Science, Materialism, Mysticism

Matter, Life, Mind

1

Our scrutiny of scientific opinions has deals so far with the problem of matter and mind and the problem of with the life. We have examined these problems in indent" and each other, thus giving the fullest scope possible scientific features peculiar to either of them and not subduing them in the interests of a theory derived from outside? field concerned. Both our surveys have reached a corn conclusion which is all the stronger because reached along two independent lines: namely, that matter is not the basic reality. We have discovered, on strictly scientific grounds, that mind cannot be reduced to matter and that matter cannot be the origin of life though both life and mind may seem to evolve from matter. Further, our discovery has rested on a complete consideration of the materialistic argument at its most formidable: we have tackled the statements made by its ablest expositors and, preferably, arrived at our non-materialism by taking stock of their own admissions and implications. This has kept our treatment utterly free of the least evasion in the scientific field and added even greater strength to our two-pronged non-materialistic solution.

Our solution has not stopped with pluralism. Indeed, he and mind we have regarded as powers distinct from matter having their own typical activities - activities subliminal no less than on the surface, universal as well as individual. However, to render intelligible the interaction of all three we have posited a unity by an approach from the right end instead of from the wrong which materialism adopts: we have looked upon matter as an involved or concealed form of life life and upon life as an involved or concealed form of mind,without implying merely a reductionism from the higher end. This view which at the same time makes matter pro-file and anti-life as well as life pro-mind and anti-mind provides the rationale of what we actually observe: life manifesting in

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matter and utilising by fighting it to a considerable extent, mind manifesting in life and utilising it by opposing it to a certain degree .The phenomena of manifested life and mind are thus part goal-seeking and part blind, progressive in some respects and retrogressive in others, a central supra-materiality within a mass of material-seeming behaviour, achieving mostly on a general balance and on the whole a definite purposive advance.

But, while we have demonstrated that life and mind are , irreducible to matter and that the central phenomenon of life -organic unity with its two pointers: harmonising purpose and integrating individuality - can be recognised in general as mind translated into life-terms, we have not demonstrated that matter actually is what we have logically theorised it to be. In order that matter should be involved life and mind, the physical universe must be proved likely to be not a closed system complete in itself but a particular face and front of a larger reality which transcends the material without excluding it. And it would further help our thesis if the methods of the science of matter and the objectives of these methods could be proved incompatible with the temper and turn of materialism.

Modem physics is our field of inquiry. Here the word "revolution" has been a brilliant sky-sign from the beginning of this century.. All sorts of interpretations have been put on 1 e ferment which began in physics at the beginning of the present century and soon reached huge proportions with the disappearance of the ideas that had been extended by the old physics from the familiar world

to all measurable facts on other scales open to the physicist. We have to pick our steps warily in this region. For much confusion and illegitimate inference results if the terms of physics, instead of being understood within their own context, are allowed to get coloured by the connotations current in common parlance, philosophically discourse or even other sciences.

Decades of discussion have set right many of the mistakes. One, however, persists because it is the easiest to commit.

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It relates to the undeniable fact that in all fundamentals the old "mechanical model" has broken down. The revolution in physics is often expressed in the phrase: "the breakdown of the mechanical model" - and an antimaterialistic implication is read into it straight away on the strength of the distinction we ordinarily draw between a mechanical act and an act according to purpose and will. Such a reading is responsible for that superlatively inept statement in an article of the Hibbert Journal, entitled Is Matter Intelligent? - "Either the universe of physics has been created by mechanism or by intelligence. But when mechanism is ruled out, as it has been, what remains? It is a shame to take the money." The fact is that there is in physics no immediate road to "intelligence" from the supersession of mechanism. In physics the mechanical model remains possible only so long as the belief of Galileo and Newton is valid that all physical events can be reduced to forces which act between particles along lines connecting the particles and which depend only on distance. This belief and nothing else is in physics the mechanical view of the world and it is summed up in the equations set down by Lagrange towards the end of the eighteenth century. Whatever conforms to these equations can be made a mechanical model of and whatever fails to conform to them contradicts the mechanical view and transcends the mechanical model - without in the least necessarily implying that the world of the physicist is ruled by any except blind forces.

Long before the twentieth century it was discovered that the electric force acted not along the line but perpendicularly to it and depended on the velocity of the electrical charge instead of only on the distance. More and more with the growth of physics the equations of Lagrange proved in" adequate and an electromagnetic description of things, a contrasted to a mechanical one, prevailed. Most materialists favoured the mechanical ideal as it best served their philosophy and they hoped that ingenious descriptions in terms of levers and pulleys and pistons might be found for all

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Physical phenomena. But such descriptions were being increasingly dropped and after Hertz and still more after Lorentz the mechanical ideal came to be regarded as impossible in ultimate accounts of physical processes. Yet, surely, electromagnetism by itself cannot be considered an evidence of intelligence creating or managing the universe or of intelligence being immanent in the particles of matter. To act perpendicularly to a line rather than along it and to depend on velocity instead of only on the distance does not necessarily bespeak purpose or will in a force! Materialists would be unduly perturbed if they thought that merely the collapse of the mechanical model brought in, by a straight cut, intelligence in the processes studied by physics.

On the other hand, materialists would be misguided to make play with current phrases like "quantum mechanics" and "wave mechanics" and ask us: "If the mechanical model has been superseded, why these expressions?" In a broad sense the term "mechanism" is synonymous with the words: "mode of operation". In that sense it is absolutely non- committal and nothing more than this sense is involved in speaking of "quantum mechanics" or "wave mechanics". There is no question of bringing in a model after an engineer's heart, a mechanical model such as nineteenth-century materialism loved.

The mechanical model has indeed broken down. But that is nothing very revolutionary in itself - and the truth is that the state of affairs in modem physics is not completely covered by the break-down. What we have as an ultimate is not an electromagnetic description or some other akin to it. "e have passed clean beyond all such descriptions. Not merely the "unpicturable" has come with the abandonment of the mechanical model. Nor is it just paradox to the sense- mind that confronts us. Something even deeper has arrived ^h relativity theory and quantum theory.

Matter which was once endowed with "a capacity to do work and was thus credited with a property called energy but which now is itself looked upon as completely resolvable

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into energy - energy which is now an entity in its own right and into which matter has been "dematerialised" but to which itself has been ascribed inertia, mass, weight, the distinctive traits of matter - space which is without any all- pervading ether and therefore entirely empty but nevertheless possesses, as if it were a concrete thing, a definite structure correlated with the amount of material mass present and in turn serving to guide material masses in the movements once called gravitational, space whose three dimensions are not merely associated with the one non- spatial dimension that is time but fused with time to form a single four-dimensional continuum of "world-lines" in which space and time lose their difference and separateness to become equal and interchangeable - a single continuum of space-time which is describable in terms of deterministic causality in the sense that it is unbroken in its "world-lines" but in which causality and determinism lose their old meaning and cannot be thought of as operating from past to present any more than from present to past or even from future to present since by the fusion of time with space past and present and even future are co-existent just as all objects in space are co-existent - space-time in which the mathematical expressions for some quantities associated with matter, like density, velocity, internal stresses, can be matched with equations having components equal in number to theirs and put together in exactly the same way as in them so that material masses may themselves be considered in some o their properties not as different from space-time but as singularities of an abstractly measurable geometrical structure hire in it and as interpretable in terms like density, velocity,. internal stresses only when the single continuum is divided into space and time: such, in some central aspects, is the state of affairs in relativity physics.

