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<b>
<font face="Times New Roman"><i>Human Progress</i> </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">CREATION has evolved. That is to say, there has been a growth
and unfoldment and progress. From nebulae to humanity the
march cannot but be called an advance, a progress, in more
senses than one. But the question is about man. Has man
advanced, progressed since his advent upon earth ? If so, in
what manner, to what extent ? Man has been upon earth for
the last two million years, they say. From what has happened
before him in the course of Nature's evolution, it is legitimate
to infer that man too, in his turn, has moved forward in the
line towards growth and development. In fact, if we admit
that man started life as a savage or jungle-man or ape-man,
and look at him as he is today, we have perforce to acknowledge that he has not merely changed but progressed too. The<br>
question to be answered is in what sense this progress has been
made.&nbsp; </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Modern knowledge has taught us that what marks the
growth of man is his use of tools. An animal has nothing else
than its own limbs as its all-serving tool. Man emerged as
man the day he knew how to use tools as an extension of his
limbs. And the cycles of human growth have, in consequence,
been marked off by the type of tools used. As we all know,
anthropologists tell us, there have been four such cycles or
ages: (1) the Old Stone Age, (2) the New Stone Age, (3) the<br>
Bronze Age and (4) the Iron Age. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In the first age, which is by far the longest period, a period
of slow and difficult preparation, man had his first lessons in a
conscious and victorious dealing with Nature. The day when
he first started chipping a stone was a red-letter day for him;&nbsp; for, by that very gesture be began shredding his purely animal
vesture. And when he not only chipped but succeeded in </font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">Page 80</font><hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">grinding and polishing a piece of stone, he moved up one step
further and acquired definitely his humanity. Again, ages
afterwards when his hand could-wield and manipulate as it
liked not only a stone but a metal, his skill and dexterity
showed a development unique in its kind, establishing and
fixing man's manhood as a new emergent factor. In this phase
also there was a first period of training and experiment, the
period of craftsmanship in bronze; with the age of iron, man's
arms and fingers attained a special deftness and a conscious
control directed from a cranium centre which has become by now a model of rich 
growth and complex structure and marvellous organisation. The impetus towards more and more efficiency in the making and handling of tools has not ceased: the craftsmanship in iron soon led to the discovery of steel and
steel industry. The temper and structure of steel are symbolic
and symptomatic of the temper and structure of the brain
that commands the weapon—strong, supple, resistant, resilient, capable of 
fineness and sharpness and trenchancy to an extraordinary degree. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This growing fineness and efficiency of the tool has served
naturally to develop and enrich man's external possession and
dominion. But this increasing power and dominion over
Nature is not the most important consequence involved; it is
only indicative of still greater values, something momentous,
something subjective, pregnant with far-reaching possibilities.
For the physical change is nothing compared with the psychological change, the change in the consciousness. In taking up<br>
his tool to chip a stone man has started hewing out and moulding entire Nature: he has become endowed with the sense of
independence and agency. An animal is a part and parcel of Nature, has no life 
and movement apart from the life and movement of Nature—even like Wordsworth's child of Nature— </font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,<br>
With rocks, and stones, and trees.<sup>1 </sup> </font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">An animal does not separate itself from Nature, exteriorise it
and then seek to fashion it as he wants, try to make it yield
things he requires. Man is precisely man because he has just
</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman" size="2">&nbsp;1&quot;A slumber did my spirit seal&quot;, <i>Miscellaneous Poems</i> </font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">Page 81</font><hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">this sense of self and of not-self and his whole life is the conquest of the not-self by the self: this is the whole story of his
evolution. In the early stages his sense of agency and selfhood
is at its minimum. The rough-hewn flint instruments are
symbolic of the first attempts of the brain to set its impress,
upon crude and brute nature. The history of man's artisanship, which is the history of his civilisation, is also the history
of his growing self-consciousness. The consciousness in its
attempt to react upon nature separated itself from Nature,
and at first stood over against it and then sought to stand over
and above it. In this process of extricating itself from the
sheath in which it was involved and fused, it came back upon
itself, became more and more aware of its freedom and individual identity and agency. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The question is now asked how far this self-consciousness—given to man by his progress from stone to steel—has advanced
and what is its future. The crucial problem is whether man
has progressed in historical times. Granted that man with an
iron tool is a more advanced type of humanity than man with
a chipped stone tool, it may still be enquired whether he has
made any real advance since the day he learnt to manipulate metal. If by advance 
or -progress we mean efficiency and multiplication of tools, then surely there can be no doubt that
Germany of today (perhaps now we have to say Germany of
yesterday and America of today) is the most advanced type
of humanity—indeed they do make the claim in that country. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; So it is argued that man may have built up more and more
efficient organisation in his outer life, he may have learnt<b> 
</b>to<b> 
</b>wield a greater variety and wealth of tools and instruments in
