Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Yoga

4. Reason, Science and Yoga

Fragment ID: 237

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Sri Aurobindo — Unknown addressee

April 24, 1934

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The¹ article reads as if it had been written by a professor rather than a philosopher. What you speak of is, I suppose, a survival of the nineteenth-century scientific contempt for metaphysics; all thinking must be based on scientific facts and the generalisations of science, often so faulty and ephemeral, must be made the basis for any sound metaphysical thinking. That is to make philosophy the handmaid of science, metaphysics the camp-follower of physics and to deny her her sovereign rights in her own city. It ignores the fact that the philosopher has his own domain and his own instruments; he may use scientific discoveries as material just as he may use any other facts of existence, but whatever generalisations science offers he must judge by his own standards – whether they are valid for transference to the metaphysical plane and, if so, how far. Still in the heyday of physical science before it discovered its own limitations and the shakiness of its scheme of things floating precariously in a huge infinity or boundless Finite of the Unknown, there was perhaps some excuse for such an attitude. But spiritualism glorified under the name of psychical research? That is not a science; it is a mass of obscure and ambiguous documents from which you can draw only a few meagre and doubtful generalisations. Moreover, so far as it belongs to the occult, it touches only the inferior regions of the occult – what we would call the lowest vital worlds – where there is as much falsehood and fake and confused error as upon the earth and even more. What is a philosopher to do with all that obscure and troubled matter? I do not catch the point of many of his remarks. Why should a prediction of a future event alter our conception – at least any philosophic conception – of Time? It can alter one’s ideas of the relation of events to each other or of the working out of forces or of the possibilities of consciousness, but Time remains the same as before.

The dream is, of course, the rendering of an attempt at communication on the subtle plane. As for the telephone and cinema, there is something of what you say, but it seems to me that these and other modern things could have taken on a different character if they had been accepted and used in a different spirit. Mankind was not ready for these discoveries, in the spiritual sense, nor even, if the present confusions are a sign, intellectually ready. The aesthetic downfall is perhaps due to other causes, a disappointed idealism in its recoil generating its opposite, a dry and cynical intellectualism which refuses to be duped by the ideal, romantic or the emotional or anything that is higher than the reason walking by the light of the senses. The Asuras of the past were after all often rather big beings; the trouble about the present ones is that they are not really Asuras, but beings of the lower vital world, violent, brutal and ignoble, but above all narrow-minded, ignorant and obscure. But this kind of cynical narrow intellectualism that is rampant now, does not last – it prepares its own end by increasing dryness – men begin to feel the need of new springs of life.

¹ This is in reply to the points raised by a disciple in the following letter to Sri Aurobindo: “On p.511 of The Listener of March 28, 1934 there are a couple of surprising assumptions – first, that metaphysics is one among the experimental sciences and has a darkened séance room for its laboratory – and secondly, that survival need not be distinguished from immortality. In the interests of clearness, most philosophical thinkers have made this distinction; it is odd that it should be ignored when such a polemic is being launched against them.... Of course, if one has a turn for practical experimenting in science, it is no doubt admirable to employ it in psychical investigation – but (unless it is assumed that all cultured human beings, or all philosophers at least, should possess and cultivate this gift) why are the majority of philosophers to be blamed for finding the results up-to-date obscure and meagre and for following their bent in confining themselves to metaphysical studies proper?”

(Regarding a dream about a long-distance telephone conversation with an acquaintance.) “In actual life I think a telephone can be far less satisfactory than an exchange of letters. Is there not something very symbolic about the emergence of telephony and cinematography just at an epoch when human behaviour and relationship is breaking down? Owing to falsehood and callousness and self-centred indifference to others, each person is to every other more and more a meaningless shadow and a deceptive voice. In The Manchester Guardian’s musical critic’s remarks on an Elgar Memorial Concert there are some good points about ‘the reaction working against nobility and tenderness in art’. I fail to see any further need for human beings either as creators or enjoyers of such ‘art’ as can still fall within the canons of fashion; perhaps, however, in an Asuric civilisation, men are anyhow superfluous and only ‘incarnated Asuras’ are required?”

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² CWSA, volume 28; Letters of Sri Aurobindo. 4 Ser. the romantic

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Current publication:

Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga // SABCL.- Volume 22. (≈ 28 vol. of CWSA).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971.- 502 p.

Other publications:

Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga. I // CWSA.- Volume 28. (≈ 22 vol. of SABCL).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2012.- 590 p.

[Largest or earliest found passage: ] Sri Aurobindo. Letters of Sri Aurobindo: In 4 Series.- Forth Series [On Yoga].- Bombay: Sri Aurobindo Sircle, 1951.- 652 p.