Part Three. Writings from the Arya (1914 – 1921
Evolution
Materialism
Many hard things have been said about materialism by
those who have preferred to look at life from above rather than below or who
claim to live in the more luminous atmosphere of the idealistic mind or ether of
the spiritual existence. Materialism has been credited with the creation of
great evils, viewed even as the archimage of a detestable transformation or the
misleader guiding mankind to an appalling catastrophe. Those whose temperament
and imagination dally lovingly with an idealised past, accuse it for the
cultural, social, political changes which they abhor, regarding them as a
disturbance, happily, they believe, temporary, of eternal moral values and
divinely ordained hierarchies. Those, more numerous, who look beyond to the hope
of a larger idealism and higher spirituality, proclaim in its decline and
passing away a fortunate deliverance for the human spirit. World-wide strife and
competition have been, it is said, its fruits, war and the holocaust of terrible
sacrifice in which mankind has been squandering its strength, blood, treasure,–
though these are no new calamities, nor would it be safe to hope that they are
the last of their kind,– are pointed to as its nemesis or regarded as a funeral
pyre it has lighted for itself in whose cruel flame the errors and impurities it
brought into existence are being burned to ashes. Science has been declared
suspect as a guide or instructor of mankind and bidden to remain parked within
her proper limits, because she was for long the ally of the material view of
existence, a suggester of atheism and agnosticism, a victory-bringer of
materialism and scepticism, the throne of their reign or pillar of their
stability. Reason has been challenged because rationalism and free-thought were
appropriated as synonyms of materialistic thinking.
All this wealth of accusation may have and much of it
has its truth. But most things that the human
mind thus alternately trumpets and bans, are a double skein. They come to us
with opposite faces, their good side and their bad, a dark aspect of error and a
bright of truth; and it is as we look upon one or the other visage that we swing
to our extremes of opinion or else oscillate between them. Materialism may not
be quite as dead as most would declare it to be; still held by a considerable
number of scientific workers, perhaps a majority,– and scientific opinion is
always a force both by its power of well-ascertained truth and its continued
service to humanity,– it constitutes even now the larger part of the real temper
of action and life even where it is rejected as a set opinion. The strong
impressions of the past are not so easily erased out of our human mentality. But
it is a fast receding force; other ideas and standpoints are crowding in and
thrust it out from its remaining points of vantage. It will be useful before we
say farewell to it, and can now be done with safety, to see what it was that
gave to it its strength, what it has left permanently behind it, and to adjust
our new viewpoints to whatever stuff of truth may have lain within it and lent
it its force of applicability. Even we can look at it with an impartial
sympathy, though only as a primary but lesser truth of our actual being,– for it
is all that, but no more than that,– and try to admit and fix its just claims
and values. We can now see too how it was bound to escape from itself by the
widening of the very frame of knowledge it has itself constructed.
Admit,– for it is true,– that this age of which
materialism was the portentous offspring and in which it had figured first as
petulant rebel and aggressive thinker, then as a grave and strenuous preceptor
of mankind, has been by no means a period of mere error, calamity and
degeneration, but rather a most powerful creative epoch of humanity. Examine
impartially its results. Not only has it immensely widened and filled in the
knowledge of the race and accustomed it to a great patience of research,
scrupulosity, accuracy,– if it has done that only in one large sphere of
inquiry, it has still prepared for the extension of the same curiosity,
intellectual rectitude, power for knowledge to other and higher fields,– not
only has it with an unexampled force and
richness of invention brought and put into our hands, for much evil, but also
for much good, discoveries, instruments, practical powers, conquests,
conveniences which, however we may declare their insufficiency for our highest
interests, yet few of us would care to relinquish, but it has also, paradoxical
as that might at first seem, strengthened man’s idealism. On the whole, it has
given him a kindlier hope and humanised his nature. Tolerance is greater,
liberty has increased, charity is more a matter of course, peace, if not yet
practicable, is growing at least imaginable. Latterly the thought of the
eighteenth century which promulgated secularism has been much scouted and
belittled, that of the nineteenth which developed it, riddled with adverse
criticism and overpassed. Still they worshipped no mean godheads. Reason,
science, progress, freedom, humanity were their ideals, and which of these
idols, if idols they are, would we like or ought we, if we are wise, to cast
down into the mire or leave as poor unworshipped relics on the wayside? If there
are other and yet greater godheads or if the visible forms adored were only clay
or stone images or the rites void of the inmost knowledge, yet has their cult
been for us a preliminary initiation and the long material sacrifice has
prepared us for a greater religion.