Energy which so far had been demonstrated to be wavelike but which in addition has been proved in certain situations to possess over and above inertia, mass weight a granular character and to do "work" in distinct tiny

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packets called quanta - matter which had so far been demonstrated to be granular but which in addition has been proved in certain situations to possess a wavelike character when each of the particles composing it moves as the member of a large group - waves which can experimentally be shown to be characteristic of matter when in its sub-atomic form it is passed through a crystal sieve but which yet are merely a mathematical device for calculating probabilities about the distribution of sub-atomic particles and that too by positing that three dimensions of space are needed for each particle's probability and therefore millions of space-dimensions for the probabilities of a group - sub-atomic particles which leave clear tracks in Wilson's cloud-chamber and make bulletlike impressions on a zinc sulphide screen but still, as Heisenberg demonstrates, provide no valid verifiable basis for our attributing to them simultaneous definite position and velocity and hence cannot be credited unequivocally with an essential characteristic of particles conceived of as being in physical space and time and as permitting causal or deterministic prediction - protons and neutrons which are the two sub-atomic particles constituting an atom's nucleus and therefore the most important of all, the one with a positive electric charge, the other with no electric charge of any kind, and which whenever there is an imbalance in their numbers change into each other by the proton's seeming to emit a positive electron out of the nucleus and by the neutron's seeming to emit similarly a negative electron but which really cannot be containing electrons, positive or negative, because even a single electron is too big to be Untamed in even the whole nucleus so that what seems bitted during the change is a sudden creation: such, in some central aspects, is the state of affairs in quantum Physics.

Further, a cosmos interpreted in terms of complete continuity, unbroken functions in a continuous "field", en "macroscopic events are calculated, but which is interpreted in terms of complete discontinuity, separate corpuscles

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and quanta to which no mathematics of unbroken functions directly applies, when events of a microscopic nature are measured, and consequently a cosmos divided by two contradictory concepts: such, in some central aspects the state of affairs when the two departments of physics seen together.

Not that "Chaos and old Night" have made their home in this science: there is a lot of ordering, of intelligible interrelating, in abstract mathematical symbols in either department and even a rapport between certain aspects of the microscopic and the macroscopic has been attempted by Bohr from the side of quanta, while Einstein till the day of his death kept trying his hand at a field-theory to unify both the departments from the side of structured space-time. Yet, whatever the internal ordering and the inter-departmental integration, the very elements ordered and partially integrated are, even apart from the extreme abstractness of the scheme into which they are fitted, such as must leave us pretty undogmatic about the fundamental character of the universe we experience from day to day. Even though physics may give no direct handle to the theory that matter is involved life and life involved mind or to the contention that life and mind are existents in themselves, it can hardly dispose us, after Planck, Schrodinger, Born, Einstein, Heisenberg and Bohr have laid their stamps upon it, to believe in a closed material reality.

The state of affairs we have glanced at in quantum physics and relativity physics bears us not only beyond mechanism: it bears us also into irreconcilables as if physical concepts were incapable of holding the truth of the material universe: it bears us in some ways beyond even any p framework of description in terms of space and time and deterministic causality. Electromagnetism and allied to . phenomena remain, like mechanism, within such a framework but what are we to say of "probability waves" , or of the particle which can be considered as having an indeterminacy where simultaneous position and velocity are concerned,

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or of the change actually occurring of a proton and a neutron into each other by their seeming to emit an electron which was not present in either of them and is not explicable by anything outside them? What, again, are we to say of the four-dimensional continuum with its fused and interchange- able space and time and of past and present and even future co-existing in it and leaving deterministic causality without any significant physical direction, or of matter not only exchanging its own description with energy but appearing in some properties to be a mere singularity of what is symbolised as "curvature" of the space-time continuum where there is neither matter nor energy? The pure mathematician may feel at home with these concepts and with others like them since he has truck only with abstractions and symbols. Everyone else must feel in the midst of some sort of magic by which material reality shades off in the direction of God- knows-what and God-knows-what lights up in the direction of material reality and the physical universe ceases to be a closed system. This, essentially, and not just the mechanical model's collapse and the advent of the unpicturable, is the revolution in physics.

Moreover, implied in the revolution in the nature of ultimate concepts are a revolutionary ideal of what these concepts may be and a revolutionary method of reaching them. The mathematical formulas which are meant to do justice to the basic character of the sense-perceived universe are not restricted by any a priori demand that they should correspond to empirical appearances. Of course, they have to be "verified" by experiment, but what is directly verified is only a number of conclusions coming at the end of a long series of logical deductions from those formulas: the formulas themselves are never asked to submit to experimental tests. Thus the general theory of relativity propounded by Einstein in 1916 was not criticised because it introduced a "curved" four-dimensional continuum which no physicist could possibly experience or register on measuring instruments: the only items considered open to criticism were the

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deductions Einstein made from his fundamental axioms deductions which could be interpreted as an erratic planetary path like that of Mercury, a certain bending of the rays of stars when they pass through the sun's neighbourhood, a particular rate of atom-vibration in the sun. Once these deductions were verified the remote axioms were accepted as proved. Thus the ideal is to let fundamental concepts be of any kind whatever: they may seem the most fanciful, the most unphysical. The mathematical mind is given complete freedom to make constructs: it has no obligation outside its own creative possibilities. This is a mighty liberation from the sense-mind and the world of physical experiment which were the chief prompters of materialism.

Also, the method of arriving at fundamental theory is, in an extreme degree, devoid of a materialistic turn. In the old physics the theoretician was supposed to make logical generalisations from experience in order to reach fundamental theory. The way the second theory of relativity was reached in 1916 showed the true nature of the practice followed by the theoretician. It became plain that no logic, however subtle or concealed, prompts the fundamentals from the side of empirical data: they cannot be derived in any fashion by broad implicative inference from phenomena or by any sort of inductive formulation of what may seem a probable conclusion from facts. As Einstein puts it, "there is no method capable of being learnt and systematically applied so that it leads to the goal" of the theoretical physicist. The play of logic is absent here. Logic figures only in the form of the background assumption that there must be "sufficient reason" for everything and that the reason must not be loaded with anything more than what is sufficient: Leibnitz s principle wedded to Occam's. Without such an assumption there would be no scientific theory, but the oddity to roe r that this assumption cannot be made operative from the only starting-point available: observed events. Reasoning is there- fore ruled out as a means of striking upon the "sufficient reason", the fundamental axioms or laws. To quote Einstein

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wee more: "there is no logical path to those laws: only in- tuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them."

Once the laws are intuited, the play of logic comes on the scene with regard to their self-consistency and the line of deductions from them in order to make distant contact with the world of observation and experiment. Primarily, intuition alone is at play. We may call the Einsteinian intuition guess- work if we like to make it look less mysterious; but when the case every time in physics is that to light upon the theoretical "guess" which most extensively correlates observations one has to make the intervening chain of deductions from the guess the longest possible, then does not the theoretician's mind strain across huge voids in a visionary way which renders every other description of its movement than "intuition" inadequate? All physics, after Einstein, involves, at its profoundest, a recognisable play of "divination" that gives its mathematical activity an essential kinship to the insight of the artist if not a distant affinity to that of the mystic, and confers on them from its own claim to validity the right to attest the supra-material.

Even in the past, intuition has been noted to take a hand in physics. Clerk Maxwell made a remarkable intuitive leap in the course of stating his famous equations for electro- magnetism. He postulated a term which nothing at the time necessitated and which was found correct by experiment later. His work on the laws of gases, too, contains a similar leap. It has provoked a modern physicist to exclaim: "Maxwell, by a train of argument which seems to bear no relation at all to molecules, or to the dynamics of their movements, or to logic, or even to ordinary common sense, reached a formula which, according to all precedents and all the rules of scientific philosophy, ought to have been hopelessly wrong. In actual fact it was subsequently shown to be exactly right and is known as Maxwell's law to this day." Yes, intuition has been no stranger to physics. But till now it has never openly figured in the method of this

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science. Einstein has given it a legitimacy and a pervasive significance and a central place in scientific philosophy which have strong ultra-materialistic undertones.

