A companion volume to 'The Destiny of the Body,' this explores man as a species, his past beginnings, present achievements & failures, his evolutionary future.
I
MAN: HIS PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
(An Essay on the Marvel that is Man)
"It is the Son of Man who is supremely capable of incarnating God."
(Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine.)
In His Own Image
Homo sapiens, "wise man": such is the term employed by the modern anthropologist to denote his own tribe, Man, considered as a distinct biological species. And in the coining of this particular nomenclature he is perhaps but echoing the age-old sense of supremacy and self-pride that man has ever displayed since the distant dawn when he first awoke and saw the panorama of creation all around. Is he not "but a little lower than God"1 if there is at all a Creator God? And God existing, he must have been no doubt His special and privileged creation, as distinct from all other animate creations! He is not a creation of God, he is the work of his predilection!
True, man cannot brush aside altogether the fact that he, too, is a part of the animal realm; in fact, his body is linked to the animal world through the triple bondage of similitude, derivation and dependence. But this notwithstanding he feels all the while that he possesses something else which singles him out from all other animate and sentient organisms. And to this sense of his unique dignity and clear supremacy over earthly creatures, man has given expression in unstinted measure in all his race-stories and mythical accounts of creation.
Thus, according to the ancient Hebrew teaching, apart from man's 'body' that is but 'dust' (āphār) and 'flesh' (bāsār), apart from his 'heart' (nephesh) that 'hopes and desponds, fears and longs', apart even from his 'mind' (lêbhābh) that is the seat of
1. Psalms, Bk. VIII-5.
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wisdom and thought, man is endowed with the unique principle, 'spirit' (rūach), 'breathed' into him directly from the Source. For did not God solemnly declare: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let him have dominion over the flesh of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him."2
The uniqueness of human creation, as pointed out in the Creation narratives of the Book of Genesis, is brought forth by the significant utterance that, whereas in the case of both animals and plants, the general formula used is the creation'after its kind' effected through some secondary agency: 'Let the earth bring forth the living creatures after its kind', 'Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life', in the case of man alone the creation is preceded by the solemn injunction: 'Let us make man', and followed by the sublime announcement: 'And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.' Man's advent is thus purported to be a unique event, a peculiar and special creation, "immediate, personal, direct".
The House of the Spirit
And what about the very body of man? Is it really nothing but 'dust' and 'flesh'? No, not so by any means. Man has indeed marvelled at his own physical frame and at the curious ingenuousness of its building. The unique structural disposition with its erect posture and forward and upward looking gaze, this wonderful anatomy provided with two hands and a fine array of fingers -unique endowments nowhere else to be found in the whole of the animal realm - such is then the body of the marvel that is Man, and verily this and this alone deserves to be the noble 'house of the Spirit'! Thus we see that an Upanishad declares in its parable of creation that when the Self or Spirit created the Gods, they said to Him, "Command unto us an habitation that we may dwell secure." Then the Spirit decided on life-creation and first formed animal kinds like the cow and the horse. "He brought unto the
2. Genesis I, 26f.
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Gods the cow, but they said, 'Verily, it is not sufficient for us.' He brought unto them the horse, but they said, 'Verily, it is not enough for us.' He brought unto them Man, and they said, 'O well fashioned truly! Man indeed is well and beautifully made.' Then the Spirit said unto them, 'Enter ye in each according to his habitation'".3 And the Gods entered into the human frame for their cosmic functions.
This is a clear parable of the creation of more and more developed forms till one was found that was capable of housing a truly developed consciousness; for one must remember in this connection that in the symbolic imagery of the Upanishads, the Gods stand for the powers of consciousness and powers of Nature.
The Theriomorphous vs. the Anthropomorphous
And how do the Gods themselves look like in their original stature? Surely they, too, must be human in form! For, to man's conception, what other habitat can possibly be there that is fit to be the robe of the heavenly Beings?
Alone among all earthly creatures, man possesses the gift of making images, i.e., of creating figured representations of beings and objects for an emotional or utilitarian purpose. This implies a unique power of exteriorization as applied to the ocular impressions either real or fictive seized only through the mind's eye. And in the gradual building up of his myths, the earliest man used this power in full to create a vast pantheon of gods who were deemed to be so many supernatural powers definitely superior to and more puissant than man. Here, too, in the evolution of the images of the deities, we witness the spectacle of progressive predominance of human forms, as and when man succeeded in establishing and extending his sway over the environment.