Reason is not the supreme light, but yet is it always a
necessary light-bringer and until it has been given its rights and allowed to
judge and purify our first infra-rational instincts, impulses, rash fervours,
crude beliefs and blind prejudgments, we are not altogether ready for the full
unveiling of a greater inner luminary. Science is a right knowledge, in the end
only of processes, but still the knowledge of processes too is part of a total
wisdom and essential to a wide and a clear approach towards the deeper Truth
behind. If it has laboured mainly in the physical field, if it has limited
itself and bordered or overshadowed its light with a certain cloud of wilful
ignorance, still one had to begin this method somewhere and the physical field
is the first, the nearest, the easiest for the kind and manner of inquiry
undertaken. Ignorance of one side of Truth or the choice of a partial ignorance
or ignoring for better concentration on another side is often a necessity of our
imperfect mental nature. It is unfortunate if
ignorance becomes dogmatic and denies what it has refused to examine, but still
no permanent harm need have been done if this willed self-limitation is
compelled to disappear when the occasion of its utility is exhausted. Now that
we have founded rigorously our knowledge of the physical, we can go forward with
a much firmer step to a more open, secure and luminous repossession of mental
and psychic knowledge. Even spiritual truths are likely to gain from it, not a
loftier or more penetrating,– that is with difficulty possible,– but an ampler
light and fuller self-expression.
Progress is the very heart of the significance of human
life, for it means our evolution into greater and richer being; and these ages
by insisting on it, by forcing us to recognise it as our aim and our necessity,
by making impossible hereafter the attempt to subsist in the dullness or the
gross beatitude of a stationary self-content, have done a priceless service to
the earth-life and cleared the ways of heaven. Outward progress was the greater
part of its aim and the inward is the more essential? but the inward too is not
complete if the outward is left out of account. Even if the insistence of our
progress fall for a time too exclusively on growth in one field, still all
movement forward is helpful and must end by giving a greater force and a larger
meaning to our need of growth in deeper and higher provinces of our being.
Freedom is a godhead whose greatness only the narrowly limited mind, the
State-worshipper or the crank of reaction can now deny. No doubt, again, the
essential is an inner freedom; but if without the inner realisation the outer
attempt at liberty may prove at last a vain thing, yet to pursue an inner
liberty and perpetuate an outer slavery or to rejoice in an isolated release and
leave mankind to its chains was also an anomaly that had to be exploded, a
confined and too self-centred ideal. Humanity is not the highest godhead; God is
more than humanity; but in humanity too we have to find and to serve him. The
cult of humanity means an increasing kindliness, tolerance, charity,
helpfulness, solidarity, universality, unity, fullness of individual and
collective growth, and towards these things we are advancing much more rapidly
than was possible in any previous age, if still
with sadly stumbling footsteps and some fierce relapses. The cult of our other
human selves within the cult of the Divine comes closer to us as our large
ideal. To have brought even one of these things a step nearer, to have helped to
settle them with whatever imperfect expression and formula in our minds, to have
accelerated our movement towards them are strong achievements, noble services.
Objection can at once be made that all these great
things have no connection with materialism. The impulse towards them was of old
standing and long active in the human mind; the very principle of the
humanitarianism which has been one of the striking developments of modern
sentiment, was first brought out from our nature and made prominent by religion,
compassion and the love of man first intimately and powerfully enforced by
Christianity and Buddhism; if they have now a little developed, it is the
natural expanding from seeds that had long been sown. Materialism was rather
calculated to encourage opposite instincts; and the good it favoured it limited,
made arid, mechanised. If all these nobler things have grown and are breaking
the bounds set to them, it is because man is fortunately inconsistent and after
a certain stage of our development cannot be really and wholly materialistic; he
needs ideals, ethical expansion, a closer emotional fulfilment, and these needs
he has tacked on to his development of materialistic opinion and corrected its
natural results by them. But the ideals themselves were taken from an anterior
opinion and culture.
