Part Three. Writings from the Arya (1914 – 1921
Section I: Rebirth and Karma
Rebirth, Evolution, Heredity
Two truths, discoveries with an enormous periphery of
luminous result and of a considerable essential magnitude, evolution and
heredity, figure today in the front of thought, and I suppose we have to take
them as a well-established unquenchable light upon our being, lamps of a
constant lustre, though not yet very perfectly trimmed, final so far as anything
is final in man’s constantly changing cinematographic process of the development
of intellectual knowledge. They may be said to make up almost the whole
fundamental idea of life in the way of seeing peculiar to a mind dominated,
fashioned, pressed into its powerful moulds by the exact, curious,
multifariously searching, yet in the end singularly limited observation and
singularly narrow reason of our modern science. Science is in her own way a
great seer and magician; she has both the microscopic and the macroscopic, the
closely gazing and the telescopic view, a dissolving power of searching analytic
resolution, a creative power of revealing synthetic effectuation. She has hunted
to their lair many of the intermediate secret processes of the great creatrix,
and even she has been able, by the inventive faculty given to us, to go and do
one better. Man, this midget in infinity, locomotive yet nailed to the
contiguity of a petty crust of soil by the force of gravitation, has certainly
scored by her a goodly number of points against the mother of the universe. But
all this has been done in some perfection only in the limits of her lowest
obtrusive physical field.
Face to face with psychic and spiritual secrecies, as
in the open elementary world even of mind, Science has still the uninformed gaze
and the groping hands of the infant. In that sphere she, so precise,
illuminative, compelling in the physical, sees only the big blazing buzzing
confusion which James tells us, with a possibly inaccurate vividness of
alliterative phrase, is the newborn baby’s view
of the sensible world into which he has dropped down the mysterious stairs of
birth. Science, faced with what are still to her the wonderful random accords
and unexplained miracles of consciousness, protects herself from the errors of
the imagination,– but stumbling incidentally by that very fact into plenty of
the errors of an inadequate induction,– behind an opaque shield of cautelous
scepticism. She clings with the grasping firmness of the half-drowned to planks
of security she thinks she has got in a few well-tested correspondences,–
so-styled, though the word as used explains nothing,– between mental action and
its accompaniment of suggestive or instrumental physical functionings. She is
determined, if she can, to explain every supraphysical phenomenon by some
physical fact; psychological process of mind must not exist except as result or
rendering of physiological process of body. This set resolution, apparently
rational and cautious of ascertainable and firmly tangible truth, but really
heroic in its paradoxical temerity, shuts up her chance of rapid discovery, for
the present at least, in a fairly narrow circle. It taints too her extensions of
physical truth into the psychological field with a pursuing sense of inadequacy.
And this inadequacy in extended application is very evident in her theories of
heredity and evolution when she forces them beyond their safe ground of physical
truth and labours to illumine by them the subtle, complex, elusive phenomena of
our psychological being.
There are still, I dare say, persons here and there who
cherish a secret or an open unfaith in the theory of a physical evolution and
believe that it will one day pass into the limbo of dead generalisations like
the Ptolemaic theory in astronomy or like the theory of humours in medicine; but
this is a rare and excessive scepticism. Yet it may not be without use or
aptitude for our purpose to note that contrary to current popular notions the
scientific account of this generalisation, like that of a good number of others,
is not yet conclusively proved, even though now taken for granted. But still
there is on the whole a mass of facts and indications in its favour so
considerable as to look overwhelming, so that we cannot resist the conclusion
that in this way or some such way the whole
thing came about and we find it difficult to conceive any more convincing
explanation of the indubitable ascending and branching scale of genus and
species which meets even our casual scrutiny of living existence. One thing at
least seems now intellectually certain, we can no longer believe that these suns
and systems were hurled full-shaped and eternally arranged into boundless space
and all these numberless species of being planted on earth ready-made and nicely
tailored in seven days or any number of days in a sudden outburst of caprice or
Dionysiac excitement or crowded activity of mechanical conception by the fiat of
a timeless Creator. The successive development which was summarily proposed by
the ancient Hindu thinkers, the lower forms of being first, man afterwards as
the crown of the Spirit’s development of life on earth, has been confirmed by
the patient and detailed scrutiny of physical science,– an aeonic development,
though the farther Hindu conception of a constant repetition of the principle in
cycles is necessarily incapable of physical evidence.
