Science, Materialism, Mysticism

The Scientific Mind and the Mystical Outlook

The scientific mind and the mystical outlook figure in the popular imagination as eternal enemies. Both are felt to be important but somehow irreconcilable in ultimate matters. It is worth inquiring whether the supposed irreconcilableness is anything other than a superficial impression.

We may remark at the very beginning that, historically, science and religion have not always stood in stark opposition. And most significantly the absence of stark opposition has been with regard to the science that is the very foundation of all sciences: physics. What is called classical or Newtonian physics was with Galileo and Kepler and Newton "the thinking of God's thoughts after Him". That is to say, physics was regarded as a discovery, by actual observation and by mathematical calculation, of the processes and laws of matter originating in a Divine Intelligence. In fact, they were considered intelligible precisely because there was not only human intelligence dealing with them but also a Divine Intelligence at their back. Newton, the supreme scientist of the world until Einstein came to share his status, was an extremely religious mind - and this not by dividing science and religion into two distinct compartments which though entirely different were vitally complementary: he was religious in the very act of being scientific and not in his extra- scientific hours, much less in spite of his science. Physical Nature as a vast yet closely-knit and basically single- patterned scheme of infinite developmental variety was Newton's world-vision as a scientist. He did not succeed in reducing all material phenomena to a basic single pattern, but his Law of Gravitation operating within the complex of his Laws of Motion went a long way towards it - holding together the smallest particles and the hugest heavenly bodies within the terms of the same mathematical equations. And this sense and discernment of unity and uniformity in the physical universe - this reduction of that universe to a harmonious seizability by the thinking mind which looks

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always for simple fundamental all-integrating categories was most religiously meaningful for Newton: it showed him that behind the universe there was one great Mind systematically at work and laying itself out for discovery by its own small and diminished replica that is human rationality.

Nor was this the sole interfusion of religion with science in Newton's attitude and outlook. Religion entered even more directly into his scientific thinking. Everybody knows that he postulated absolute motion, absolute space and absolute time: he said that there was one universal homogeneous extension of space and flow of time, in reference to which there was a motion of things which must be called the true motion as compared to motions that are relative. Nothing that we observe with the senses is ever completely at rest: what seems at rest is so only in relation to what moves faster, it is itself in motion relatively to what is still slower. To find absolute motion, the real as opposed to the apparent, we must have as a first condition, according to Newton, a perfectly immobile frame or standard of reference present in all places, in absolute space. But he realised that there was no means of directly observing motion in absolute space. He wrote: "It is indeed a matter of great difficulty to discover, and effectually to distinguish, the true motion of particular bodies from the apparent; because the parts of that immovable space, in which those motions are performed, do by no means come under the observation of our senses." To give empty and absolute space the logicality it lacked from the viewpoint of sense-observation Newton introduced into science the religious concept of God's omnipresence in a literal sense. The diary of his friend and student, David Gregory, leaves no doubt that the unmoving uniform universal presence of God in the physical cosmos was the essence of his absolute space in reference to which absolute motion would occur. Of course the knowledge of absolute motion can be only with God whose being is its basis, but, as its postulation was for Newton a necessity of reason, both God's being and consciousness were integral part of Newtonian physics!