Einstein calls the intuitively reached fundamental axioms of physics "free creations". He alternatively names them "free inventions" or "free fictions", but these labels should not be misconstrued as pejorative: "inventions" is used as opposed to the sense-given, the observationally discovered, and "fictions" as opposed to entities measurable with instruments, the experimentally factual. The meaning is: what is not bound by or inferred from the reality with which we are in immediate practical contact - "free creations". From the freedom of these intuitively reached fundamental axioms an important point emerges about the role of explanation in scientific philosophy. As long as there was the belief that all physical reality could be tackled by direct scientific investigation and conceptually summed up in generalisations from observation and experiment, scientific philosophy could declare that it would be unscientific to speak of any reality that could not be thus tackled and summed up. From this attitude there could arise the assumption that no reality beyond such tackling and summing-up could exist or, conversely, all reality should be amenable to the mathematical formulation in experiment and theory typical of physics. But once we admit that reality can be beyond direct scientific investigation and that we cannot grasp its nature by merely generalising from observation and experiment, we have n right to dictate materiality to its nature and rule the ultra material out of court. With regard to material phenomena the nature would be material, with regard to vital ones it could be vital, with regard to mental ones it might be mental. Each class has to be separately studied. Conclusions reached in connection with one class may throw light on questions related to another, but there should be no forcing of co ions between the classes, and a synthesis, if any, would be fully founded not before a separate study of each class has been patiently carried out without any haste in favour of

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materialism. The scientific philosophy growing out of the theoretical ideal of modem physics demands such a procedure and provides lebensraum for the distinctly vital and the distinctly mental if these can be discovered by the sciences of

biology and psychology.

Life and mind cannot be denied the title of existents simply because they cannot be brought directly to the test of measurement or, broadly speaking, of sense-observation. One sole condition must be fulfilled for their being legitimate postulates. Just as in physics the deduced results of the basic axioms are brought into touch with observation and experiment, so also the deduced results of postulating life and mind as the basic factors or entities behind vital and mental phenomena in the embodied organism have to be tested for the validation of these factors or entities. Not life and mind as such but only their deduced results should be open to direct scientific investigation. And, since the nature of what is not open to such investigation is not dictated a priori, the deduction of the results has to be in consonance with the character of each science. Deduction from the ultimates of physics which are necessarily mathematical has to be mathematical. But to ask for mathematical deduction everywhere would be to assume beforehand that no reality except the material could exist. Being non-mathematical in character the postulates of life and mind cannot be expected to yield their consequences by mathematical deduction. Logical deduction Would be in order here. Of course, within each science the part play-ed by mathematics should be sought to be extended as far as possible: in other words, the utmost physico-chemical description should be attempted. But no scruple Against coming to the end of such description is called for and hence between the phenomena so described and the ^lira-material factors or entities posited beyond them there need be no mathematical deduction. In short, the theoretical ideal of modem physics widens immensely the meaning of explanation in scientific philosophy though keeping it strictly Mathematical in physics itself, and frees it completely from a

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materialistic bias in the other sciences. This further implies that a synthesis, if any, of the conclusions of all the sciences may be reached without a materialistic bias.

In addition, we may say that both the actual findings of physics and its mode of arriving at ultimate axioms not only undermine dogmatic materialism but also prove physics compatible in its essence with the highest characteristics we have shown the ultra-material to possess. Our study of parapsychology in the context of scientific findings on a statistical basis, supplemented by an examination of June's "collective unconscious", revealed mind as capable of operating not only in independence of the body and brain but also in independence of physical space and time, though having contact with them all, and as operating with a telepathic and precognitive faculty that can best be termed intuition and that, as the provisionally epiphenomenalist Margaret Knight admits, entails the causing of an event in the present by an event in the future, thus revolutionising the whole meaning of time and causality accepted by materialism. Now, physics breaks the framework of physical space and time and causality in one way or another by quantum theory and relativity theory, puts basic reality outside them and outside direct experimental validation though not denying it contact with the world of observation, stresses the intuitive faculty as the master means of reaching final truth. The most physical of sciences, therefore, connects up with the least physical. And while the latter gives the proper interpretative approach to the former, the former provides an extreme accession strength to the latter by the fact that in the domain where non-materialism might hope for the smallest encouragement any it still gets a standing-ground substantial enough. So we may firmly say: "The physical universe, according to the science of matter, is most likely to be only a surface-phenomenon with vital-mental 'planes' as depth-phenomena, the frontal appearance of a larger many layered interrelated cosmos unified in a principles transcending materiality with out excluding it."

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Here perhaps the point will be raised: "If modem physics breaks the framework of space, time and causality/ why look towards anything other than matter in its fundamental constitution for explaining extra-sensory perception? Materialism should be a sufficient philosophy." The argument conceals two fallacies. Firstly, the matter on which materialism is built is what is within the framework which physics now breaks. If it were not, materialism would not be built a-t all. When the framework gives way, such matter ceases to be plausible as an ultimate concept. It remains a valid concept of the familiar world, but its foundations are shown to extend beyond the closed universe of materialism, though physic: s itself cannot judge whither the extension leads. To explain E5P, therefore, we have to postulate something else than such matter. Secondly, the something else cannot be merely the extension we have spoken of. Mind cannot be covered by this extension, for none of the concepts of physics are psychological: they refer to physical reality, whatever be the sort. But the extension has an affinity to the highest characteristics revealed of the ultra-material by ESP. It could very well be the ultra-material itself in a form in which the psychological element is subdued or suppressed. It cannot serve °^ its own as an explanation of ESP. Even matter in the extended sense which pierces through the dosed universe of materialism is not sufficient but rather invites the hypothesis that the ultra- material is its true hidden nature. The synthesis/ therefore, of physics, biology and psychology can never be in terms of physics. As regards physics and biology it must be in biological terms, as regards biology and psychology it must be in psychological terms, as regards all the three sciences it must be in the terms of the last- provided we understand the higher terms in a new way which does not commit us merely to a reductionism from an end opposite to the material. Moreover, the synthesis cannot be done by merely broadening the basic concepts of physics in the interests of a specific physico-chemical operation in biology and psychology, as von Bertalanffy suggests. This would be just a subtler

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materialism. All materialism, be it ever so subtle, we have shown to be impossible in the phenomena of life and mind as studied in their central issues by science. Consequently the synthesis has to proceed from the side of the ultra-material and, with the proviso hinted above, take life to be involved mind and matter to be involved life.

There seems no reason to suspect our thesis - a non- materialism which is a pluralism inasmuch as it accepts matter, life and mind as distinct powers and which yet is a monism "inasmuch as it considers them as entering into a single system of interaction wherein each of the lower powers is a particular phase of concealment or "involution" of the one above it and hence capable of interacting with it by way both of opposition in its own right and subservience as a derivate, the two modes together figuring in the evolutionary manifestation of that power, vertical no less than horizontal.

2

We have come to the end of our survey of the findings of science on the nature of things. After examining the problem of matter and mind and that of matter and life, we examined the character of matter in itself as disclosed by the science of physics. Scrutinising the field of this science we have found strong positive indications that the physical universe is not a dosed complete system but a particular face and front of a larger reality transcending the material without excluding it, as well as that the methods of theoretical physics and the objectives of this method are incompatible with the temper and turn of materialism. In other words, physical science supports, though necessarily in an indirect way, our thesis that mind, life, matter are three principles interacting and that the interaction is possible because each lower principle is an "involution" or concealment of the one above it. Thus we have a pluralism playing on the basis of a monism of the highest principle.

