture distinguishing it from everything else. If this is true in the comparison of individual cultures, how much more applicable will it be if by the "West" we mean Greek, Roman, medieval Christian, Renaissance Italian, modern French, German, English, and contemporary American philosophy, and if by the "East" we mean ancient Egyptian and Babylonian, medieval Hebrew, Arabian and Persian, and all periods of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese philosophy! The present writer therefore wishes to suggest that the key to comparative philosophy is not the contrast of cultures but rather the contrast of basic philosophical attitudes or types of philosophy. There are certain philosophical attitudes that appear again and again at widely separated points in space and in widely separated periods of time, each of which is logically consistent within itself but in fundamental conflict with each of the others. Much further study would be required to determine the exact number and nature of these attitudes. But for the purposes of this article and in order to demonstrate the significance and value of this conception, let me arbitrarily speak of three such fundamental attitudes, understanding that this number represents undoubtedly a great simplification, although not, I hope, a falsifica-