One thing more seems now equally certain that not only
the seed of all life was one,– again the great intuition of the Upanishads
foreruns the conclusions of the physical enquiry, one seed which the universal
self-existence by process of force has disposed in many ways,
ekaṃ bījaṃ bahudhā śakti-yogāt,– but even the principle of development is
one and the structural ground-plan too as it develops step by step, in spite of
all departures to this side or that in the workings of the creative Force or the
creative Idea. Nature seems to start with an extraordinary poverty of original
broad variative conceptions and to proceed to an extraordinary richness of her
minuter consequential variations, which amounts to a forging of constant subtle
differentiations of species and in the individual a startling insistence on
result of uniqueness. It almost looks as if in the process of her physical
harmonies there was meant to be some formal effect or symbolic reproduction of
the truth that all things are originally one being, but a one who insists on his
own infinite diversity, and even a suggestion that there is in this eternal
unity an eternal pluralism, the Infinite Being self-repeated in an infinite multiplicity of beings each unique and yet each the One. To a mind on
the look-out for the metaphysical suggestions we can draw from the apparent
facts of being, that might not seem altogether an imagination.
In any case we have this now patent order in the
profuse complexities of the natural harmony of living things,– one plasmic seed,
one developing ground-plan, an opulent number of varieties whose logical process
would be by an ascending order which passes up through fine but still very
distinct gradations from the crude to the complex, from the less organised to
the more organised, from the inferior to the superior type. The first question
that should strike the mind at once, when this tree of life has been seen, is
whether this logical order was indeed the actual order in the history of the
universe, and then, a second, naturally arising from that problem, whether, if
so, each new form developed by variation from its natural predecessor or came in
by some unknown process, a fresh, independent and in a way sudden creation. In
the first case, we have the scientific order of physical evolution,– in the
other one knows not well what, perhaps an unseen Demiurge who developed the
whole thing in the earlier period of the earth evolution and has now wholly or
almost entirely stopped the business so that we have no new physical development
of that kind, but only, it may be, an evolution of capacity in types already
created. Science stands out for a quite natural and mechanical, a quite unbroken
physical evolution with many divergent lines indeed of developing variation, but
in the line no gap or interstice. It is true that there are not one but a host
of missing links, which even the richest remains of the past cannot fill in, and
we are not in a position to deny with an absolute dogmatism the possibility of
an advance per saltum, by a rapid overleaping, perhaps even by a crowded
psychical or bio-psychic preparation whose result sprang out in the appearance
of a new type with a certain gulf between itself and the preceding forms of
life. With regard to man especially there is still an enormous uncertainty as to
how he, so like yet so different from the other sons of Nature, came into
existence. Still the gaps can be explained away, there is a great mass of telling facts in favour of the less physically anarchic view, and it
seems to have on its side the right of greatest probability in a material
universe where the most perfectly physical principle of proceeding would seem to
be the just basic law.
But even if we admit the most scrupulous and rigorous
continuity of successive determination, the question arises whether the process
of evolution has been indeed so exclusively physical and biological as at first
sight it looks. If it is, we must admit not only a rigorous principle of class
heredity, but a law of hereditary progressive variation and a purely physical
cause of all mental and spiritual phenomena. Heredity by itself means simply the
constant transmission of physical form and biological characteristics from a
previous life to its posterity. There is very evidently such a general force of
hereditary transmission within the genus or species itself, as the tree so the
seed, as the seed so the tree, so that a lion generates a lion and not a cat or
a rhinoceros, a man a human being and not an ourang-outang,– though one reads
now of a curious and startling speculation, turning the old theory topsy-turvy,
that certain ape kinds may be, not ancestors, but degenerate descendants of man!
But farther, if a physical evolution is the whole fact, there must be a capacity
for the hereditary transmission of variations by which new species are or have
been created,– not merely in the process of a mixture or crossing, but by an
internal development which is stored up and handed down in the seed. That too
may very well be admitted, even though its real process and rationale are not
yet understood, since the transmission of family and individual characteristics
is a well-observed phenomenon. But then the things transmitted are not only
physical and biological, but psychological or at least bio-psychic characters,
repetitions of customary nervous experience and mental tendency, powers. We have
to suppose that the physical seed transmits these things. We are called upon to
admit that the human seed for instance, which does not contain a developed human
consciousness, yet carries with it the powers of such a consciousness so that
they reproduce themselves automatically in the thinking and organised mentality
of the offspring. This, even if we have to accept
it, is an inexplicable paradox unless we suppose either that there is something
more behind, a psychical power behind the veil of material process, or else that
mind is only a process of life and life only a process of matter. Therefore
finally we have to suppose the physical theory capable of explaining by purely
material causes and a material constitution the mystery of the emergence of life
in matter and the equal mystery of the emergence of mind in life. It is here
that difficulties begin to crowd in which convict it, so far at least, of a
hopeless inadequacy, and the nature of that inadequacy, its crux, its
stumbling-point leave room for just that something behind, something psychical,
a hidden soul process and for a more complex and less materialistic account of
the truth of evolution.