What remains now is to set in proper conceptual focus the

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phenomenon of interaction and proceed from it to a clearer picture of the three principles in our world-system as well as of that world-system as a whole. The best starting-point here is by way of an analogy from the view of matter taken by the biologist Julian Huxley in one of his neo-materialistic declarations. He denies any gap in the continuity of physical processes. According to him there is no special vital principle injected into material phenomena nor is there a break in them at which we can say "here mind appears" or "there personality enters"; all is development of matter. But Huxley rejects what he calls the old "one-sided materialism" to which mind is a mere subtillisation of matter and he puts aside also the notion of some materialists that mind is not pervasive of all life. On the second point we may take him to be in agreement with the assertion of G.N. Ridley in Man: The Verdict of Science on the question: Where in the scale of organisms are we to locate the first signs of mind? Ridley writes: "There appear to be two schools of thought. One, taking a very broad view of the problem, sees even in the most elementary responsive and apparently purposive behaviour of the simpler creatures of the pond the working of an element of mind. The other holds that mind is recognisable as such only in those animals which possess that degree of flexibility of behaviour which marks them as something more than mere automata. A strictly objective view of the matter would favour the first hypothesis; the second obviously admits subjective criteria." But Huxley goes beyond even the first hypothesis. To him mind is co-extensive with matter. And it is co-extensive not as a subtle state of matter itself but ^ something irreducible to matter since science has never been able to present mind in materialistic terms: no species of "phosphorescence", as the old crude materialism suggested, "or anything amounting to a dance of protons and neutrons and electrons can be equated to mind. Yet Huxley is a neo- "materialist, for he still subscribes to the old doctrine that all dental phenomena have material counterparts without which they cannot exist. The upshot of his rejection of one

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side of the old materialism and acceptance of the other is a "monism" in which matter and mind - the latter term broadly denoting for him "all psychical activity and experience, conscious or subconscious, sensory, emotional, cognitive and conative" - are "two aspects of one organisation," of "one world-stuff" in which the aspect of matter is the chief and that of mind merely a non-material correlate of it.

He says: "Mind or something of the same nature as mind must exist throughout the entire universe.... All the activities of the world-stuff are accompanied by mental as well as by material happenings. In most cases, however, the mental happenings are at such a low level of intensity that we cannot detect them; we may perhaps call them 'psychoid' happenings, to emphasise the difference in intensity and quality from our own psychical activities. In those organs that we call brains the psychoid activities are in some way made to reinforce each other until, as is clearly the case in higher animals, they reach a high level of intensity, and they are the dominant and specific function of the brain of man. Until we learn to detect psychoid activities of low intensity, as we have learned to do with electrical happenings, we cannot prove this. But already it has become the simplest hypothesis that will fit the facts of developmental and evolutionary continuity."

We need not pause to refute this theory. Scientifically it is refuted by all the essays already written in our series. The "facts" to which Huxley appeals are no such absolute "facts as conceived by him. It is in a mood of dogmatism that the theory is said to be scientifically the most adequate. And Huxley himself in his other writings can be made to show up the dogmatism of it. In The Uniqueness of Man he has admitted extra-sensory perception as a reality: "Experiments such as those of Rhine and Tyrrell on extra-sensory guessing, experiences like those of Gilbert Murray on thought-transference, and the numerous sporadic records of telepathy and clairvoyance suggest that some people at least possess possibilities of knowledge which are not confined within the ordinary

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channels of sense-perception." Later, in a sober Foreword to a violent attack on the results of parapsychology launched by D.H. Rawcliffe who disparagingly dubs this whole branch of study "occult", Huxley asserts that he cannot follow Rawcliffe in "stigmatising studies in telepathy, clairvoyance, etc., as occult research." He regards such studies on a systematic basis as scientific. Further, in the same Foreword, he writes: "I am quite prepared to find that certain techniques, such as Rajah Yoga involving withdrawal from sense-impression, may reveal new properties of mind, or, to put it more scientifically, result in new modes of mental activity. After all, mental activity has been enormously intensified during evolution. And we simply do not yet know the basic relation between mental activity and physical brain activity. It is extremely important to try to find out whether under certain conditions mental activity may be detached from physical; we can be sure that many possibilities of mind or mental activity are still unexplored."

The double-aspect theory a la Huxley cannot at all stand as an ultimate explanation. However, there is an element of truth in what he calls "developmental and evolutionary continuity." Something like a complementary-process of matter and mind, with the latter merely a non-material correlate of the former, is part of the many-sided complex of mind-matter interrelation. Although this process is not the whole psycho-physical reality, Huxleyan monism seems to obtain in some measure and is for a certain range of facts the simplest explanatory hypothesis.

In its full form the hypothesis should speak of vital and mental happenings instead of mental alone accompanying material happenings. Huxley himself perhaps intends this: for, in the same context, before launching on an illustrative aside on "electrical happenings" which we have learnt to detect almost everywhere, he remarks: "The notion that there is something of the same nature as human mind in lifeless matter at first sight appears incredible or ridiculous." The opposition made between "lifeless matter" and "mind"

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indicates that vital happenings are included in the latter concept, even if his definition of mind - despite being wide by its inclusion of all psychical activity and experience conscious or subconscious, sensory, emotional, cognitive and conative - may not directly take them in. At any rate whether Huxley includes them or not, we have in the course of our scientific scrutiny recognised life no less than mind as a distinct principle irreducible to matter and when we accept Huxleyan monism within certain limits as providing us with the right point of departure for understanding our own interacting system of several principles we have to begin with both life and mind together as non-material correlates of matter itself, a three-aspected single organisation in which matter is the chief decisive aspect, so that matter itself seems by its development and evolution to give rise to vitality and mentality, has the appearance of becoming alive and mental in various degrees of intensity.

By analogy from such matter we have to conceive the nature of life and mind. If matter has vitality and mentality of some sort, life must have mentality and materiality of its own and mind must have materiality and vitality proper to it. No principle of the three is without the other two principles associated with it. And, once we see this, we see too that all of them have a certain commonalty diversely organised. Each is the same in a different plane, with an organisation peculiar to each. Hence the distinctness and yet a capacity to interact. It is not mind or life interacting with matter, or mind interacting with life, but one poise of mental-vital-material organisation interacting with another poise of organisation containing the same factors. The distinctness consists in the predominance of one factor over the rest. In the principle of matter, the material factor rules the vital and mental: in that of life, the vital rules the remaining two: in that of mind, the mental is the ruler of its pair of companions.

And so, when we speak of matter as involved life and W6 as involved mind, we do not resort to a reductionism from the higher level corresponding to the reductionism which"

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materialists posit from the lower. Rather, holding each principle to be a three-in-one, we regard the involution of the higher in the lower as consisting in the subordination of the higher's ruling role to what was in it a subordinate play. Thus we have to conceive of life as involved mind in the sense that the principle of life which, together with the principle of matter, was subordinate to the principle of mind proper becomes predominant: similarly, matter is involved life in the sense that the material principle which, side by side with the mental, was dominated by the vital is no longer subordinate. Matter is not merely life changed to a lower scale nor life merely mind changed in the same fashion: life was always life but only its role is different and matter was always matter but just its role is altered. And yet, while there is no reductionism, it is mind, from the plane where the mental holds sway over the vital and material, that delivers a new organisation in which the vital comes to the top; and it is life-force, from the plane where it is sovereign over the mental and material, that precipitates a new organisation in which the material stands as the determinant. Therefore life is involved mind and matter involved life in a real sense without there being any reductionism.