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Today physics is Einsteinian and not Newtonian Newton's absolutes have gone by the board. But Einstein the exemplar par excellence of scientist in the post-Newtonian era, does not reject everything religious in connection with science. In his theory of the four-dimensional continuum of fused space and time, the new absolute entity replacing Newton's absolutes, he himself does not see any religious concept involved. No spiritual or mystical idea is acknowledged by him as integral part of his physics. There he differs from Newton's position. Though here too he does not rule spiritual interpretations of his continuum out of court so much as confesses inability to understand their relevance and though he is even willing to grant that the inability may argue a lack in himself and not necessarily want of validity in the interpretations, the fact remains that he the exemplary scientist refrains from subscribing to them. But all the same he no less than Newton looks on scientific truth as rooted in the existence of a Divine Intelligence. He goes further and states that a certain type of religious feeling in face of the universe is the real fountain-head of the scientific urge: in this connection he has said, "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science." A God beyond the cosmos and working "miracles" or interfering with the cosmic formula is tabooed by him: Einstein has no proper philosophical grasp of tran- scendence and is evidently repelled by the too anthropomorphic conceptions current in the popular creeds. But a God a la Spinoza, a Pantheos, is in his view a prerequisite of science. For science is to him the discovery of the order, the system, the logic, the reason embodied in phenomena: it is the finding of the mathematical mind expressive in the constitution of Nature. A profound and enthusiastic sense of a sovereign structuring and ordering Intelligence in the stuff and movement of the universe is, for Einstein, the core of true religiousness and such "cosmic religious emotion", as he calls it, is also the spring behind scientific research. Correctly speaking, this emotion is, according to him, strongest

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and most pure in the scientific researcher, for he has the -test and widest feeling of the structure and order of the world - namely, the feeling of precise mathematical relations and laws: the scientist is the best mystic. And, in Einstein's eves, no scientist can be of the profoundest calibre unless he is a mystic, explicitly or implicitly. For, pioneer creation in scientific thought can never come without terrific exertion and intense devotion and a mighty and heroic turning away from common pleasures and immediate practical life - and all this single-minded idealistic pursuit of truth can never be possible without "cosmic religious emotion". "What deep faith," exclaims Einstein, "in the rationality of the structure of the world, what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world, there must have been in Kepler and Newton!"

Einstein sums up his notion of science's dependence on response to a Superior Intelligence mathematically operative in the cosmos: "Science without religion is lame." And he goes on to state also that the scientific truth discovered on the spur of the religious or mystical feeling has in science itself no rational justification for its discovery: science cannot even provide the value of the very striving which constitutes it, the striving for a knowledge of physical truth. Why should we pursue this truth at even enormous self-sacrifice as if it were precious in itself? Science provides no answer: it can give us only the conceptual comprehension of the reciprocal relations among observed facts. To find real values, real norms, to arrive at a real support for our highest scientific aspirations we have to resort to the religious sense. And how does this sense find them? In Einstein's own words: "They do not come into existence as a result of argument and proof, but instead by revelation, and through the actions of strong personalities. One should not attempt to prove them, but rather to recognise their essence as clearly and purely as Possible."

These words set up a connection with another aspect of Einstein's "religiousness". For, the method that is set over

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against argument and proof is akin to what in another context he terms "intuition". And that context is of central importance: it is concerned with the discovery of the basic axioms of physics. Einstein says that these axioms are not reached by generalising from observed facts: the Theory of Relativity has decisively shown this. Experience may suggest certain lines of thought but by no process of induction are the fundamental laws derived. They are what Einstein calls "free creations" of the mathematical mind. They are a visionary structure and their contact with observed facts comes at the end of a long chain of deduction: it is the end-terms that are tested by experiment. Of course experiment has the last word - there must be observable facts answering to these end-terms if the free creations are to be accepted as valid. But the creations themselves cannot be inferred from experience. "There is no logical path to these laws," writes Einstein, "only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them."

So an authentic power of direct divination, a faculty not only supra-sensible but also supra-logical is granted by Einstein in even his scientific capacity. And although it is hedged round by several conditions, so that it is not taken to be a quite sovereign power of seizing truth, a most significant and far-reaching pronouncement is made when Einstein declares: "In a certain sense I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed." This means that, while Einstein himself does not lend his authority to any spiritual or mystical interpretation of his theory or see any religious concept figuring in his postulates and in this respect differs from Newton, he definitely makes something of a spiritual or mystical mode of mental activity a fundamental ingredient of scientific methodology.