The materialistic assumption – it is no more than a
hypothetical assumption, for it has never been proved – is that development of
non-living matter results under certain unknown conditions in a phenomenon of
unconscious life which is in its real nature only an action and reaction of
material energy, and the development of that again under certain unknown
conditions in a phenomenon of conscious mind which is again in its real nature
only an action and reaction of material energy. The thing is not proved, but
that, it is argued, does not matter; it only means that we do not yet know
enough; but one day we shall know,– the necessary physiological reaction called
by us an intuition or train of reasoning crowned by discovery having, I suppose,
taken place in a properly constituted nervous body and the more richly
convoluted brain of a Galileo of biology,– and then this great and simple truth
will be proved, like many other things once scoffed at by the shallow common
sense of humanity. But the difficulty is that it seems incapable of proof. Even
with regard to life, which is by a great deal the lesser difficulty, the
discovery of certain chemical or other physical and mechanical conditions under
which life can be stimulated to appear, will prove no more than that these are
the favourable or necessary conditions for the manifestation of life in body,–
such conditions there must be in the nature of things,– but not that life is not
another new and higher power of the force of universal being. The connection of life responses with physical conditions and stimuli proves very
clearly that life and matter are connected and that, as indeed they must do to
coexist, the two kinds of energy act on each other,– a very ancient knowledge;
but it does not get rid of the fact that the physical response is accompanied by
an element which seems to be of the nature of a nervous excitement and an
incipient or suppressed consciousness and is not the same thing as the companion
physical reaction.
When we come to mind, we see – how could it be
otherwise in an embodied mind? – a response, interaction, connection, a
correspondence if you will; but no amount of correspondence can show how a
physical response can be converted into or amount to or by itself constitute in
result a conscious operation, a perception, emotion, thought-concept, or prove
that love is a chemical product or that Plato’s theory of ideas or Homer’s Iliad
or the cosmic consciousness of the Yogin was only a combination of physiological
reactions or a complex of the changes of grey brain matter or a flaming marvel
of electrical discharges. It is not only that common sense and imagination
boggle at these theories,– that objection may be disregarded,– not only that
perception, reason and intuition have to be thrust aside in favour of a forced
and too extended inference, but that there is a gulf of difference here between
the thing to be explained and the thing by which it is sought to explain it
which cannot be filled up, however much we may admit nervous connections and
psycho-physical bridges. And if the physical scientist points to a number of
indicative facts and hopes one day to triumph over these formidable
difficulties, there is growing up on the other side an incipient mass of
psychical phenomena which are likely to drown his theory in fathomless waters.
The insuperability of these always evident objections is beginning to be more
widely recognised, but since the past still holds considerable sway, it is
necessary to insist on them so that we may have the clear right to go on to more
liberal hypotheses which do not try prematurely to reduce to a mechanical
simplicity the problem of our being.
One of these is the ancient view that not only
incidence of body and life on mind and soul, but incidence of mind and soul on body and life have to be considered. Here too there is the
evolutionary idea, but physical and life evolution, even the growth of mind, are
held to be only incidental to a soul evolution of which Time is the course and
the earth among many other worlds the theatre. In the old Indian version of this
theory evolution, heredity and rebirth are three companion processes of the
universal unfolding, evolution the processional aim, rebirth the main method,
heredity one of the physical conditions. That is a theory which provides at
least the framework for a harmonious explanation of all the complex elements of
the problem. The scientific idea starts from physical being and makes the
psychical a result and circumstance of body; this other evolutionary idea starts
from soul and sees in the physical being an instrumentation for the awakening to
itself of a spirit absorbed in the universe of Matter.
the newborn baby’s view
of the sensible world into which he has dropped down the mysterious stairs of
birth. Science, faced with what are still to her the wonderful random accords
and unexplained miracles of consciousness, protects herself from the errors of
the imagination,– but stumbling incidentally by that very fact into plenty of
the errors of an inadequate induction,– behind an opaque shield of cautelous
scepticism. She clings with the grasping firmness of the half-drowned to planks
of security she thinks she has got in a few well-tested correspondences,–
so-styled, though the word as used explains nothing,– between mental action and
its accompaniment of suggestive or instrumental physical functionings. She is
determined, if she can, to explain every supraphysical phenomenon by some
physical fact; psychological process of mind must not exist except as result or
rendering of physiological process of body. This set resolution, apparently
rational and cautious of ascertainable and firmly tangible truth, but really
heroic in its paradoxical temerity, shuts up her chance of rapid discovery, for
the present at least, in a fairly narrow circle. It taints too her extensions of
physical truth into the psychological field with a pursuing sense of inadequacy.
And this inadequacy in extended application is very evident in her theories of
heredity and evolution when she forces them beyond their safe ground of physical
truth and labours to illumine by them the subtle, complex, elusive phenomena of
our psychological being.