But here we must make an important distinction inspired by the evolutionary nature of the plane on which we exist. Evolution, in a world not explicable by materialism, means the graded release of powers higher than matter from an original involution - a release due to at once the expressive urge of what is involved and the liberative pressure of the full planes of those powers beyond matter. Can we generalise that an evolutionary process holds on the free vital and mental planes also? No. On a plane where the lowest power is not the primary factor, there cannot, strictly speaking, be an evolution. In view of this, the original involution on our own plane must be of a special order and the subordination there of two powers to one must have another meaning than elsewhere. We have to polarise involution to evolution and take subordination to connote the submergence of the superior

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powers in the most inferior, preliminary to their emergence from it. Precisely like evolution, involution can- not, strictly speaking, apply to any plane where the lowest is not the primary factor.

And on an involutionary and evolutionary plane of matter, with life and mind not functioning in the way in which on the other planes matter and mind or else life and matter do, - that is, openly from the very start, though in subordination - life and mind cannot be bound to subordination always in the way in which matter and mind or else life and matter are bound on those planes. The graded emergence of the higher powers from their submergence carries the possibility - nay, the certainty - of their progressive domination over the inferior after a period during which they appear to be entirely determined by it as if they were its mere vital-mental correlates: the law of a permanent subordination is inapplicable where the initial state is one in which they ostensibly suffer a sheer loss of themselves and there is apparently nothing except blind brute matter utterly devoid of both life and mind. This progressive domination is just what we seem to discover when we observe the results of evolution and the seeming shows itself as fact when we demonstrate, in contradiction of the old materialism no less than of Huxleyan monism, life and mind to be distinct powers operating on matter and to be neither useless material by-products nor helpless non-material correlates of physical happenings.

Now, looking at all the planes as an ensemble, we may declare that in a total conception we have a single reality with three distinct yet interacting levels of its power, in each of which it is triply at work in an organisation individual to that level and in one of which it is evolutionary and in the other two what we may term "typal" - a single reality which in its essential existence must be some inconceivable fusion of the three levels but with a capacity to project them in differing modes to make a "multiverse" whose "depths" are the mental and vital planes and whose "surface" is the plane of matter.

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Two considerations, however, must modify the picture of the world-system we have presented with science's help, and a third must supply some very significant motifs. The first arises from the double character of our own plane: this plane not only has the lowest power, matter, as its base and continent but also proceeds evolutionarily. We have said that evolution cannot occur unless the primary factor is constituted by the lowest power; but this is not tantamount to saying that when the primary factor is constituted by the lowest power evolution is a necessity. For, there can be a subordination of the superior powers to the inferior without their subsequent graded release from it: the graded release or emergence occurs only if there is an initial subordination in the sense of submergence. Consequently, two kinds of material planes are possible. And on the one that is not involutionary or evolutionary like ours the subordination of the superior powers to the inferior will not imply the seeming loss of both life and mind in blind brute matter. Matter, merely subordinating life and mind, would be quite a different thing: life and mind, though always subordinate, would always be manifest in it and there would be no travail of them, no conflict with the material base and continent. Such matter would be, like life and mind on their own planes, "typal".

And it is exactly such matter's existence that is demanded as immediate background to our world of evolution. For, this world introduces an a-symmetry. It is not the plane of matter corresponding to the other two of life and mind: a gap is left in the "depth"-series which subordinates two principles to one without submerging them. A plane of evolution is rather an amalgam of all the three principles, each having in turn a chance to subordinate the remainder, each emerging in turn as ruler in the course of time: it is an amalgam where the three strive with one another to avoid subordination and achieve dominance. In order that such a state should come about, there should be a precipitation of all the principles from planes of their own into a sort of indeterminate chaos

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out of which they progressively emerge with recognisable matter as the first power and therefore the base and continent. If, behind an evolving world of matter and life and mind, there are typal planes of life and mind, logic requires a typal plane of matter also. There one main fully-achieved theme with two subsidiary strains ever-present would be found in varied play rather than a difficult emergence of two strains from a developing theme which seems the sole cosmic formula, but on the other hand matter there would not become increasingly an instrument of life and mind and open to possibilities beyond the material formula however excellent.

A fourfold instead of a threefold system - fourfold with three typal cosmicities behind one cosmicity in evolutionary struggle - is therefore the result of our first consideration. The second consideration compelling us to modify our idea of a three-tiered scheme is that the mind-plane does not appear to be the highest, short of the all-fusing inconceivable status of the single reality projecting the "multiverse". Mystical experience, if it is to be believed, goes clean beyond the mental plane to not only that all fusing state but also a state in which all stands integrated in a harmony of perfect equals - a balanced play of perfect matter, perfect life, perfect mind, brought about by a supreme dynamic principle. This principle is hinted in ancient Indian scriptures of spiritual realisation in various terms. The Vedas invoke it as Satyam Ritam Brihat - the True, the Right, the Vast. The Upanishads chant of it as the ever-blissful omniscient and omnipotent Lord locked in superconscious sleep, Prajna; or else as the Self of supra-intellectual Knowledge which has the master discrimination of a multiform creativity, Vijnana; or, again/ simply as the dynamic Immense above mind, Mahas. There is inspired reference to it also in the vision of the threefold embodiment of the Divine Being: sthula sharira, the gross body of vitalised and mentalised matter that is the surface o reality - sukshma sharira, the subtle body of matter, life and mind as they are in reality's depths - karana sharira, the causal

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body of the original and ideal materiality, vitality and mentality that are on reality's heights as modes of the supreme creative and operative Truth, the sovereign dynamism manifested out of the ineffable all-fusing Essence, what Sri Aurobindo with a total realisation of it in even wide-awake experience has designated as Supermind or Truth-Conscious- ness.

Science, of course, knows nothing about this divine principle, nor even about whatever lesser play of it may be in force between it and the mind-plane as connective sub- territories or "anterooms" of its plenary splendour, a lesser play which the world's different religions as well as certain philosophies figure as "Heaven" or "Nous". Science at its top knows only of the plane to which the mental phenomena of telepathy and precognition are pointers. But with the acceptance of these pointers its whole stance vis-a-vis the varieties of religious experience and the revelations of mystical and spiritual realisation must undergo a change. Bertrand Russell's statement that the declarations of mystics can be taken merely as expressive of psychological phenomena and not of aspects of ontological truth can no longer have the full support of scientific observation; for science has already through parapsychology caught sight of an ontological truth whose greater ranges may with reason be surmised to be compassed in diverse degrees by mysticism and spirituality. Science's world-view, therefore, holds as a faint glimmer on its horizon a plane beyond that of mind, and its scheme of monism-in-pluralism must tentatively be fivefold (or, if we count the all-fusing status as an additional ultimate plane, sixfold).

The second modifying consideration, by thus extending the scheme, extends also the vision of evolutionary fulfillment on earth. For, not only matter, life and mind are the principle in action on each plane: there is too the ultra-mental divine principle. The involution from which earth-evolution starts must be holding this divine principle no less than subtle matter, subtle life and subtle mind. The three latter

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principles have to a certain extent been established in all humanity with the aid of pressure from the planes where they are dominant. The divine principle is known by nothing more than brief touches or by some reflection in the developed consciousness of a few. But its evolution too is part of earth's destiny and must take place in proportion as there are the urge and aspiration from within and the pressure and "grace" from beyond. The outcome of its evolution would be a divinely dynamic status of Being, Consciousness and Bliss - a sovereign Truth-Power, as it were, - effectuating an absolute perfection of mind and life and body.