Here is a permanent pointer in the body of science itself in the direction of spirituality. Elucidating the development of science, Einstein has shown that the pointer was always there and that even the Newtonian concepts were "free creations" at bottom but that the pointer was dearly defined

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only with the advent of the General Theory of Relativity. After that theory had been formulated, scientific methodology once and for all and quite openly, made room for the factor of intuition or divination at its very centre. No matter what limiting provisos may be set up about this factor, its essential character remains the same as in the philosophy of the ancients to whom Einstein refers in his dictum about pure thought and reality. Its admission, therefore, is a major revolution in the relations between spirituality and science. It renders Einstein, for all his disavowal of a direct penetration of his theory by a religious concept and his non-committal attitude to spiritual views of his continuum, a more effective "mysticiser" of science than Newton.

Unfortunately, he is himself debarred from realising the full import of his role by his belief that the only way to knowledge, to truth, is the scientific way, of which the way of physics is the prototype. Even intuition or divination is regarded by him as never leading to knowledge and truth except when it has a mathematical form and is operative with scientific concepts. With this prejudice he pairs his epigram "Science without religion is lame" with a complementary pointed phrase: "Religion without science is blind."

However, there is no whittling down of the typical character of the intuitive act. Between reality and the scientific mind there is, in Einstein's view, a "pre-established harmony" such as Leibnitz posited, by which after patient endeavour the scientific investigator can win to a knowledge of reality's depths: intuition is the instrument which his mind employs to disclose this intrinsic accord in an ever more profound degree until the whole and final truth stands bare. Indeed, in science the term "truth" has no assured meaning for Einstein without the "pre-established harmony". For, "truth" resides in fundamental theory's comprehension of the universe; but how are we to account for the universe's lending itself to this comprehension? Einstein once remarked, "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible to our mind." To him the only

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explanation is "pre-established harmony" progressively revealed by intuition. Also, he cannot conceive of the disinterested and self-sacrificing passion for truth which distinguishes the mighty pioneers of scientific research except as inspired by a faith that such a harmony exists to fulfil their terrific efforts and give them an insight into the Wisdom and Beauty embodied in the world-structure.

Einstein's high sense of the intuitive act is not shared by the Positivists who choose to avoid words like "intuition" and "divination" and prefer to speak only of an enumeration of possible and alternatives, a number of guesses out of which one is accepted with the aid of experimental verification. They also reduce the accepted alternative to the status of a purely subjective or rather inter-subjective construct, a thought-device for our own convenience, which has no "mystical" element in it like grasping of reality by pure thought. And their argument is that it is evidently a construct of this kind since it is often far removed from phenomenal experience and is connected with it only at the terminal of a long chain of deduction from the fundamental axioms. But the very distance, the extreme length of the deductive chain, between verifiable propositions and the original theory indicates the peculiar nature of the theoretical process. For, while one may give, with the Positivists, some colour of facility to those theories which seem near to sense-experience and look very much like inductions from empirical observa- tions, the facile view is all too inadequate when the theory is far removed from phenomenal appearance. There is no question then of guessing in the ordinary way. And let us not forget that the gap which separates reality as conceived by theory and reality as perceived in empirical experience increases as theory copes with more and more empirical data. For example, the Riemannian "curved" four-dimensional continuum by which the General Theory of Relativity coped with the data of gravitation receded immeasurably more beyond observed phenomena than the semi-Euclidian or "hyperbolic" continuum of space-time by which the

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special Theory dealt with uniform straight-line motion unaffected by a gravitational field. The concept of the latter, in its final synthesis of generalisations, is sufficiently distant from phenomena: that of the former is removed from them by a hiatus which is stupendous. The way to such a concept is very hard indeed: no logic, however subtle or concealed, prompts it from the empirical side, it cannot be derived in any way by implicative generalisation from phenomena or by probability or other inductive formulation. 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. To call the faculty which strives towards that remote goal a faculty of guess-work is to be ridiculous. No fundamental theorist, using guesswork, could go anywhere:

it would not be worth his while to even try to go anywhere. Whether he errs or proves right, he has to attempt to use another faculty: his attempt may be futile but he has not the ghost of a chance to be correct if he does not strain towards an act of consciousness which can only be designated as intuitive in the authentic sense of direct insight into reality's nature. In other words, the act must be "mystical" though it has not explicitly to do with the spiritual contents of

mysticism.

