The world today is in the throes of a new birth. Philosophers in the East and the West, tired of their isms, are groping for some new synthesis. And yet, if the truth must be told, there seems to be no agreed formula or unanimously adopted method by which the synthesis can be effected. Sympathetic exposition and comparison of major attitudes, friendly compromises consisting largely in taking over from other philosophies whatever one finds deficient in one's own philosophy, there are in plenty. But philosophic systems, in attempting to absorb what they find valid in other systems, encounter the same order of difficulty that religions do in aspiring to be World Faiths. As Professor W. E. Hocking has shown in his Hibbert Lectures,' the distortion or corrugation of shapes which occurs in the process of assimilation is attended with perils. What is needed is perhaps some comprehensive reformulation of the very bases of Eastern and Western thought which will bring with it new insights. I have not the temerity to embark on so ambitious an undertaking. It is not the work of a decade or even a century; a team of accomplished scholars is ridiculously small to do it. I shall confine myself to a more modest task. Before genuine assimilation can be effected, certain challenges must be met. The East has been accused of standing in its ancient and sacrosanct ways, permitting no jot or tittle to be altered. Without trying to absolve the East from whatever may be true in this criticism, I wish to point out that the challenge of the East, too, must be met. I am persuaded that the challenge ought to be met not only by tramping on the highways of the East, but by straying into the nooks and alleys of the West. I should like to draw attention here to some aspects of the classical Russian ontology, which draws its nourishment from the rich soil of the Eastern Church and medieval mysticism. The philosophy of Vladimir S. Solovyov (1853-1900),2 the