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<font face="Times New Roman" size=3>IV</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size=3>SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY</font>
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		<b><font face="Times New Roman"><i>In Quest of 
		Reality</i></font></b></p>
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<font face="Times New Roman">THIS is, they say, the age of Positivism—no mystic obfuscation,
but clear light in the open sun. Let us enquire a little into the
nature of this modern illumination.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Positivists are those who swear by facts. Facts to them mean
naturally facts attested in the end by sense-experience. To a
positivist the only question that matters and that needs to be
answered and can be answered is whether a thing <i>is</i> or <i>is not
</i>physically: other questions are otiose, irrelevant, misleading. So problems 
of the Good, of the Beautiful, of God are meaningless. When one says this is good, that is bad, well, it is a
proposition that cannot be related to any fact, it is a subjective
personal valuation. In the objective world a thing simply is
or is not, one cannot say it is good or it is bad. The thing called
good by one is called bad by another, the same thing that
is good to you now will appear bad at another time. This is a
region absolutely of personal and variable idiosyncrasy. The
same with regard to the concept of beauty. That a thing is
beautiful or ugly is a subjective judgment; it is not and cannot
be an objective statement. Beauty is a formula in your mind
and imagination, it is a changing mode of your apprehension.The concept of God too fares no better. God exists: it is a judgment based upon no fact or facts of sense-experience. However
we may analyse it, it is found to have no direct or even indirect
but inevitable <i>rapport</i> with the field of actual reality. There is
between the two an unbridgeable hiatus. This is a position
restated in a modern style, familiar to the Kantian Critique
of Pure Reason.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; There are two ways effacing the problem. First, the Kantian
way which cuts the Gordian knot. We say here that there are
two realms in which man lives, but they are incommensurables: </font>
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Page 207<hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">the truths and categories of one cannot be judged and
tested&nbsp; by those of the other. Each is <i>sui generis,</i> each is valid in
its own right, in its own dominion. God, Soul, Immortality—
these are realities belonging to one section of our nature,
seizable by a faculty other than the Pure Reason, <i>viz.,</i> the
Practical Reason; while the realities given by the senses and
the judgments of the logical mind are of another section. It
may be said one is physical, the other metaphysical. The
positivists limit their field of enquiry and knowledge to the
physical: they seek to keep the other domain quite apart as
something imaginary, illusory, often unnecessary and not
unoften harmful to true human interest.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To a more detached and impartial view this may appear very
much like the ostrich-policy. If a thing really exists, one cannot negate it by simply closing one's eyes. This involves a
dichotomy which the logical mind may like to impose and
live by, but man cannot be thus artificially segmented. And
if both the worlds are found in him both have to be accepted
and if they are found together, there must be some sort of
commensurability between the two.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Indeed the second way of approach to the problem is the
positivist's own way. That is to say, let us take our stand on the <i>terra firma</i> of the physical and probe into it and find out whether
there are facts there which open the way or point to the other
side of nature, whether there are signs, hints, intimations,
factors involved there that lead to conclusions, if not inevitable,
at least conformable to supraphysical truths. It is usually
asserted, for example, that the scientist—the positivist <i>par
excellence—</i>follows a rigid process of ratiocination, of observation, analysis and judgment. He collects facts and a sufficient
number of them made to yield a general law—the probability
of a generic fact—which is tested or exemplified by other correlate facts. This 
is however an ideal, a theoretical programme not borne out by actual practice, it is a rationalisation
of a somewhat different actuality. The scientist, even the most
hard-headed among them, the mathematician, finds his laws
often and perhaps usually not by a long process of observation
and induction or deduction, but all on a sudden, in a flash of
illumination. The famous story of Newton and the falling
apple, Kepler's happy guess of the elliptical orbit of the</font>
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Page 208<hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">planets—and a host of examples can be cited as rather the rule
than the exception for the methodology of scientific discovery.
Prof. Hadamard, the great French mathematician,—the
French are well-known for their intransigent, logical and
rational attitude in Science,—has been compelled to admit
the supreme role of an intuitive faculty in scientific enquiry.
