4 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
“A few words may be useful at the outset as an indication of what we commonly mean by the Philosophy of Religion. Philosophy was described long ago by Plato as the synoptic view of things. That is to say, it is the attempt to see things together - to keep all the main features of the world in view, and to grasp them in their relation to one another as parts of one whole. Only thus can we acquire a sense of proportion and estimate aright the significance of any particular range of facts for our ultimate conclusions about the nature of the world-process and the worldground. Accordingly, the philosophy of any particular department of experience, the Philosophy of Religion, the Philosophy of Art, the Philosophy of Law, is to be taken as meaning an analysis and interpretation of the experience in question in its bearing upon our view of man and the world in which he lives. And when the facts upon which we concentrate are so universal, and in their nature so remarkable, as those disclosed by the history of religion—the philosophy of man’s religious experience—cannot but exercise a determining influence upon our general philosophical conclusions. In fact with many writers the particular discussion tends to merge in the more general.”
“The facts with which a philosophy of religion has to deal are supplied by the history of religion, in the most comprehensive sense of that term. As Tiele puts it, “all religions of the civilized and uncivilised world, dead and living”, is a ‘historical and psychological phenomenon’ in all its manifestations. These facts, it should be noted, constitute the data of the philosophy of religion; they do not themselves constitute a ‘philosophy’ or, in Tiele’s use of the term, a ‘science’ of religion. ‘If’, he says, ‘I have minutely described all the religions in existence, their doctrines, myths and customs, the observances they inculcate and the organization of their adherents, tracing the different religions from their origin to their bloom and decay, I have merely collected the materials with which the science of religion works’. ‘The historical record, however complete, is not enough; pure history is not philosophy. To achieve a philosophy of religion we should be able to discover in the varied manifestations a common principle to whose roots in human nature we can point, whose evolution we can trace by itelligible stages from lower to higher and more adequate forms, as well as its intimate relations with the other main factors in human civilization”.
If this is Philosophy of Religion it appears to me that it is merely a different name for that department of study which is called comparative religion with the added aim of discovering a common