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<span style="font-weight:700"><font size="4">Aspects of Modernism</font></span></p>
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<FONT SIZE=3>&quot;Unity was the sheet-anchor of Science 'up to now.
But the latest theories seem to break up the universe into a mass of
independent constituents each acting for itself No doubt there is one
Force still (if magnetism and electricity can be reduced to one
formula as is sought to be done by Einstein), but it is a
discontinuous unity in its manifestation at least. Science seems to
be coming away from a materialistic Adwaita towards a restatement of
the Sankhya idea.&quot; –</FONT><FONT SIZE=2> SRI AUROBINDO .</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Every age has claimed to be modern and sought to
establish its characteristic newness, the hall-mark that separates it
from the preceding age.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>How then does the twentieth century propose to mark out
its difference from the past? &quot;Science and the scientific out
look,&quot; many would answer. But to others that difference itself
might appear antiquated. For, strictly speaking, science was the
key-note of the nineteenth century; and although we of the twentieth
are enjoying its fruits, putting it to more practical use than our
predecessors did, yet it is they who embodied its spirit, its special
and proper rule of light and life. We have not discarded the gift,
but assimilated it and even seem to have outgrown it; we have added
to it or extended and developed it.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Science indeed gave a very decided turn to the slowly
advancing humanity. It brought with it something that meant in the
march of evolution a <I>saltum, </I>a leap wide and clear; it landed
man all of a sudden into a new world, a new state of consciousness.
It is this state of consciousness, the fundamental way of being,
inculcated by the scientific spirit that is of capital importance and
possesses a survival value. It is not the <I>content </I>of Science,
but its <I>intent, </I>not its riches, but its secret inspiration,</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 139</FONT></P>
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motive power, that will give us a right understanding of the change
it has effected. The material aspect of the event has lost much of
its value; the mechanical inventions and discoveries, bringing in
their train a revolution in the external organization of life, have
become a matter of course, and almost a matter of the past. But the
reactions set up in the consciousness itself, the variations brought
about in the very stuff and constitution of life still maintain a
potency for the future and are to be counted.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The scientific spirit, in one word, is rationalisation –
rationalisation of Mind as well as of Life. With regard to Mind,
rationalisation means to get knowledge exclusively on the data of the
senses; it is the formulation, in laws and principles, of facts
observed by the physical organs, these laws and principles being the
categories of the arranging, classifying, generalising faculty,
called reason; its methodology also demands that the laws are to be
as few as possible embracing as many facts as possible.
Rationalisation of life means the government of life in accordance
with these laws, so that the wastage in natural life due to the
diversity and disparity off acts may be eliminated, at least
minimised, and all movements of life ordered and organised in view of
a single and constant purpose (which is perhaps the enhancement of
the value of life). This rationalisa&shy;tion means further, in
effect, mechanisation or efficiency, as its protagonists would prefer
to call it. However, mechanistic efficiency, whether in the matter of
knowledge or of life-of mind or of morals was the motto of the early
period of the gospel of science, the age of Huxley and Haeckel, of
Bentham and the Mills. The formula no longer holds good either in the
field of pure knowledge or in its application to life; it does not
embody the aspiration and outlook of the contemporary mind, in spite
of such inveterate rationalists as Russell and Wells or even Shaw (in
<I>Back to Methuselah, </I>for example), who seem to be already
becoming an anachronism in the present age.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The contemporary urge is not towards rationalisation,
but rather towards <I>irrationalisation. </I>Orthodox science itself
is taking greater and greater cognisance today of the irrational
move&shy;ments of nature, even of physical nature. Intuition and
instinct are now welcomed as surer and truer instruments of knowledge
and action than reason.</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 140</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Another special feature of the modern consciousness is
its &quot;multiple sightedness&quot;. The world, as it is presented
to us, is no more than an assemblage of view-points; and each point
of observation forms its own world-system. There is no one single
ultimate truth; if there is any, there is no possibility of its being
known or perceived by the mind or the senses. Things exist in
relation to one another and for us they have no intrinsic existence
apart from the relations. The instrument itself that perceives is the
resultant of a system of relations. A truth is only a view-point; and
as the view-point shifts, the truth also varies accordingly. The cult
of Relativity is a significant expression of the modern
consciousness.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Intimately connected with relativity and multiplicity is
the principle of fragmentation or atomism (perhaps one should now say
“electronismâ€) – that forms another characteristic element of
modernism. The universe, on a final analysis, is now found to be a
concourse of vagrant electric charges. Even likewise, human
personality too has no longer its old-world character and consistency