If it is argued that the so-called sudden intuition is nothing but
the final outburst, the cumulative resultant of a long strenuous
travail of thinking and reasoning and arguing, Prof. Hadamard says, in reply, that it does not often seem to be so, for the
answer or solution that is suddenly found does not lie in the
direction of or in conformity with the conscious rational
research but goes against it and its implications.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This faculty of direct knowledge, however, is not such a rare
thing as it may appear to be. Indeed if we step outside the
circumscribed limits of pure science instances crowd upon us,
even in our normal life, which would compel one to conclude
that the rational and sensory process is only a fringe and a very
small part of a much greater and wider form of knowing. Poets
and artists, we all know, are familiar only with that form:</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">without intuition and inspiration they are nothing. Apart
from that, modern inquiries and observations have established
beyond doubt certain facts of extra-sensory, suprarational
perception—of clairvoyance and clairaudience, of prophecy,
of vision into the future as well as into the past. Not only these
unorthodox faculties of knowledge, but dynamic powers that
almost negate or flout the usual laws of science have been
demonstrated to exist and can be and are used by man. The
Indian yogic discipline speaks of the eight <i>siddhis,</i> super-natural power? attained by the Yogi when he learns to control
nature by the force of his consciousness. Once upon a time
these facts were challenged as facts in the scientific world, but
it is too late now in the day to deny them their right of existence:</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">Only Science, to maintain its scientific prestige, usually tries
to explain such phenomena in the material way, but with no
great success. In the end she seems to say, these freaks do not
come within her purview and she is not concerned with them.
However, that is not for us also the subject for discussion for
the moment.                  </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The first point then we seek to make out is that even from a</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">Page 209</font><hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">rigid positivist stand a form of knowledge that is not strictly
positivist has to be accepted. Next, if we come to the content
of the knowledge that is being gained, it is found one is being
slowly and inevitably led into a world which is also hardly
positivistic. We have in our study of the physical world come in
close contact with -two disconcerting facts or two ends of one
fact—the infinitely small and the infinitely large. They have
disturbed considerably the normal view of things, the view
that dominated Science till yesterday. The laws that hold good
for the ordinary sensible magnitudes fail totally in the case of
the infinite magnitudes (whether big or small). In the infinite
we begin squaring the circle.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Take for instance, the romantic story of the <i>mass of</i> a body.
Mass, at one time, was considered as one of the fundamental
constants of nature: it meant a fixed quantity of substance
inherent in a body, it was an absolute quality. Now we have
discovered that this is not so; the mass of a body varies with its
speed and an object with infinite speed has an infinite mass—
theoretically at least it should be so. A particle of matter moving
with the, speed of light must be terribly massive. But—<i>mirabile
dictu! —</i>a photon has no mass (practically none). In other
words, a material particle when it is to be most material—
exactly at the critical temperature, as it were—is dematerialised. How does the miracle happen?</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In fact, we are forced to the conclusion that<b> 
</b>the picture of<b> 
</b>a solid massive material nature is only a mask of the reality;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">the reality is that matter is a charge of electricity and the charge
of electricity is potentially a mode of light. The ancient distinction between matter and energy is no longer valid. In fact
energy is the sole reality, matter is only an appearance that
energy puts on under a certain condition. And this energy too
is not mechanical (and Newtonian) but radiant and <i>ethereal.
</i>We can no longer regret with the poet:</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">They have gone into the world of light</font>

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&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">for, we all are come into a world of light and we ourselves, the
elements of our physical frame are made of the very texture of
light.</font>&nbsp;

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&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font face="Times New Roman">So far so good. But it is evidently not far enough, for one</font>

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210<hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">can answer that all this falls within the dominion of Matter and
the material. The conception of Matter has changed, to be
sure: Matter and energy are identified, as we have said, and
the energy in its essential and significant form is light (which,
we may say, is electricity at its highest potential). But this
does not make any fundamental change in the metaphysical
view of the reality. We have to declare in the famous French
phrase <i>plus a change, plus ca reste Ie meme</i> (the more it changes
the more it remains the same). The reality remains material:</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">for light, physical light is not something spiritual or even
immaterial.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Well, let us proceed a little further. Admitted the universe
is a physical substance (although essentially of the nature of
light—admitted light is a physical substance, obeying&nbsp; the law
of gravitation, as Einstein has demonstrated). Does it then
mean that the physical universe is after all a dead inert
insentient thing, that whatever the vagaries of the ultimate
particles composing the universe, their structure, their disposition is more or less strictly geometrical (that is to say,
mechanical) and their erratic movement is only the errantry
of a throw of dice—a play of possibilities ? There is nothing
even remotely conscious or purposive in this field.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Let us leave the domain, the domain of inorganic matter for
a while and turn to another set of facts, those of organic matter,
of life and its manifestation. The biological domain is a freak
in the midst of what appears to be a rigidly mechanistic material
universe. The laws of life are not the laws of matter, very often
one contravenes the other. The two converging lenses of the
two eyes do not make the image twice brighter than the one
produced by a single lens. What is this alchemy that forms the
equation l<sup> 2&nbsp; = </sup>l (we might as well put it as 1+1 ==1)? Again,
a living whole—a cell—fissured and divided tends to live and
grow <i>wholly</i> in each fragment. In life we have thus another
strange equation: part=whole (although in the mathematics
of infinity such an equation is a normal phenomenon). The
body (of a warm-blooded animal) maintaining a constant
temperature whether it is at the Pole or at the Equator is a
standing miracle which baffles mere physics and chemistry.