The prehistoric man haunted by the fear of the savage beast strutting in the alien and dangerous world, imaged his gods in the form of animals. Thus among the first idols thus far excavated, representations of animals predominate, as is still the case with uncivilised peoples of to-day. But these theriomorphic images were gradually supplanted first by therianthropic and finally by
3. Aitareya Upanishad, 1.2.
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anthropomorphic representations as man began to conceive of the gods as a type of ennobled manhood. At the same time "the animals which originally represented the beings did not entirely disappear from iconography; they became the companions or slaves of the divinities whom they used to embody, e.g., the owl of Athene, the eagle of Zeus, the hind of Artemis, the dolphin of Poseidon, and the dove of Aphrodite. In other cases, the bestial or repugnant forms have been left to evil spirits, the enemies of gods and men."4
Man the Measure
So much for the theotropic man. But in the historic period of humanity, man has often tried to assert his autonomy in full. He has established himself as the master of the animals, he has felt himself to be the master of all existence. He has ventured to deny the existence of God and declare himself to be 'the monarch of all I survey'.
Ever since the day when Protagoras, the most famous of the Greek sophists of the fifth century b.c., whom Plato pitted even against Homer as an authority on the education and improvement of mankind, formulated his famous maxim, Panton chrematon metron anthropos, "Man is the measure of all things", this formula has continued to enthrall a section of humanity as typifying man's mood of perfect autonomy. And this tradition of autonomous man as opposed to the theotropic man has come down even to our day, - or should we not say that this indeed is the prevailing temper of the modern man? For, the problem of man as such has lately become the central theme of all philosophy. The concept of anthropology is invading diverse domains of human knowledge so much so that it is giving rise to many distinct sub-disciplines like physical anthropology and historical anthropology, cultural anthropology and industrial anthropology, psychic anthropology and even philosophical anthropology. This philosophical anthropology and its twin brother existentialism are but modern denominations for a turn of mind as old as philosophy itself.
Modern man has declared a war - or at least he has thought so -
4. William L. Davidson, "Image of God", Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. VII, p. 160.
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against all notions of trans-empiricism. 'Trans-positive' and 'trans-material' are so many taboos to his conception. He patronisingly laughs at those 'pygmy souls' who still may care to occupy themselves with the problems of god, Immortality and transcendental Liberty! for to him this transcendentalism is nothing but an irrational 'fideism', and his self-appointed mission in life is to prick the bubble of this 'meta-physics' and to replace it by his positivism; but, alas, he too turns out to be a confirmed 'fideist' with this questionable distinction that his fideism is of a scientific brand that frets and fumes in the guise of a 'dogmatic adogmatism'.5 Amongst these fideisms of the autonomous man, mention may be made here of Historical Materialism, Positivist Sociology, Logical Positivism and finally of Freudian Psycho-analysis which is, to quote the significant remark of Roland Dalbier, "the profoundest analysis of all that, in man, is the least human."
But let us now withdraw a little into history and place ourselves in the momentous period of mid-nineteenth century to witness the advent of a revolutionary doctrine that would in no time rudely disturb man's sempiternal pride and be the starter on a drama of polemics and fierce intellectual battles the like of which man has rarely seen.
The Challenge Fails
The ancient conception as regards the uniqueness of human creation as distinguished from all other animate creation grew out of man's sense of his clear supremacy among earthly creatures, the dignity of this supremacy seeming to demand a special privileged creation. This conception was first challenged and the idea of evolutionary transformation as opposed to once-and-for-all creation began to be seriously entertained only in the early nineteenth century. The notion of distinct biological species grew up, it is true, in the preceding century. But Linné who was the first initiator of the classification of species declared in the orthodox tradition of the Book of Genesis: "There are as many species as the infinite Being chose to create in the beginning of creation." Although the germs of the idea of transformism could be discerned
5. Ivo Hollhuber, Philosopher C'est Apprendre à être Homme.
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even in the eighteenth century in the writings of Buffon in France, Goethe in Germany and Erasmus Darwin in England, these could not prevail against the then current mood of intellectual Europe. It is Lamarck, the disciple of Buffon, who was the incontestable founder of the transformist doctrine. Born in 1744, he had to wait till the end of the eighteenth century and published only in 1809 his masterpiece. Philosophic Zoologique, which was incidentally the first serious scientific formulation of the faith in transformism. But Lamarck's revolutionary ideas came up against the traditionalist spirit of Cuvier, the then monarch of the biological sciences. To Cuvier the notion of the fixity of the species was almost a matter of creed. So he challenged the doctrine of transformism with all the authority at his command and completely ruined Lamarckism in the eyes of his contemporaries.
Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire, a disciple of Lamarck, then took up the issue and joined battle with the redoubtable Cuvier. The drama was enacted in 1830 in the French Academy of Sciences and the now famous controversy raged for almost half a year: it was a duel between the transformist doctrine and the doctrine of the fixity of species. The whole of the scientific world of the epoch reverberated with the echoes of these polemics. Goethe, then of the ripe old age of eighty-one, took the keenest interest in this battle of ideas and, in fact, dedicated to this debate his last work completed in 1832 soon before his death. But, alas, traditionalism triumphed again; Cuvier won the controversy and the majority of the men of science rallied round his banner of orthodoxy. The revolutionary ideas of transformism were soon forgotten and the biologists of the day almost seemed to throw a blanket of oblivion over them. "It was as if all our university professors had drunk the water of the Lethe and completely forgotten that there had been ever in the recent past a serious discussion about transformism."6
Swords Are Crossed
Exactly fifty years had rolled by since the publication of Lamarck's magnum opus. Then there came a man armed with new evidences
6. Weismann, Vorträge über Descendenztheorie, 1902, I, p. 32.
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in favour of transformism. We are of course referring to Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882). Darwin was an extremely scrupulous and keen observer. Through his minute observation of the variation of flora in South America and in the Galapagos archipelago, undertaken during the navigational cruise of the Beagle (1831 - 1836), he developed the idea of the general variability of species. Through a chance reading in 1838 of Malthus' almost forgotten work, An Essay on the Principles of Population (1798), he formulated the concept of natural selection. The artificial selection consciously adopted by the village-folk at Down to rear up better agricultural products appeared to him as only the image of Nature's selection. Meanwhile almost analogous ideas concerning artificial selection were formulated by A. R. Wallace (1823 - 1913) who expressed these in a letter addressed to the geologist Lyell. At Lyell's suggestion, Darwin and Wallace read their respective memoirs, in July 1858, at a sitting of the Linnean Society of London. Soon after, in 1859, Darwin published the essence of his ideas in the form of a book: thus was ushered the epoch-making publication, The Origin of Species. Herein, Darwin presented an enormous mass of evidence which made it clear that transformation must have occurred.
The Origin of Species made a tremendous impact on the mind of the day; it created a sensation all around. Polemics raged again; controversies started afresh. Man's age-old self-pride, protected behind the shields of religious tradition and orthodox reaction, violently opposed this revolutionary doctrine. It was only because man had already travelled long that Darwin escaped the fate that befell Bruno and Galileo. Because of their opposition to the geocentric theory of the universe, hallowed and sanctified by the body of the Church, Bruno was burnt at the stake, and the sixty-seven years old Galileo called before the Inquisition had to indicate his "free and unbiased" willingness to recant, to "abjure, curse, and detest the said heresies and errors and every other error and sect contrary to the Holy Church", and he had to further agree "never more in future to say or assert anything, verbally or in writing, which may give rise to similar suspicion." But geocentric cosmology could not prevail for long, and before the blast of the evidences accumulated by Darwin the anthropocentric creed, too, soon dissolved.
It is interesting to note in this connection that in his first published
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book, The Origin of Species, Darwin intentionally left aside the problem of the origin of man. But the conclusion he did not want to draw in prudence was forcefully pointed out by T. H. Huxley in England and by E. Haeckel in Germany. At last in 1871, Darwin too did the same in his work entitled The Origin of Man and Sexual Selection. But long before this date the real significance of his revolutionary doctrine was patent to all, to friends and foes alike of the idea of transformism: animal origin of man\ For if the principle of transformation was once admitted, man could not be for long shielded from his animal pedigree. But how revolting and nauseating was the very idea itself! Surely the protagonists of the doctrine of evolution must be atheists and materialists, immoral heretics in the family of man! And thus arose once again the fierceness of the opposition.