This is the truth, but not the whole truth. The old
religious cultures were often admirable in the ensemble and always in some of
their parts, but if they had not been defective, they could neither have been so
easily breached, nor would there have been the need of a secularist age to bring
out the results the religions had sown. Their faults were those of a certain
narrowness and exclusive vision. Concentrated, intense in their ideal and
intensive in their effect, their expansive influence on the human mind was
small. They isolated too much their action in the individual, limited too
narrowly the working of their ideals in the social order, tolerated for instance
and even utilised for the ends of church and
creed an immense amount of cruelty and barbarism which were contrary to the
spirit and truth from which they had started. What they discouraged in the soul
of the individual, they yet maintained in the action and the frame of society,
seemed hardly to conceive of a human order delivered from these blots. The depth
and fervour of their aspiration had for its shadow a want of intellectual
clarity, an obscurity which confused their working and baulked the expansion of
their spiritual elements. They nourished too a core of asceticism and hardly
cared to believe in the definite amelioration of the earth life, despised by
them as a downfall or a dolorous descent or imperfection of the human spirit, or
whatever earthly hope they admitted saw itself postponed to the millennial end
of things. A belief in the vanity of human life or of existence itself suited
better the preoccupation with an aim beyond earth. Perfection, ethical growth,
liberation became individual ideals and figured too much as an isolated
preparation of the soul for the beyond. The social effect of the religious
temperament, however potentially considerable, was cramped by excessive
other-worldliness and distrust in the intellect accentuated to obscurantism.
The secularist centuries weighed the balance down very
much in the opposite direction. They turned the mind of the race wholly
earthwards and manwards, but by insisting on intellectual clarity, reason,
justice, freedom, tolerance, humanity, by putting these forward and putting the
progress of the race and its perfectibility as an immediate rule for the earthly
life to be constantly pressed towards and not shunting off the social ideal to
doomsday to be miraculously effected by some last divine intervention and
judgment, they cleared the way for a collective advance. For they made these
nobler possibilities of mankind more imperative to the practical intelligence.
If they lost sight of heaven or missed the spiritual sense of the ideals they
took over from earlier ages, yet by this rational and practical insistence on
them they drove them home to the thinking mind. Even their too mechanical turn
developed from a legitimate desire to find some means for making the effective
working of these ideals a condition of the very structure of society.
Materialism was only the extreme intellectual
result of this earthward and human turn of the race mind. It was an intellectual
machinery used by the Time-spirit to secure for a good space the firm fixing of
that exclusive turn of thought and endeavour, a strong rivet of opinion to hold
the mind of man to it for as long as it might be needed. Man does need to
develop firmly in all his earthly parts, to fortify and perfect his body, his
life, his outward-going mind, to take full possession of the earth his
dwelling-place, to know and utilise physical Nature, enrich his environment and
satisfy by the aid of a generalised intelligence his evolving mental, vital and
physical being. That is not all his need, but it is a great and initial part of
it and of human perfection. Its full meaning appears afterwards; for only in the
beginning and in the appearance an impulse of his life, in the end and really it
will be seen to have been a need of his soul, a preparing of fit instruments and
the creating of a fit environment for a diviner life. He has been set here to
serve God’s ways upon earth and fulfil the Godhead in man and he must not
despise earth or reject the basis given for the first powers and potentialities
of the Godhead. When his thought and aim have persisted too far in that
direction, he need not complain if he is swung back for a time towards the other
extreme, to a negative or a positive, a covert or an open materialism. It is
Nature’s violent way of setting right her own excess in him.
But the intellectual force of materialism comes from
its response to a universal truth of existence. Our dominant opinions have
always two forces behind them, a need of our nature and a truth of universal
existence from which the need arises. We have the material and vital need
because life in Matter is our actual basis, the earthward turn of our minds
because earth is and was intended to be the foundation here for the workings of
the Spirit. When indeed we scan with a scrupulous intelligence the face that
universal existence presents to us or study where we are one with it or what in
it all seems most universal and permanent, the first answer we get is not
spiritual but material. The seers of the Upanishads saw this with their
penetrating vision and when they gave this expression of our first apparently complete, eventually insufficient view of Being, “Matter is the
Brahman, from Matter all things are born, by Matter they exist, to Matter they
return,” they fixed the formula of universal truth of which all materialistic
thought and physical science are a recognition, an investigation, a filling in
of its significant details, elucidations, justifying phenomena and revelatory
processes, the large universal comment of Nature upon a single text.
Mark that it is the first fact of experience from which
we start and up to a certain point an undeniable universal truth of being.