Thirdly, life is immortal—the law of entropy (of irrevocably
diminishing energy) -that governs the fate of matter does not</font>
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Page 211<hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">seem to hold good here. The original life-cells are 
carried over physically from generation to generation and there is no end to the 
continuity of the series, if allowed to run its normal course. Material energy 
also, it is said, is indestructible; it is never destroyed, but changes form 
only. But the scientific conception of material energy puts a limit to its 
course, it proceeds, if we are to believe thermodynamics, towards a dead 
equilibrium—there is no such thing as &quot;perpetual movement&quot; in the field of matter.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Again the very characteristic of life is its diversity, its infinite
variety of norms and forms and movements. The content and
movement of material nature is calculable to a great extent.
A few mathematical equations or formulae can after all be
made to cover all or most facts concerning it. But the laws of
life refuse systematisation. A few laws purporting to govern
the physical bases of life claim recognition, but they stand on
precarious grounds. The laws of natural selection, of heredity
or genetics are applicable within a very restricted frame of
facts. The variety of material substances revolves upon the
gamut of 92 elements based upon 4 or 5 ultimate types of
electric unit—and that is sufficient to make us wonder. But
the variety in life-play is simply incalculable—from the
amoeba or virus cell to man, what a bewildering kaleidoscope
and each individual in each group is unique in its way! The
few chromosomes that seem to be the basis of all diversity do
not explain the mystery—the mystery becomes doubly
mysterious: how does a tiny seed contain the thing that is to
become a banyan tree, how does a speck of plasma bring forth
from within an object of Hamletian dimensions! What then is
this energy or substance of life welling out irrepressively into
multitudinous forms and modes ? The chemical elements composing an organic body do not wholly exhaust its composition;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">there is something else besides. At least in one field, the life
element has received recognition and been given an independent name and existence. I am obviously referring to the
life element in food-stuff which has been called <i>vitamin.</i></font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Life looks out of matter as a green sprout in the midst of a
desert expanse. But is matter really so very different and
distinct from life? Does Matter mean no Life? Certain facts
and experiments have thrown great doubt upon that assumption. </font>
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Page 212<hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">An Indian, a scientist of the first order in the European
and modern sense, has adduced proofs that obliterate the
hard and fast line of demarcation between the living and the
non-living. He has demonstrated the parallelism, if not the
identity, of the responses of those two domains: we use the
term fatigue in respect of living organisms only, but Jagadis-chandra Bose says and shows, that matter too, a piece of metal
for instance, undergoes fatigue. Not only so, the graph, the
periodicity of the reactions as shown by a living body under a
heightened or diminished stimulus or the influence of poison
or drug is repeated very closely by the so-called dead matter
under the same treatment.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It will not be far from the truth, if it is asserted that matter
is instinct with a secret life. And because there was life secreted&nbsp;
within matter, therefore life could come out of matter; there is
here no spontaneous generation, no arbitrary fiat nor a fortuitous chance. The whole creation is a mighty stir of life. That
is how the ancient Rishi of the Upanishad puts it: Life stirred
and all came out.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Now, let us advance another step forward. Beyond matter
there lies life and beyond life—consciousness. Is consciousness
too a mere epiphenomenon as life was once thought to be in the
empire of matter ? Or can it not be that consciousness is an
extension—an evolute—of life, even as life is an extension, an
evolute of matter ? In other words consciousness is not a freak,
even as life was not; it is inherent in life, life itself is a rudimentary movement of consciousness. The amoeba feeling or
pre-sensing its way towards its food, the twig bending towards
the direction in which it has the chance of getting more light,
the sudden appearance of organs or elements in an organism
that will be useful only in the future are indisputable examples
of a purposiveness, a forward reference in the scheme of Nature.