Here enters the third consideration with the query: Has this perfection a really individual sense? Of course, evolution, the long process which makes for perfection across a thousand zigzags, is through individual organisms. But can we say that the organic individualisation is anything more than a passing unity achieved by the universal powers of life and mind and beyond-mind? In common parlance, is there an individual "soul" answering to the distinct organism, an "immortal spark" of the Divine Spirit? As regards the human organism, the specific answer of science based on extra- sensory phenomena studied under test conditions and by a statistical method, is summed up by Dr. Rhine: "Not the supernatural character of the soul, not its divine origin, its transmigration, its immortality - indeed nothing has been dealt with so far but its elemental reality.... What has been found may be called a psychological soul." Dr. Rhine simply means that an extra-physical factor exists in man. This by itself does not carry us directly towards a solution of our problem. However, he adds: "It is true that, as far as we have gone, there is no conflict between this psychological soul and the common theological meaning of the term." An indirect affirmative is thus given.

Starting with it we may further affirm that under the circumstances the sense of self, which is implied in the "self- awareness" which is one of our mental differentia from the other organisms, need not be an illusion as materialism,

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whether one-sided or Huxleyan or any other, would think, but has every chance of being the positive sign of an immortal individual entity. This entity would not be the "capsulated ego" (Jung's phrase) which is our surface self- hood: it would be something that is both projected into that ego and continuous beyond it, something that in spite of individuality can partake of universality, the "open" subliminal and whatever is even greater, for its profoundest urge struggling through the ego capsule is to overflow to all beings, to comprehend all existence, to be world-wide, and even world-transcendent. In Jungian language, we may say that it is that part of the individual consciousness which is the outward crest of the "individual unconscious" and, through the latter, a participant in the "collective unconscious". It is what Jung considers the "inner core" of our individuation, the inmost "Self" which he calls "a magnitude superordinate to the conscious ego", "a mid-point stretched between two worlds... strange to us and yet so near", taking in both consciousness and the unconscious, "the centre of the psychic totality, as the ego is the centre of conscious- ness." Unlike the capsulated ego which is mostly bound up with the physical-vital-mental surface, this soul which is a depth-phenomenon peeping out would survive that surface's disintegration. And in its final essence it would be a spark of the Divine Spirit originating the universe.

Further, if evolution is the key-process on earth and if an immortal individual entity is in every human evolute, then every such soul must be a sharer in that process and must have been in an overt or covert form behind other evolutes before the present one, other evolutes both within and outside the human series. Rebirth, and not only survival of death, is a necessary postulate when evolution is understood with reference to the individual soul. And each link in the chain of rebirth must be taken as contributing in some way to a system of progress until at last the birth is attained in which not only the soul's oneness with the Divine but also the absolute perfection of mind and life and body is reached.

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Thus the scheme of monism-in-pluralism which we have derived from science comes to be charged with the motifs of soul-individuality and soul-continuity. With these two motifs the philosophy of science gets completed and, in its completeness, grows the outline of a new mysticism which does not need to throw away anything really valuable in the past of religion but can put into all ancient spiritual values a mighty this-worldly meaning by assimilating the significances and stresses of scientific thought and discovery.

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A monism-in-pluralism which does not minimise within the final synthesis any of the principles concerned and founds itself in a reality not only above Matter but also above Mind and takes up the essential values of past mystico-spiritual traditions to orientate them towards this-worldly ends that are inseparable from the temper of science: such is the system we have patiently discerned as part indicated and part implicit in the scientific findings within the domains of physical, vital, mental, para-psychological phenomena.

Here two points, apropos our mention of the temper of science, may be touched upon. The first is akin to a question we tackled when discussing Einstein's conception of theory in physics and is really another manner of putting that question. We may be asked: "Do not science's this-worldly ends include an insistence on explaining everything in terms of matter? Can we ever speak of the temper proper to science and not reject your neo-mysticism?" Well, there is an idea fairly common that science needs no world-view to be found for it by impartial evaluation of its main concepts: science is believed to have been born with a world-view in its eyes - materialism. But this is a mistake. Correctly speaking, science is not pledged to materialism as a dogma. Its approach is materialistic in the sense that it is a quest for knowledge basing itself on the universe that is observable by the bodily senses and there comes in consequence a stress on material

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reality. Its approach is materialistic also in the sense that it proceeds to study and analyse the universe presented to the senses, as if nothing except matter existed. That "as if" is of capital importance in understanding science: it is necessary for scientists because without it they would miss a sharp spur to making more and more subtle and elaborate discoveries in the field of sense-apprehended objects, but it clearly suggests a hypothetical or methodological materialism as contrasted to a materialism that is dogmatic. Science cannot afford to be dogmatic: it has constantly to keep an open mind in order to extend the range of its observation and arrive at new theories correlating an ever-wider body of facts. Nor need correlation be always mathematical as in physics. The essence of correlation is logic and not mathematics. Mathematics is, in general, logic applied to quantities or what may symbolise them: it does not exhaust the meaning of correlation. Correlation is mathematical or non-mathematical according as the reality it deals with is quantitatively measurable or not: in short, according as the reality is material or ultra-material. A mathematical theory, therefore, is not a sine qua non of science. But, of course, science should try to push mathematics as far as possible and, in consonance with its natural stress on material reality, it does make one inexorable demand: material results - that is, observable crucial consequences of every theory and increase in the possibilities of physical being and action.

All this does not mean that a number of scientists are not materialists. What we have called the materialistic approach tends easily to induce in less careful minds a dogmatic materialism which looks upon the physical universe as a closed system complete in itself rather than as a certain facade of a larger many-layered interrelated cosmos unified in some principle which transcends materiality and yet includes it. In fact, the age we live in partly overlaps and partly emerges from one in which science not only put a tremendous emphasis on material reality but also sought to unify all existence under the concept of matter. This move

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had as its main origin and driving power the discovery of organic evolution. The old line dividing man from other living creatures and, among all living creatures, the demarcation between species and species were erased. Everything organic was traced to a common ancestral form, a primitive protoplasm. Even the barrier between organic and inorganic was thinned, and theory confidently asserted that all matter is a unity and that the phenomena of life and mind and whatever subtle activity is termed the soul are not distinct from (he physical world but developments of its inherent potencies through a complex organisation of its elementary particles. Such a view of nature brushed aside the privileged position conventional religion had given to man, and the contempt in which religious philosophy had held the world of matter and bodily life, and the straining it had encouraged towards a Beyond as the scene of human completion. Science reacted in the direction of the opposite extreme, putting a premium on the Here and Now and condemning all non- materialistic speculation as hallucinated folly.

So one-sided, so thoroughly exclusive a conception was bound to have little finality in a multifarious world like ours. We have tried to show how scientific study compels us in every field to put materialism aside - even a neo-materialism such as suggested once by Julian Huxley, which makes mind and matter two aspects of a single organisation or world-stuff in which the chief and basic aspect is matter. That monism of this sort does not do justice to the full findings of scientific enquiry is most glaringly evident from parapsychology, the statistically measured facts of extra-sensory perception; but otherwise too it stands convicted of error as soon as we discover that what is known in the biological field as "organic unity" cannot be explained either by extrapolating ordinary physics and chemistry to the cell-compound or by seeking with von Bertalanffy a new physics and chemistry of the organic under which ultimately the physics and chemistry of the inorganic will be subsumed: if in its central processes life is independent of and not ruled by material organisation,

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much less can mind in its distinction from matter be a mere helpless accompaniment of physical events.