Matter surely is here our basis, the one thing that is and persists, while life,
mind, soul and all else appear in it as a secondary phenomenon, seem somehow to
arise out of it, subsist by feeding upon it,– therefore the word used in the
Upanishads for Matter is annam, food,– and collapse
from our view when it disappears. Apparently the existence of Matter is
necessary to them, their existence does not appear to be one whit necessary to
Matter. The Being does present himself at first with this face, inexorably, as
if claiming to be that and nothing else, insisting that his material base and
its need shall first be satisfied and, until that is done, grimly persistent
with little or with no regard for our idealistic susceptibilities and caring
nothing if he breaks through the delicate net of our moral, our aesthetic and
our other finer perceptions. They have the hope of their reign, but meanwhile
this is the first visage of universal existence and we have not to hide our face
from it any more than could Arjuna from the terrible figure of the Divine on the
battle-field of Kurukshetra, or attempt to escape and evade it as Shiva, when
there rose around him the many stupendous forms of the original Energy, fled
from the vision of it to this and that quarter, forgetful of his own godhead. We
must look existence in the face in whatever aspect it confronts us and be strong
to find within as well as behind it the Divine.
Materialistic science had the courage to look at this
universal truth with level eyes, to accept it calmly as a starting-point and to
inquire whether it was not after all the whole formula of universal being.
Physical science must necessarily to its own first view be materialistic,
because so long as it deals with the physical,
it has for its own truth’s sake to be physical both in its standpoint and
method; it must interpret the material universe first in the language and tokens
of the material Brahman, because these are its primary and its general terms and
all others come second, subsequently, are a special syllabary. To follow a
self-indulgent course from the beginning would lead at once towards fancies and
falsities. Initially, science is justified in resenting any call on it to
indulge in another kind of imagination and intuition. Anything that draws it out
of the circle of the phenomena of objects, as they are represented to the senses
and their instrumental prolongations, and away from the dealings of the reason
with them by a rigorous testing of experience and experimentation, must distract
it from its task and is inadmissible. It cannot allow the bringing in of the
human view of things; it has to interpret man in the terms of the cosmos, not
the cosmos in the terms of man. The too facile conclusion of the idealist that
since things only exist as known to consciousness, they can exist only by
consciousness and must be creations of the mind, has no meaning for it; it first
has to inquire what consciousness is, whether it is not a result rather than a
cause of Matter, coming into being, as it seems to do, only in the frame of a
material inconscient universe and apparently able to exist only on the condition
that that has been previously established. Starting from Matter, science has to
be at least hypothetically materialistic.
When the action of the material principle, the first to
organise itself, has been to some extent well understood, then can this science
go on to consider what claim to be quite other terms of our being,– life and
mind. But first it is forced to ask itself whether both mind and life are not,
as they seem to be, special consequences of the material evolution, themselves
powers and movements of Matter. After and if this explanation has failed to
cover and to elucidate the facts, it can be more freely investigated whether
they are not quite other principles of being. Many philosophical questions
arise, as, whether they have entered into Matter and whence or were always in
it, and if so, whether they are for ever less and subordinate in action or are
in their essential power greater, whether they are contained in it only or really contain it, whether they are subsequent and
dependent on its previous appearance or only that in their apparent organisation
here but in real being and power anterior to it and Matter itself dependent on
the essential pre-existence of life and mind. A greater question comes, whether
mind itself is the last term or there is something beyond, whether soul is only
an apparent result and phenomenon of the interaction of mind, life and body or
we have here an independent term of our being and of all being, greater,
anterior, ultimate, all matter containing and contained in a secret spiritual
consciousness, spirit the first, last and eternal, the Alpha and the Omega, the
OM. For experiential philosophy either Matter, Mind, Life or Spirit may be the
Being, but none of these higher principles can be made securely the basis of our
thought against all intellectual questioning until the materialistic hypothesis
has first been given a chance and tested. That may in the end turn out to have
been the use of the materialistic investigation of the universe and its inquiry
the greatest possible service to the finality of the spiritual explanation of
existence. In any case materialistic science and philosophy have been after all
a great and austere attempt to know dispassionately and to see impersonally.
They have denied much that is being reaffirmed, but the denial was the condition
of a severer effort of knowledge and it may be said of them, as the Upanishad
says of Bhrigu the son of Varuna, sa tapas taptvā annaṃ
brahmeti vyajānāt. “He having practised austerity discovered that Matter
was the Brahman.”