And this signifies that the fundamental concepts are not

purely subjective constructs - utilitarian tools of the human mind and nothing more. Einstein, no doubt, calls them in one context "fictions", but with no derogatory motive, for he also calls them "inventions" and "creations": what he in- tends to convey is that they are not a datum of observed factuality, not a general summing-up of the empirical behaviour of phenomena but discovered by a play of the unrestricted imagination which takes the physically "given" as just a vaulting-board for its visionary leap. The leap, according to him, is for seizing the real in all its depth, for penetrating into truth, for arriving at concepts which are grounded in Nature's ultimate structure. Its arrival at a conceptual picture so different from the picture provided by

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empirical experience does not render the theory a subjective convenience: it only proves how different ultimate reality is from that experience.

Because of this difference the Einsteinian "intuition" becomes all the more a mystical activity. It not only functions mystically but also leads to a reality which is mystical in so far as it is not in the least limited by phenomenal fact except that the theorist "takes off" from the field of such fact and "touches down" there for final proof. The intuition has complete freedom for presenting the most fantastic-seeming concept, the most unphysical-appearing formula: the only conditions to be fulfilled are that the deductions from the first concepts and formulas - from the "free creations" - should be strictly logical and lead to propositions open to physical tests. The length between the axioms and these propositions can be as great as one wishes. Indeed, the ideal is that the length should be very great, for it is found that then alone the largest body of phenomenal fact is comprehended and the simplest and fewest basic axioms compatible with this body are creatable, so that the utmost unity-in-multiplicity is achieved. The ideal is to go on increasing the length between the two ends of the theory and further and further "mysticise" those axioms. The function of the Einsteinian intuition is to reach mystically an extremity of what is best described as quantitative or mathematical mysticism.

It may perhaps be doubted whether one can legitimately speak of a mysticism that is quantitative or mathematical in the terms in which ultimate reality is described. The question is founded in some confusion of thought. It is the physical universe that is being explored by science and it is the basic structure of this universe that is sought to be conceived: the method of exploration is mathematical and also the conception of the basic structure has to be quantitative. Science cannot, by its very character, give us the living conscious reality of the Divine Existence which is the spiritual seeker's objective and which he seeks by non-mathematical means. But if the Divine Existence is, as the spiritual view implies,

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what has manifested or expressed itself as the physical universe, it automatically becomes, in the form of that universe, subject to quantitative treatment if such treatment is desired as by science. A mathematical exploration of the Divine Existence in its self-figuration as the physical cosmos is not irrelevant to mysticism. So, when the quantitative or mathematical terms in which the basic structure of physical reality is satisfactorily described are such that they carry an extreme freedom from limitation by the world of empirical experience and stand at a very great distance from this world's contents and permit the most unphysical-seeming formula, they can legitimately be spoken of as, in a general sense, mystical.

Of course, if the quantitative structural description is

itself demonstrated to have a mystical import - for instance, if the four-dimensional continuum of fused space and time is shown to be a mathematical replica of the mystic's Totum Simul (All-at-once) or Nunc Stans (Ever-standing Now), the mysticism to which the Einsteinian intuition mystically leads would be more explicitly indicated. But that explicitness of indication is not our concern here. We are dealing with scientific pointers to mysticism which arise from a supreme scientist's own admissions and contentions.