In the domain of life-play <i>teleology</i> is a fact which only the
grossest brand of obfuscation can deny. And teleology means—
does it not?—the stress of an idea, the pattern of a consciousness.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Consciousness or thought in man, we know, is linked with
the brain: and sentience which is the first step towards thought'
and consciousness is linked with the nervous system (of which
the brain is an extension). Now the same Indian wizard who
first, scientifically speaking, linked up the .non-living with the</font>
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Page 213<hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">living, has also demonstrated, if not absolutely, at least to a
high degree of plausibility, that the plant also possesses a kind
of rudimentary nervous system (although we accept more
easily a respiratory system there). All this, however, one has to
admit, is still a far cry from any intimation of consciousness in
Matter. Yet if life is admitted to be involved in matter and
consciousness is found to be involved in life, then the unavoidable conclusion is that Matter too must contain involved in it a
form of consciousness. The real difficulty in the way of attributing 
consciousness to Matter is our conception of consciousness which we usually identify with articulate thought,
intelligence or reason. But these are various formations of
consciousness, which in itself is something else and can exist
in many other forms and formulations. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; One remarkable thing in the material world that has
always attracted and captivated man's attention, since al-
, most the very dawn of his consciousness, is the existence
of a pattern, of an artistic layout in the composition and
movement of material things. When the Vedic Rishi sings
out: &quot;These countless stars that appear glistening night after
night, where do they vanish during the day?&quot; he is awed by
the inviolable rhythm of the Universe, which other sages in
other climes sang as the music of the spheres. The presence of
Design in Nature has been in the eyes of Believers an incontrovertible proof of the existence of a Designer. What we want   *
to say is not that a watch (if we regard the universe as a watch)
presupposes the existence of a watch-maker: we say the pattern
itself is the expression of an idea, it involves a conception not
imposed or projected from outside but inherent in itself. The
Greek view of the artist's mode of operation is very illuminating
' in this connection. The artist, according to this view, when he
carves out a statue for example, does not impose upon the
stone a figure that he has only in his mind, but that the stone
itself contains the figure, the artist has the vision to see it, his
chisel follows the lines he sees imbedded in the stone. It is why
we say that the geometry in the structure of a crystal or an
atom or an astronomical system, the balance and harmony,
the symmetry and polarity that govern the composition of
objects and their relations, the blend of colour schemes, the
marshalling of lines and the building of volumes, in a word,</font><p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
		<font face="Times New Roman">page 214</font></p>
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<font face="Times New Roman">the artistic make-up, perfect in detail and in the ensemble that
characterise all nature's body and limbs and finally the
mathematical laws that embrace and picture as it were Nature's
movements, all point to the existence of a truth, a reality whose characteristic 
marks are or are very much like those of consciousness and Idea-Force. We fight 
shy of the 'word—consciousness—for it brings in a whole association of anthropomorphism and pathetic fallacy. But in our anxiety to avoid
a ditch let us not fall over a precipice. If it is blindness to see
nothing but the spirit, it is not vision to see nothing but Matter. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; A hypothesis, however revolutionary or unorthodox it may
seem for the moment, has to be tested by its effective application, in its successful working out. All scientific discoveries
in the beginning appear as inconveniences that upset the
known and accepted order. Copernicus, Newton, Galileo,
Kepler, Maxwell or Einstein in our day enunciated principles
that were not obvious sense-given axioms. These are at the
outset more or less postulates that have to be judged by their
applicability. </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Creation as a movement or expression of consciousness need
not be dubbed a metaphysical jargon; it can be assumed as
a scientific working hypothesis and seen how it affects our
view, meets our problems and difficulties, whether it can
give a satisfactory clue to some of the riddles of physical and
psychical phenomena. A scientific supposition (or intuition)
is held to be true if it can be applied 'invariably to facts of
life and experience and if it can open up to our vision and
perception new facts. The trend of scientific discoveries today
is towards the positing of a background reality in Nature of
which energy (radiant and electrical) is the first and overt
form. We discarded <i>ether,</i> only to replace it by <i>field</i> and <i>disposition.</i> We have arrived at a point where the question is
whether we cannot take courage in both hands and declare,
as some have already done, that the substratum in Nature
is consciousness-energy and on that hypothesis better explain
certain movements of Matter and Life and Mind in a global
unity. Orthodox and die-hard views will always protest and
cry that it is a <i>mesalliance,</i> a misjoinder to couple together
Matter and Consciousness or even Life and Consciousness.
But since the light has touched the higher mind even among </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">page 215</font><hr>
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<font face="Times New Roman">a few of the positivist type, the few may .very well be the
precursor of the order of the day.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">After all, only one bold step is needed: to affirm unequivocally what is being suggested and implied and pointed to
in a thousand indirect ways. And Science will be transformed.
The scientist too, like the famous Saltimbanque (clown) of
a French poet, may one day in turning a somersault, suddenly
leap up and find himself rolling into the bosom of the stars.</font>
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Page 216<hr>

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