SEARCH FOR AN INDIAN RENAISSANCE 73 sources of knowledge, parameters of which were what was ordained. The very entry into these sources became freedom from thraldom to tradition, freedom id the making in its widest connotations as we conceive of it today. Into this and from this flowed the other stream, man's world conceived as creaiedness, as his own handiwork. I am using the word createdness and not creativity for they suggest important differences in their implications. The world was now being taken more and more in terms of, even if not so articulated, something actively being made by man; his labour, his activity and his thinking being the central points of the emerging civilisation. In a philosophical sense, the autonomy or centrality of man is nothing other than this return from Eternity to Temporality, history as an irreversible process of becoming through man's involvement in the present. Such a visualisation of social reality is nowhere more amply demonstrated, in spite of fallecies an4 one-sidedness, than in the emerging epistemology. Such a man could understand best that which he created himself. So he contrived also. Not being a philosopher by profession, I can only breifly hint at why this was so. Epistemology built on a renaissance world-view subjected man to invariant, central laws. It could do so by first subsuming him as part of one single system of nature instead of treating him as a higher being in a stratified ontology of nature, society and morality. At the root of this was the levelling idea that man himself is known in the same way as he knew anything else, a conception built on the assumption that nothing can have a standing above the evidence of its existence. What after all makes up evidence is something constructed and evaluated by man and that evidence, like nature, is public and open to scrutiny. Our experience, however unique, is a part of this public evidence in that it too is built on a combination of accumulated bits. . atom-like elements. . our sensations which are the universal building blocks. This did, not allow for any ground to assume the intrusion of anything supernatural; foreclosed by the rejection of super sensory channels entering into human cognition. Today we may rightly question this account which established the 'cognitive sovereignty', the sense experience and the explanatory models of human conduct built upon these. What is important is not the errors we can criticise but the consequences of such an epistemology. It helped in driving out all notions of finality, sacredness and extra-terrestrial authority from human reasoning; in the extreme case of Hume, even the finality of causality was given a burial. These two streams conditioned by and working in conjunction with the stupendous material transformations surrounding man drained the wordly institutions—authority structures, value sources, decision making modes—of the sacredness, a process I prefer to call by a borrowed term as de-sacralisation. More and more everything surrounding the routine life of men was emptied of religious content and