of being made of one undivided piece – a monolithic structure; it
is a composite of innumerable personalities, big and small, apparent
and hidden, all huddled together in a case called the body, which
itself is not more stable than the shifting desert sands.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>It is this pluralisation which has resulted in a
necessary polarisation in the human consciousness. We have gained a
power which was not only rare but perhaps totally absent in the old
world, at least in the general mind; we have reached in a novel way
that very wideness or wholeness which was at the outset negatived by
the urge towards separativeness and parcellation. Thus the modern
mind can take in more view-points than one – even contrary ones –
at the same time. The individual has acquired the capacity – to put
it in popular language – to enter into another's skin, not to be
confined to its own outlook, limited within its linear groove, but to
be able, with ease and grace to look through the eyes of others, even
though they be on the other side of the arena. A wide and supple,
large and subtle perception that goes round the entire contour of the
observed object, not a perspective but a global view, is a
characteristic capacity of the modern mind. We can see the same thing
from all angles and distances; we can turn </FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 141</FONT></P>
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gaze upon ourselves; we can see ourselves not only with our own way
of looking but also as others see us, with equal detachment and
impartiality. At least this is the character of the cultured, the
representative man of today. Modern art too has sought in some of its
significant expressions to demonstrate this) protean nature of truth
and reality, to bring out the simultaneity of its multiple modes, to
give a living sense of its tangled dynamism.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>We spoke of the extreme atomism of modern Science that
has thrown into the background the solid unity of creation and is
laying emphasis for the moment more upon the division and scattering
of forces than upon the cohesiveness and identity of the substratum;
still that unity has not been abrogated but has been maintained on
the whole, even if as an underlying note. Not only so, the reign of
multiplicity, by a curious detour, is working towards a discovery of
enhanced unity. The plurality of the modern consciousness is moving
towards a richer and intenser unity; it is not a static, but a
dynamic unity – a unity that does not suppress or merely transcend
the diversity and disparity of its components but holds them together
as an immanent force, and brings forth out of each its fullness of
individuality. In the same way the present-day movement towards
internationalism or supra-nationalism has produced a rebound towards
regionalism or infra-nationalism. And the voice of anarchism tends to
be as insistent as that of collectivism.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The consciousness of yesterday was a unilateral
movement. It rose up high and descended deep into the truth of
things, but mostly along a single line. In the horizontal direction
also, when it travelled, it effected a linear movement. The
consciousness of today is complex and composite; it has lost much of
the vertical movement; it does not very easily soar or dive,
precisely because it has spread itself out in a multitude of
horizontal movements. Our modern consciousness is outward gazing and
extensive; it has not the in-gathering and intensive character of the
old-world consciousness; but what it has lost in depth and height, it
has sought to make up in width.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Simplicity and intensity, sublimity and profundity were
the most predominant qualities of man's achievement in the past; what
characterises human endeavour in the present is its wideness,
richness, complexity. It can also be noted that the </FONT>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 142</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>corruptions
of these qualities likewise mark out their respective ages.
Fanaticism, for example, the corruption of a good and noble thing,
fidelity, means a unilateral mind carried to its extreme; it is a
characteristic product of the middle ages in the West as in the East.
The modern world in its stead has given us dilettantism and cynicism,
corruption of largeness and catholicity.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Consciousness has two primary movements. In one it
penetrates, enters straight into the heart of things; in the other it
spreads out, goes about and round the object. The combination of the
two powers is a rarity; ordinarily man follows the one to the
exclusion of the other. The modern age in its wide curiosity has
neglected the penetrative and intensive movement and is therefore
marred by superficiality. It is eager to go over the entire panorama
of creation at one glance, if that is possible, to have a telescopic
view of things; but it has been able to take in only the surface, the
skin, the crust. Even the entrance into the world of atoms and cells
– of protons and electrons, of chromosomes and genes – is not
really a penetrative or intensive movement. It is only another form
of the movement of pervasion or extension: it is still a going
abroad, only on another line, in a different direction, but always
fundamentally on the same horizontal plane. The microscope is only an
inverted telescope. Our instruments are the external mind and senses
and these move laterally and have not the power to leap on to a
different level of vision. The earlier ages of mankind, narrow and
circumscribed in many respects, possessed nevertheless that intensive
and in-gathering movement, which is a kind of movement in the fourth
dimension; it was a sixth sense leading into the Behind or Beyond of
things.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 143</FONT></P>
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