What remains to be commented on is some further statements by Einstein on the intuitive act. An argument against his contention that pure thought can grasp reality is the question: Can there not be any number of systems of theoretical physics or at least more than one system with equal capacity to correlate observations? If the answer is "Yes", we have an arbitrariness which induces us to look upon all systems as no more than subjective constructs, speculative conveniences for ordering empirical material:

there would be no unique intuitive correspondence to the secret structure of the real. Einstein opines that to decide the question we must glance at the history of physics. He says: "At any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself immeasurably superior

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to the rest. Nobody who has really gone deeply into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles." In other words, there is in the world of phenomena a particular structure which rules out the claim of more than one theory to be competent to correlate empirical data; somewhere or other all theories fall short except that which harmonises with reality: in every age, in respect to the amount of empirical data available, there has been found to be a single valid theory. And history even indicates what sort of theory fulfils the function of uniquely harmonising with the fundamental structure of the universe. Einstein writes: "Our experience hitherto justifies us in believing that nature is the realisation of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas." Of course, "simplest" does not signify for Einstein that the ideas are easy to understand or are expressed in equations we can tackle without difficulty. The ideas of Relativity Theory are neither. Simplicity means, in the first place, the minimum set of postulates for embracing the widest possible range of empirical data;-no limit is put to the possible complexity of the ideas in the postulates themselves. Simplicity means, in the second place, the simplest form of mathematical equations possible for those ideas. Simplicity connotes the utmost logical economy compatible with the widest applicability to facts. It is, properly understood, Occam's Razor: "entities should not be unnecessarily multiplied." It is a criterion of essential rationality. But cannot we conceive that this criterion which we as rational beings observe is not respected by nature? Why should nature follow "the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas"? Here we come upon the further nuance of Einstein's notion of simplicity. He does not merely say that we must act as rational beings: this would leave the possibility that a not simple theory may also explain the universe though we do not accept it on account of our logical penchant. Einstein also says that Nature itself has a logical penchant. For example,

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the formula he found effective for the General Theory of Relativity is the simplest form of mathematical equations for curved space-time. This means that Nature renders the logical criterion applicable. Nature may allow a complex theory also to stand, it may not directly disprove it - but by letting itself be explicable by "the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas" it renders the complex ones superfluous in physical fact and not only in logical principle. Nature need not fulfil our logical aspirations and yet it does. What is more, it shows that the simplest construction is the one which is immeasurably superior to the rest. All this confirms Einstein's belief in a more-than-human Intelligence mathematically manifest in the world.

Out of the historical perspective, however, emerges a point to which we have already referred when mentioning intuition's role vis-a-vis "pre-established harmony": the change of theory, age after age. Einstein himself avers: "We must always be ready to change our notions of physical reality - that is to say, the axiomatic structure of physics - in order to do justice to perceived facts in the most logically perfect way." Does this imply that every notion of physical reality is a bit of complicated fancy with no designation in it of the character of this reality? What then becomes of the intuitive act? Can an intuitive act lead to a theory which must be supplanted sooner or later? What happens to the alleged truth discovered by it? There is, for Einstein, a non-sceptical answer to each of the queries. Our scientific notions give us more and more adequate conceptions of reality's structure: the degrees of adequacy do not render them elaborate fantasies. And the act of consciousness by which they are reached does not cease to be intuitive in the genuine sense just because they are not final: there is no other name except intuition for the way in which they are arrived at in order to correlate observations. The supplanting of successive intuitions is inevitable since the intuitive act is performed not sovereignly but within the context of certain data: as soon as the context widens critically a new intuition has to come into

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play. The alleged truth discovered by each intuition remains a truth, though not the whole truth, for truth is adaptive to the state of mind at work upon reality's depths and what makes for truth is the profundity of the method of probing Nature - the intuitive method.

Einstein's whole position, either explicitly stated by him or gathered from attitudes implicit in his words, is, within the scientific predisposition and bias of his intellect, both consistent and strong. And it is highly en rapport with the mystic's Weltanschauung. It proves that the scientific genius at its acme goes very far indeed not merely to be neutral towards the spiritual outlook but actually to permit, if not provide, a most helpful climate to it.

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