Objective linguistics seems to be near the end of its resources in dealing with the many remaining obscurities of Rig Vedic phraseology. Dr Coomaraswamy’s new subjective approach to the problem will therefore be welcome to all students of Indian art, literature, and philosophy. In this volume he has studied the Tree of Life, the Lotus of Space, the Word-Wheel, the Lotus-throne, and the Fiery Pillar. He traces these symbols far back of their first representation in Buddhist iconography through the aniconic period of the Brahmanical Vedas, even into the Rig Vedic period itself, and he shows that they represent a universal Indian symbolism and set of theological concepts.

In contrast to contemporary western theories of aesthetics, scholastic and Oriental art agree that art imitates nature in her manner of operation, not nature visually. Things, including works of art, are what they are by reason of the determining forms or ideas embodied in them, and valid judgments are impossible without an understanding of these formative ideas. Christian and Oriental art, in other words, are languages; post-renaissance art, a spectacle. Aesthetic experience, then, consists in the combined intellectual and emotional delight of the spectator’s self-identification with the indicated content. Mr Coomaraswamy’s book sets forth this view of art and at the same time makes accessible certain Oriental, and especially Indian, source material hitherto almost unknown to students.