Yes, pluralism cannot be avoided in scientific philosophy. A plane of life and a plane of mind must be declared to exist together with the material plane. At the same time, within a certain range the close connection between matter and non- matter which science has demonstrated, the amount of correlation it has found between the physical and the vital- mental, the developmental and evolutionary continuity stressed by Huxleyan monism appear to suffer some injustice of description if they are understood as the locked interplay of entities quite distinct rather than aspects of one single entity. Life and mind are of two sorts, one of which is exactly as if matter itself were transposed to a vital and mental key and the activity of such life and mind is inseparable from physico-chemical organisation. But the implications of this inseparableness are quite other than those envisaged by monism of the Huxleyan type: we have demonstrated these implications and also stepped by a justifiable analogy to a life-plane in which matter and mind are subordinated to life, as well as a mind-plane in which matter and life are subordinated to mind. Further we have examined the heart of the evolution-concept and argued evolution to be a fact of only our terrestrial existence, while life and mind on their own planes are typal rather than evolutionary. From this we have proceeded to posit a typal matter-plane also behind earth- evolution, and finally we have looked beyond mind itself to what the mystical traditions call Spirit and we have visioned the evolution of the Spirit with a perfect material, vital, mental instrument as the future to which unbiased scrutiny of scientific data must point.

Quite a complexity is here - with a harmony of "isms" which ordinarily fall apart or glare at one another. And some may object to it by invoking "simplicity" as the guiding slogan of the scientific temper. This objection is the second of the two points we proposed to touch upon. But those who press it are not really being simple in the true logical sense.

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Logically speaking, simplicity of hypothesis lies in embracing the widest range of facts within the smallest set of axioms. The smallest set may be a very complex thing, but it is the simplest compatible with the multifarious factuality that has to be comprehended. Einstein's theory of relativity is by no means simple by ordinary standards, but it provides the most economical comprehension of all the facts of uniform and accelerated motion. Newton's theory in its original form leaves out some momentous facts and if it is emended it becomes as cumbersome as the ptolemaic hypothesis of cycles and epicycles which the Copernican view replaced. Even Huxley's monism is obviously not as simple as the old- fashioned materialism which made consciousness some sort of secretion of the brain: whatever advantage over that crude philosophy it has is due to its embracing the "irreducible" fact of mind without bringing in dualism or pluralism. The scientific findings of modem times create the need of a grand synthesis in which this monism would be brought into accord with realities other than and distinct from a world- stuff which is indivisibly though not indistinguishably material-mental.

The four European thinkers of our time who have built up philosophical systems containing a more or less explicit recognition of this monism have not come authentically near such a synthesis. Bertrand Russell with his view that ultimate reality is neither mental nor material but neutral in respect of these alternatives reckons not at all with a life or mind existing and functioning beyond its material companion: he is, in spite of his technical non-materialism, a materialist for all practical purposes, believing in "blind" cosmic evolutionary forces that have engendered in man a strange briefly brilliant exception who in his high hours strives after truth and beauty and goodness and holiness. Lloyd Morgan, affirming that there are not two realms, a physical and a psychical, but one psycho-physical from top to bottom, and expounding the theory of "emergent evolution" according to which novel values display themselves at

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certain stages of the psycho-physical world, values not reducible to the lower components of a stage and having an effective unity as well as a purposive law of their own - Lloyd Morgan has a strong though vague sense of some greatness which is universally enfolded and progressively unfolded, but he cannot give proper form to his sense and remains, as far as intellectual terms are concerned, within the confines of a noble naturalism. Samuel Alexander, who considers mind as being in our experience a "continuum" of conscious acts while from the scientific standpoint it is a "continuum" of neural motions in the brain and who suggests a basic reality for this two-sided monism by broadly naming time as the "mind" of space, is more deeply haunted than his scientific- philosophic contemporaries by the presence of something godlike surpassing the body-mind status of man in general and reads in the universe a "nisus towards deity" from its very foundational stuff of "space-time". But "deity" is always becoming, always yet to be: the universe is never complete and new qualities keep on emerging as the patterns of nature's conditions change. Hence, though the next emergent after the present human consciousness may reasonably be supposed to be a quality higher than it, it cannot be understood within Alexander's system as anything independent of our universe's stuff of space-time. Neither can it be conceived within that system as originally distinct from that stuff.

A.C. Whitehead, the acutest and subtlest enemy of what he terms "bifurcation of nature" and therefore of the body- mind dualism, speaks not only of all constituents of reality being implicative of one another by "prehension", a mutual taking into account or "sensitiveness" or "feeling", which objectively seen is the interrelatedness of the material world: he speaks also of each creature having a "prehension" into the "togetherness" of the universe and into the principle of concretion turning universal possibility into universal actuality - a "prehension" into what is identified by Whitehead as God. God is further designated not merely as the abstract

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"ground of concreteness" but also as concrete in every concretion, each "temporal occasion" embodying him. Finally, God is regarded as more than "a multiplicity of actual components in process of creation": he is, in addition, one since the fulfillment of his "consequent" as distinguished from his "primordial" nature is a single consciousness and "the realisation of the actual world in the unity of his nature". There is evidently in Whitehead a desire to come somehow to terms with religion and mysticism no less than with science, but it is often difficult to separate his keen complexity from ingenious obscurity and, while he is frequently profound as well as large-visioned, it is doubtful whether he comes really to grips with whatever exceeds the unbifurcated nature on which his philosophy is founded. Religion and mysticism, familiar with experience of soul and God and the Absolute or of planes beyond the material-vital- mental world-stuff, cannot rest in the "first and last things" posited by him, things which appear to be great spiritual truths glimmering through subtle words but which fail to convince us that they are anything else than wonderful mirages created by verbal affinities of a semi-poetic philosophising to the "mantras" of the rishis and saints. Nor can the parapsychological discoveries of present-day science in its unorthodox activity be satisfactorily attuned to Whitehead's philosophy.

There are other names in contemporary European thought that provide more direct approaches to what is here left too metaphysicised away or else inadequately metaphysicised. Bergson is perhaps the most notable: he has brought in his later works his earlier "Duree" and "Elan Vital" and "Intuition" or "In-feeling" into significant touch with the date of mystical experience. But there is not yet precisely the grand synthesis called for by the findings of science. Bergson is the philosopher of life: neither matter nor mind exists for him in quite its own right.

At this point, apropos of Bergson in particular, we may mention that the grand synthesis of which we have spoken

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involves also two "stresses" without which a philosophy of the scientific age would be incomplete. One is with regard to further evolution. Of course the idea of evolution, which is at white heat in Bergson though a kindling force too in Lloyd Morgan, Alexander and Whitehead, is the central dynamic of all modern thought playing round the word "Progress". Man is the product of evolution and, by his highly awakened consciousness, he is the supreme spearhead of the evolutionary movement in the future: that is a recurrent theme. However, man does not ordinarily realise his role; nor do the exponents of Progress gauge their theme's full sense. There is in man a large drive towards comfort and pleasure, a considerable straining towards making organised use of whatever capacities are present, a degree of endeavour to develop these capacities, a small amount of push towards evoking new ones and a very limited nisus towards surpassing himself and practically no explicit urge towards evolving a new species out of the human. But evolution in the true scientific sense means exactly the last three activities - or, rather, the very last with the other two as contributory factors.

When the theory of evolution was first established, some- thing of this true sense of it was caught up in a poetically inspired though not profound or even quite coherent manner by Nietzsche with his cry that man is to be surpassed and that he is only a bridge between the ape and the superman. Nietzsche was under the spell of the materialistic evolution- theory of his day, with its cult of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest: he concentrated and intensified this cult into what he termed the Will to Power. The superman signified in the Nietzschean vision a colossalisation of individualism, his highest virtue an inexhaustible heroic zest, magnificently pitiless to whoever stands in his way as well as to whatever in himself makes for weakness and wistfulness, inertia and complacence, security and luxury. Further, this bright brutality turns a face of flint towards the religious yearning after a Beyond: living and thinking matter is all in

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all to it. In this century evolutionism has moved considerably away from the Nietzschean vision. Though it has still a materialistic undertone to many of its pronouncements and though not all biologists subscribe to a non-materialistic philosophy, the Darwinian theme of "Nature red in tooth and claw" has given place to a more subtle and complex understanding of natural selection: indeed, according to Julian Huxley, sanguinary competition is now held to be mostly an anti-evolutionary force, the main part assigned to natural selection being an effect on what is labelled as "differential fertility" among populations, a peaceful working within a web of variation and mutation in the germplasm's pattern of chromosomes and genes. Besides, World War II has thrown into frightful relief an actual approximation to the Nietzschean dream in the Herrenvolk of Hitler and today other forms of that Titanism are also about us to shake our senses into vivid realisation of its mortal danger to all evolutionary hopes.