an increasing degree of refinement and power; but this, does
not mean that his character, his nature or even the broad
mould of his intelligence has changed or progressed. The
records and remains of Predynastic Egypt or of Proto-Aryan
Indus valley go to show that those were creations of civilised&nbsp;
men, as civilised as any modern people. The mind that produced the Rig Veda or the Book of the Dead or conceived the
first pyramid is, in essential power of intelligence, no whit
inferior to any modern scientific brain. Hence a distinction is
sometimes made between culture and civilisation; what the
moderns have achieved is progress with regard to civilisation, </font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">Page 82</font><hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">that is to say, the outer paraphernalia; but as regards culture
a Plato, a Lao-tse, a Yajnavalkya are names to which we still
bow down. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; One can answer, however, that even if in the last eight or
ten thousand years which, they say, is the extent of the present
cycle, the civilised or cultural life of humanity has not changed
much, this does not mean that it cannot, will not change. The
paleolithic age, it appears, covered a period of thirty to forty
thousand years; the neolithic age also must have lasted some
fifteen thousand years. The metal age is now not more than ten
thousand years. So it does not seem to be too late; perhaps it
is just time for another radical and crucial change to come as
the chronological scheme would seem to demand. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; We propose, however, to reopen the question and enquire
if there has not been some kind of radical change or progress
in the make-up of human nature and civilisation even within
the span of historical times. This reminds us of the remarkable
conclusion or discovery made by the much maligned and
much adulated Psycho-analysts. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Jung speaks of two kinds or grades of thinking: (1) the
directed thinking and (2) the wishful thinking; one conscious
and objective, the other automatic and subjective. The first
is the modern or scientific thinking, the second the old-world
mythoposic thinking. These two lines of mental movement
mark off two definite stages in the cultural history of man.
Down to the Middle Ages man's mental life was moved and
coloured by his <i>libido—</i>desire soul; it is with the Renascence
that he began to free his mind from the libido and transfer and transform the 
libido into non-egoistic and realistic thinking. In simpler psychological terms we can say that man's
mentality was coloured and modulated by his biological
make-up out of which it had emerged; the age of modernism
and scientism began with the development of a rigorous
rationalism which means a severance and transcendence of
the biological antecedent.&nbsp; </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In other words, it can be said that the older humanity was 
intuitive and instinctive, while modern humanity is rationalistic. Now it has been questioned whether this change or reorientation is a sign of progress, whether it has not been at the
most a mixed blessing. Many idealists and reformers frankly </font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">Page 83</font><hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman"><b>&nbsp;</b>view the metamorphosis with anxiety. Gerald Heard vehemently declares that the rationalism of the modern age is a 
narrowing down of the consciousness to a superficial movement, a foreshortening, and a top-heavy specialisation which
means stagnation, decay and death. He would rather release
the tension in the strangulation of consciousness, even if<b> 
</b>it<b> 
</b>means a slight coming down to the anterior level of instinct
and intuition, but of more plasticity and less specialisation:&nbsp; it is, he says, only in conditions of suppleness and variability,
of life organised yet sufficiently free that the forces of evolution
can act fruitfully. It has also been pointed out that <i>homo
sapiens</i> is not a direct descendant of <i>homo neanderthalis</i> who was
already a far too specialised being, but of a stock anterior<b> 
</b>to<b> 
</b>it which was still uncertain, wavering, groping towards a
definite emergence. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Now, these two positions—of Jung and of Heard—offer 
us
a good basis upon which we can try to estimate the nature of
man's progress in historical times. Both refer to a crucial
change in human consciousness, a far-reaching change having
no parallel since it invented the metal tool. The change means
the appearance of pure intelligence in man, a change, as we
may say, in modern terms, in the system of reference, from
biological co-ordinates to those of pure reason. Only Jung<br>
thinks that the reorganisation of the human consciousness is
to happen precisely round the focus of pure reason, while
Gerald Heard is doubtful about the efficacy of this faculty—
of &quot;directive thinking&quot;, as Jung puts it—if it is to lead to
overspecialisation, which means the swelling of one member
and atrophy of the rest; a greater and supreme direction he
seeks elsewhere in a transcendence of intelligence and reason
which, besides, is bound to happen ,in the course of evolution. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; We characterise the change as a special degree or order of
self-consciousness. Self-consciousness, we have seen, is the <i>sine qua non</i> of humanity. It is the faculty or power by and with
which man appears on earth and maintains himself as such,
as a distinct species. Thanks to this faculty man has become
the tool-making animal, the artisan—<i>homo faber.</i> But on emerging from the original mythopœic to the scientific status man
has become doubly self-conscious. Self-consciousness means to
be aware of oneself as standing separate from and against the </font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">Page 84</font><hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">environment and the world and acting upon it as a free agent,
exercising one's deliberate will. Now the first degree of self-consciousness displayed itself in a creative activity by which
consciousness remained no-longer a suffering organon, but
became a growing and directing, a reacting and new-creating
agent. Man gained the power to shape the order of Nature
according to the order of his inner will and consciousness.