Self-Pride Tumbles
It was a crucial moment in the history of human thought. Man was asked to make a radical departure from his traditional idea of himself and of the world-creation. A revolutionary orientation was called for and the very world-existence seemed to be pregnant with a new sense and destiny. But quite apart from these significant implications, scientific as well as philosophical, evolution as a fact could not be challenged for long. Studies of ontogeny in relation to phylogeny, comparative anatomy, animal and vegetable paleontology: all these disciplines joined hands to marshal a remarkable array of testimony that confirmed in the most striking way Darwin's deductions that "the evolutionary advance of a group of animals and plants is brought about by its radiation into a number of separate lines or lineages, in each of which transformation is gradual and tends towards the improvement of the lineage for a particular way of life".7
The present century has witnessed great activity in the field of paleontology, notably in the unearthing and analysis of trends or lineages of fossil animal groups, thus giving us for the first time a reasonably accurate and detailed picture of the actual course of evolution in different groups in various circumstances and in
7. Julian Huxley, "Evolution and Genetics" in What is Science (Ed. by J. R. Newman), p. 272.
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various periods of the earth's history and helping the scientists to construct the genealogical table of evolution.
We cannot but mention here the remarkable fact revealed in the study of individual evolution - otherwise known as embryology or ontogeny - that all creatures, in their development from a single cell to maturity, pass rapidly through the forms of all their biological ancestors. "Each human embryo shows the gill arches of the fish; every unborn whale has its legs." Thus Nature manages to do in a few hours or months a job that took her millions of years for the first time. As pointed out by F. Muller, ontogeny seems to be an abridged recapitulation of phylogeny (past history of the species).
And as regards the animal affinity of man, did not Sir Arthur Keith construct a table to show the intimate kinship of man to the monkeys, more particularly to the anthropoid apes? Out of 1665 anatomical characteristics of men,
312 belong exclusively to man;
396 are common to man and the chimpanzee;
385 are common to man and the gorilla;
354 are common to man and the orang-outang;
117 belong both to man and the gibbon; and
113 are shared with other apes.
This does not mean, of course, that man has actually "descended from the monkeys" as used to be generally believed in the late nineteenth century. In fact, "although specialists agree on the main events of human evolution and their significance, they argue about the precise course of evolution. Has man been separated from the apes and monkeys for many millions of years, or is he a recent arrival, perhaps distinct from the apes for only a million years? Was man ever really an ape or is his origin so remote that his ancestors were more like monkeys? I believe that the close similarity in the arms of man and ape shows that our direct ancestors were arm-swinging apes, perhaps not very different from the living chimpanzee".8
8. S. L. Washburn, "Human Evolution" in Anthropology by Kluck Kohn, p. 322.
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Kinsmen of the Past
Mammals have existed on earth for 60 million years and man's first mammalian ancestor was a four-footed beast about the size of a rat. In the millennia since then he has developed into the relatively giant biped of to-day. Paws changed to hands and the method of locomotion changed at least twice and perhaps three times. In the phase of primate evolution, the common ancestors to modern man and the present anthropoid apes can be located in a not too distant geological past. In fact, the age of our earth has been calculated to be approximately 1600 million years and the first appearance of life on this terrestrial scene has been dated at 1200 million years ago, whereas the modern man is a very recent arrival barely 70 thousand years old, and even if we consider the extinct species of first true men, that too appeared much less than a million years ago.
The first anthropoids resembling somewhat our present-day gibbons are known to have appeared in the Tertiary, say, two or three million years ago. More recent species like the Sivapithecines and the Neopithecines appeared in the same Tertiary Epoch: some of their features, notably in the structure of the molars, resemble markedly those of men. The remains of the South African ape-men (Australopithecines), discovered in 1925, show affinity to human anatomy in the position of their nose relative to the sockets of the eyes.
The fossils belonging to the Quaternary are indeed more human. The most ancient of them all belonging to the Lower Pleiostocene was discovered in 1890 in the island of Java: it has been christened Pithecanthropus (literally meaning 'ape-man'). The thigh-bone of this Java Man was of the human type, indicating its bipedal anatomy.
In 1927, 25 skulls were discovered in the vicinity of Peking in China. These skulls belong to the species now labelled Sinan-thropus or Peking Man which appeared in the Mid-Pleistocene about 300 thousand years ago. The skull of the Peking Man was markedly human with certain simian details but the chinless mandible resembled that of the chimpanzee.
We come at last to the Neanderthaloids who first appeared towards the close of the Mid-Pleistocene (about 150 thousand years ago). Beginning in 1856, quite a good number of skeletons
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belonging to this group have been discovered till this date, mostly in an intact form. These Neanderthal men may be considered as true men, although still revealing variable but uniformly brutish features. In fact, they belong to a now extinct species of men, which was subsequently exterminated towards the beginning of the Upper Pleistocene by our own species.