A finer and less egoistic strain is observable in recent evolutionism, and the individual is shown values like "sublimation" and "integration of personality" as beacon-lights:

even an indirectly religious colour is introduced by the psychoanalytic therapy a la Jung. Psychoanalysis has also served to emphasise the subjective side of man, if often only in an endeavour to rid him of too much preoccupation with subjective states. Its most suggestive contribution to thought is Jung's concept of the "collective unconscious", which approaches the old mystical notion of the Anima Mundi, the World-Soul, and whose most natural association is with the hypothesis stimulated by the discoveries of the para-psychologists that establish the existence of a mind independent or matter and of space and time as known in the material cosmos, a mind also capable of affecting matter without a physical intermediary. And as the statistically indicated concept of this mind is one of the master-ideas of twentieth- century science, modem evolutionism must be, on the positive side, plumbed for its full significance through that

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concept. The general direction of the evolutionary movement is to be read in this concept's light. Also the general method of the movement begins then to take shape. For, while science has made an external approach which is extremely valuable in an age when the scientific motif is predominant, what it has proved is something internal - a mysterious psychological transcendence of the physical world. And only through the internal and psychological, through a looking by the human personality into itself, through some sort of direct subjective exploration or evocation of the abyssus humanae conscientiae, through a kind of intense inner rapport with layers of being which exceed the normal focus of conscious- ness, the next evolutionary step can fundamentally be taken.

Yes, the fundamental of further evolution - of man's self- surpassing - is demonstrated to be within. A semi-mysticism is definitely indicated as inherent in the evolution-stress that is characteristic of modem science. Among European philosophers who have handled the evolutionary theme, Bergson whom we noted to have been most intensely charged with the idea of evolution is also the one who has best realised the inward nature of the method by which contact with the true springs of progress can be made. His account of the method may have defects, and his tendency to dissociate altogether the intellectual consciousness from it may be criticised, but with his "Intuition" or "In-feeling" he does point in the right direction.

Unfortunately, as we have already remarked, he fails to take sufficient cognisance of matter no less than of mind as distinct from life: especially matter is put by him under some sort of cloud. In this he is not merely reactive in a healthy way against the dogmatic materialism of the nineteenth century: he is also open to the suspicion of being crypto- Christian, most probably without intention or even aware- ness at the outset. Perhaps, in this business of looking down on matter, we should not single out Christianity: Bergson was crypto-Christian simply because Christianity is the religion of Europe, but all religion in general has depreciated

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matter and turned man's eyes to a Heaven or a Nirvana Sat-chit-ananda annulling the cosmos. Even the most dynamic types of religion have thought in terms of complete fulfilment elsewhere after a life of considerable God-manifestation here. It is not surprising, therefore, that evolutionists who are not inclined to materialism still take colour from a "supra-terrestrial" outlook fostered by past masters of mysticism and spirituality. They may be modem enough in not picturing the human body as the Devil's own trap of sin and a bagatelle of dirty dust which the soul must wait eagerly to throw away, they may even advocate a healthy balance between it and the soul, yet by its very materiality it does seem to them an obstacle in the final view. They do not perceive that if evolution is the law of life the permanent departure to a supra-terrestrial plane of self-completion robs this law of its central meaning: there must be, if we think in terms of self-completion, a supremely satisfying achievement on the earth-plane which is the stage of evolution: the line of progress must not come to an abrupt terminus, with what- ever is more than the world-stuff escaping beyond it and leaving the material-vital-mental nature of this stuff unperfected, dropped behind as cankered with some irremediable minimum of imperfection that no evolutionary advance can remove.

Here comes the second of our two stresses: it is with regard to matter's role in further evolution. Materialism was indeed shallow from an all-round standpoint and the dethronement of its one-sided conception of things was both inevitable and desirable; but it caught hold of the central meaning of evolution by insisting that there should be fulfilment on the material scene. Of course, it hardly knew what true fulfilment implies: it had too "extravert" a bent; still, it has had immense value inasmuch as it brought about vast amelioration of physical conditions on the collective no less than the individual scale and a sense at the same time of the body's actual rights and its ideal potentialities. Even its exaggeration of bodily values at the expense of less tangible

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ones has a significant truth concealed in it. Although the world-stuff is vital and mental as well as material, it does have a predominant material aspect: matter is, as it were, its matrix-aspect and life and mind are its aspects as "emergents" and that is why life and mind, in spite of being not really confined to the "emergent" status and of being also "independents", have an uphill fight to wage in vitalising and mentalising matter. Evolution, therefore, must signify a superb efflorescence of matter as its goal of goals. No doubt, matter's efflorescence must be a perfect instrument of the subtler powers and splendours of life and mind and beyond- mind; but all these would negate the evolutionary law unless they worked for that perfect instrumentality and brought about matter's own consummation.

It is thus that the new mysticism, into which the philosophy of science - the monism-in-pluralism outlined by us - grows, does not need to reject anything really valuable in the past of religion but puts into all ancient spiritual values a mighty this-worldly meaning by assimilating the significances and stresses of scientific thought and discovery. Yet vainly in the homeland of science, the West, do we seek for a consistent conceptual formulation, at once ample and detailed, of the mystical world-view half compelled and half permitted by that discovery and that thought. Only from India has come the satisfying formulation as part of a system of thought and discovery wider than the scientific: it is to be found in that masterpiece of intellectual and spiritual inspiration, Sri Aurobindo's book The Life Divine. Here a gigantic mystical experience which reaches from the splendid realisations of traditional spirituality to a consummate grip on what they left vaguely visioned is laid out in a vast yet minutely built philosophical pattern by means of a logic both firm and supple, coping with the abstract and the concrete of many planes of knowledge. Here is the outlook of one who has not only explored reality in its depths and heights but kept in living touch with modem ideas and needs. For, Sri Aurobindo was educated in England and the period of his

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stay there between his seventh to his twenty-first year (l»7o 1893) fell within some of the most keen decades of scientific development. Materialism was at its acme and was fixing, ineradicably in the consciousness of the times the concept c universal evolution and the feeling of earth-life's centrality in the scheme of man's fulfilment. Sri Aurobindo, on his return to India, prophesied that the materialistic denial of the extra- sensory and the mystical would break down by the very force of its own narrowness, but he always appreciated the austere discipline, fostered by scientific materialism, of emotion-free intellect which insists on putting everything to rigorous test and he set an extreme value on the materialist's cry for tangible results of all endeavour and for building by evolution upon terra firma whatever heaven the dreamer sees among the clouds. By what he criticised and what he approved he went to the heart of the scientific adventure cleansing it of all adventitious dogmatism and making its essential integrity and clarity and progressive this-worldlness one with his insatiable hunger for the Eternal, the Infinite, the Divine. It is this rare union of the scientific and the spiritual that finds voice in the book we have mentioned and renders the philosophy of Integral Yoga expounded in its pages the most fitting subject with which to crown a scientific survey opening up far beyond materialism.

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