This creative activity, the activity of the artisan, developed
along two lines: first, artisanship with regard to one's own
self, one's inner nature and character, and secondly, with
regard to the external nature, the not-self. The former gave
rise to mysticism and Yoga and was especially cultivated
in India, while the second has led us to Science, man's physical
mastery, which is the especial field of European culture. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Now the second degree of self-consciousness to which we
referred is the scientific consciousness <i>par excellence.</i> It can be described also as the spirit and power of experimentation,
or more precisely, of scientific experimentation: it involves
generically the process with which we are familiar in the domain
of industry and is termed &quot;synthetic&quot;, that is to say, it means
the skill and capacity to create the conditions under which a
given phenomenon can be repeated at will. Hence it means a
perfect knowledge of the process of things—which again is a
dual knowledge: (1) the knowledge of the steps gradually
leading to the result and (2) the knowledge that has the
power to resolve the result into its antecedent conditions. Thus
the knowledge of the <i>mechanism,</i> the detailed working of things,
is scientific knowledge, and therefore scientific knowledge
can be truly said to be mechanistic knowledge, in the best
sense of the term. Now the knowledge of the ends and the
knowledge of the means (to use a phrase of Aldous Huxley)
and the conscious control over either have given humanity a
new degree of self-consciousness. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It can be mentioned here that there can be a knowledge<b> 
</b>of<b> 
</b>ends without a corresponding knowledge of means, even there
can be a control over ends without a preliminary control over
means—perhaps not to perfection, but to a sufficient degree
of practical utility. Much of the knowledge—especially
secular and scientific—in ancient times was of this order; what we mean to say is that the knowledge was more instinctive </font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">Page 85</font><hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">or intuitive than rational or intellectual. In that knowledge the result only, the end that it to say, was the chief aim
and concern, the means for attaining the end was, one cannot
perhaps say, ignored, but slurred or slipped over as it were: the process was thus involved or understood, not expressed or
detailed out. Thus we know of some mathematical problems
to which correct solutions were given of which the process is
not extant or lost as some say. Our suggestion is that there
was in fact very little of the process as we know it now—the
solution was reached <i>per saltum,</i> that is to say, somehow, in the
same manner as we find it happening even today in child
prodigies. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; One can point out however that even before the modern
scientific age, there was an epoch of pure intellectual activity,
as represented, for example, by scholasticism. The formal
intellectualism which was the gift of the Greek sophists or the
Mimansakas and grammarians in ancient India has to be recognised as a pure mental movement, freed from all life value
or biological bias. What then is the difference? What is the
new characteristic element brought in by the modern scientific
intellectualism ? </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The old intellectualism generally and on the whole, was
truly formal and even to a great extent verbal. In other words,
it sought to find norms and categories in the mind itself and
impose them upon objects, objects of experience, external or
internal. The first discovery of the pure mind, the joy of
indulging in its own free formations led to an abstraction that
brought about a cleavage between mind and nature, and
when a harmony was again attempted between the two, it
meant an imposition of one (the Mind) upon another (Matter),
a subsumption of the latter under the former. Such scholastic
formalism, although it has the appearance of a movement
of pure intellect, free from the influence of instinctive or
emotive reactions, cannot but be, at bottom, a mythopoeic
operation, in the Jungian phraseology; it is not truly objective
in the scientific sense. The scientific procedure is to find
Nature's own categories—the constants, as they are called.