The gates of escape by which a knowledge starting from
materialism can get away from its own self-immuring limitations, can here only
be casually indicated. I may take another occasion to show how the possibility
must become in eventual fact a necessity. Physical science has before its eye
two eternal factors of existence, Matter and Energy, and no others at all are
needed in the account of its operations. Mind dealing with the facts and
relations of Matter and Energy as they are arranged to the senses in experience
and continuative experiment and are analysed by the reason, would be a
sufficient definition of physical science. Its first regard is on Matter as the
one principle of being and on Energy only as a
phenomenon of Matter; but in the end one questions whether it is not the other
way round, all things the action of Energy and Matter only the field, body and
instrument of her workings. The first view is quantitative and purely
mechanical, the second lets in a qualitative and a more spiritual element. We do
not at once leap out of the materialistic circle, but we see an opening in it
which may widen into an outlet when, stirred by this suggestion, we look at life
and mind not merely as phenomenon in Matter but as energies and see that they
are quite other energies than the material with their own peculiar qualities,
powers and workings. If indeed all action of life and mind could be reduced, as
it was once hoped, to none but material, quantitative and mechanical, to
mathematical, physiological and chemical terms, the opening would cease to be an
outlet; it would be choked. That attempt has failed and there is no sign of its
ever being successful. Only a limited range of the phenomena of life and mind
could be satisfied by a purely bio-physical, psycho-physical or bio-psychical
explanation, and even if more could be dealt with by these data, still they
would only have been accounted for on one side of their mystery, the lower end.
Life and Mind, like the Vedic Agni, have their two extremities hidden in a
secrecy, and we should by this way only have hold of the tail-end: the head
would still be mystic and secret. To know more we must have studied not only the
actual or possible action of body and matter on mind and life, but explored all
the possible action of mind too on life and body; that opens undreamed vistas.
And there is always the vast field of the action of mind in itself and on
itself, which needs for its elucidation another, a mental, a psychic science.
Having examined and explained Matter by physical
methods and in the language of the material Brahman,– it is not really
explained, but let that pass,– having failed to carry that way of knowledge into
other fields beyond a narrow limit, we must then at least consent to scrutinise
life and mind by methods appropriate to them and explain their facts in the
language and tokens of the vital and mental Brahman. We may discover then where and how these tongues of the one existence render the same
truth and throw light on each other’s phrases, and discover too perhaps another,
high, brilliant and revealing speech which may shine out as the definitive
all-explaining word. That can only be if we pursue these other sciences too in
the same spirit as the physical, with a scrutiny, not only of their obvious and
first actual phenomena, but of all the countless untested potentialities of
mental and psychic energy, and with a free unlimited experimentation. We shall
find out that their ranges of the unknown are immense. We shall perceive that
until the possibilities of mind and spirit are better explored and their truths
better known, we cannot yet pronounce the last all-ensphering formula of
universal existence. Very early in this process the materialistic circle will be
seen opening up on all its sides until it rapidly breaks up and disappears.
Adhering still to the essential rigorous method of science, though not to its
purely physical instrumentation, scrutinising, experimenting, holding nothing
for established which cannot be scrupulously and universally verified, we shall
still arrive at supraphysical certitudes. There are other means, there are
greater approaches, but this line of access too can lead to the one universal
truth.
Three things will remain from the labour of the
secularist centuries; truth of the physical world and its importance, the
scientific method of knowledge,– which is to induce Nature and Being to reveal
their own way of being and proceeding, not hastening to put upon them our own
impositions of idea and imagination, adhyāropa,– and
last, though very far from least, the truth and importance of the earth life and
the human endeavour, its evolutionary meaning. They will remain, but will turn
to another sense and disclose greater issues. Surer of our hope and our labour,
we shall see them all transformed into light of a vaster and more intimate
world-knowledge and self-knowledge.
its truth. But most things that the human
mind thus alternately trumpets and bans, are a double skein. They come to us
with opposite faces, their good side and their bad, a dark aspect of error and a
bright of truth; and it is as we look upon one or the other visage that we swing
to our extremes of opinion or else oscillate between them. Materialism may not
be quite as dead as most would declare it to be; still held by a considerable
number of scientific workers, perhaps a majority,– and scientific opinion is
always a force both by its power of well-ascertained truth and its continued
service to humanity,– it constitutes even now the larger part of the real temper
of action and life even where it is rejected as a set opinion. The strong
impressions of the past are not so easily erased out of our human mentality. But
it is a fast receding force; other ideas and standpoints are crowding in and
thrust it out from its remaining points of vantage. It will be useful before we
say farewell to it, and can now be done with safety, to see what it was that
gave to it its strength, what it has left permanently behind it, and to adjust
our new viewpoints to whatever stuff of truth may have lain within it and lent
it its force of applicability. Even we can look at it with an impartial
sympathy, though only as a primary but lesser truth of our actual being,– for it
is all that, but no more than that,– and try to admit and fix its just claims
and values. We can now see too how it was bound to escape from itself by the
widening of the very frame of knowledge it has itself constructed.