—and link up mind and intellect with that- reality. This is the
Copernican revolution that Science brought about in the
modern outlook. Philosophers like Kant or Berkeley may say </font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">Page 86</font><hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">another thing and even science itself just nowadays may
appear hesitant in its bearings. But that is another story which
it is not our purpose to consider here and which does not
change the fundamental position. We say then that the objectivity of the scientific outlook, as distinguished from the
abstract formalism of old-world intellectualism, has given a
new degree of mental growth and is the basis of the &quot;mechanistic&quot; methodology of which we have been speaking.&nbsp;</font><p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Indeed, what we lay stress upon is the methodology of
modern scientific knowledge—the apparatus of criticism and
experimentation. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; We have said that this &quot;methodologism&quot;—the knowledge
of means and the consequent control over means—the hall-
mark of modern scientific knowledge—is a new degree of
self-consciousness which is the special characteristic of the
human consciousness. Put philosophically, we can say that
the discovery of the <i>subject</i> and its growing affirmation as an
independent factor in a subject-object relation marks the
evolutionary course of the human consciousness. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; A still further unveiling seems to be in progress now. The
subject has discovered itself as separate from the observed object and still 
embracing it: but a given subject-object relationship in its turn again is being viewed as itself an object
to another subject consciousness, a super-subject. That way
lie the ever widening horizons of consciousness opened up by
Yoga and spiritual discipline. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In other words, the self-consciousness which marks off man
as the highest of living beings as yet evolved by Nature is still not her 
highest possible instrumentation. As has been experienced and foreseen by Yogins in all ages and climes and
as it is being borne in upon the modern mind more and more
imperatively, this self-consciousness has -to be consciously
transcended, lifted, transmuted—worked out into the super-consciousness. Such is Nature's evolutionary <i>nisus</i> and such
is the truth and fact man is being driven to face in his inner
individual consciousness as well as outer collective life. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; We can thus note, broadly speaking, three stages in the
human cycle of Nature's evolution. The first was the period of
emergence of self-consciousness and the trials and experiments
it went through to establish and confirm itself. The ancient </font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">Page 87</font><hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">civilisations represented this character of the human spirit. The subject freeing itself more and more from its environmental tegument, still living and moving within it and dynamically reacting upon it—this was the character we speak of.
Next came the period when the free and dynamic subject
feeling itself no more tied down to its natural objective sphere
sought lines of development and adventure on its own account. This was the age of speculation and of scholasticism in philosophy and intellectual inquiry and of alchemy in natural
science—a period roughly equated with the Middle Ages. The
Scientific Age coming last seeks to re-establish a junction and
co-ordination between the free and dynamic self-consciousness
and the mode and pattern of its objective field, involving a
greater enrichment on one side—the subjective consciousness&nbsp; <b>—</b>and on 
the other, the objective environment, a corresponding change and effective reorganisation. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The present age which ushers a fourth stage—significantly
called <i>tunya</i> or the transcendent, in Indian terminology—is
pregnant with a fateful crisis. The stage of self-consciousness
to which scientific development has arrived seems to land in a cul-de-sac, a 
blind alley: Science also is faced, almost helplessly, with the antinomies of reason that Kant discovered
long ago in the domain of speculative philosophy. The way
out, for a further growth and development and evolution, lies
in a supersession of the self-consciousness, an elevation into a
superconsciousness—as already envisaged by Yogis and Mystics
everywhere—which will give a new potential and harmony
to the human consciousness. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This super consciousness is based upon a double movement
of sublimation and integration which are precisely the two
things basically aimed at by present-day psychology to meet
the demands of new facts of consciousness. The rationalisation,
specialisation or foreshortening of consciousness, mentioned
above, is really an attempt at sublimation of the consciousness,
its purification and ascension from baser—animal and vegetal&nbsp; —confines: only, ascension does not mean alienation, it must
mean a gathering up of the lower elements also into their
higher modes. Integration thus involves a descent, but it has
to be pointed out, not merely or exclusively that, as Jung and
his school seem to say. Certainly one has to see and recognise </font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">Page 88</font><hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">the aboriginal, the infra-rational elements imbedded in our
nature and consciousness, the roots and foundations that lie
buried under the super-structure that Evolution has erected.
But that recognition must be accompanied by an upward
look and sense: indeed it is healthy and fruitful only on condition that it occurs in a consciousness open to an infiltration of
light coming from summits not only of the mind but above
the mind. If we go back, it must be with a light that is ahead
of us: that is the sense of evolution. </font>

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