Thus appeared on the earthly scene, about 70 thousand years ago, that wonderful creature and the marvel product of evolution, which belongs to the species sapiens, the genus Homo, the family Hominidal, the order Primates, the class Mammalia, the sub-phylum Vertebrata, and the phylum Chordata of the animal kingdom! Man was at last born!
Man the Marvel
"This faint and fluid sketch of soul called man
Shall stand out on the background of long Time
A glowing epitome of eternity. "9
What a wonder product of evolution was this our Man, chiselled to be in the long run 'a stepping-stone to conquer heaven'! In more than one respect, he differed intrinsically from all other species that the biological evolution could bring forth before his appearance on the earthly scene. Both in his anatomical structure and physiological functionings as well as in his psychic traits, he marked a radical break with the past. To evaluate man's worth in this exciting drama of earth-evolution, we should not consider him as he appears now in his polychrome manifestation, but rather look back into the far past and place ourselves in imagination 'in the prone obscure beginning of the race' when the human first emerged 'in the bowed ape-like man'. Let us discuss in turn, although necessarily in a summary way, a few of these salient traits that marked out man as a distinctly superior biological species destined from then onwards to be the 'dominant type' in future evolution.
9. Sri Aurobindo. Savitri, Bk. II, Canto I, p. 100.
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a) Ah! the gift of a couple of hands!
"And instruments were sovereignly designed
To express divinity in terrestrial signs."10
Vialleton, the modern protagonist of a separate line of evolution for man, defines him as "an animal erect in posture, possessing two hands and provided with a language." It was indeed a crucial departure when the front paws in animals changed their aspect and became in man the palm of their hands. Man alone developed the unique faculty of turning his hands, palms upwards and palms downwards. This special constitution of the hands along with a set of ten marvellous fingers may well be regarded as the symbol of the supremacy of man. For through this innovation alone accrued two immense gains to the race: Tools and Fire.
b) And, lo, he stood erect!
"He stood erect, a Godlike form and force".11
The specialisation of the hands invariably imposed a vertical station upon the human frame. At first it was no more than a trial posture, but the experiment was crowned with so much success that the erect posture became the normal status with men, and this, in its train, brought rich dividends. This vertical station presaged the future glory of man, for, from now on, the upward look became 'native to his sight'; he was no more an earth-gazing animal, he could look up and round, and turned out to be a creature essentially heaven-oriented.
c) "Eyes... front!"
"A Mind began to see and look at forms"12
And what a marvellous set of eyes man has got! Indeed, as someone has remarked, no first awareness dawned in a dark and misty world when God said, "Let there be light", for light was there to
10.Savitri, Bk. IV, Canto I, p. 354.
11.Ibid., Bk. VII, Canto II, p. 485.
12.Ibid., Bk. II, Canto I, p. 101.
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live by, not to see by. Then, in the course of evolution, Nature contrived to create the organ of perception, but for millions of years it remained too imperfect an instrument to offer its possessors any real command of the universe. But finally in man, Nature has managed to move forward the eyes distinctly in front of his face, thus permitting them to fuse in their 'brain switchboard' the images from the two separate eyes into a single picture giving the sense of depth! Forms stood at once in their relief and it was really a significant jump from the primitive condition in which each eye worked relatively separately and saw only black and white into the stereoscopic colour vision we now think normal for man.
This anterior shifting of the eyes coupled with his vertical station has played a considerable role in the evolution of mind. The very constitution and configuration of these eyes helped man to proceed from quality to quantity. Quantification became the regular norm for the race thus making possible the development of mathematics and science. To quote Abel Rey, "It is the organ of vision - and not the auditive, tactile or olfactory sense organs -that has made man the homo sapiens".
d) 'Homo faber' is born!
"He used the powers earth-instruments cannot use".13
Specialised eyes co-operated with specialised hands and there dawned at last the red-letter day in the calendar of man when he first learnt to chip flints and stones. It was no job for an ape, and herewith the process of change in man took on a new dimension and accelerated. If it were not for tools, mankind might be only a species of tropical bipeds no more successful than the baboons. But with the development of this tool-making ability, man could now exteriorize himself in action. Power was added to vision, and the Homo faber arose from the Homo sapiens in man.
e) The cerebrum, the trump card!
"Man stood erect, he wore the thinker's brow".14
13.Savitri, Bk. VII. Canto II, p. 486.
14.Ibid., p. 485.
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But man became man, only because he was endowed with the greatest tool yet developed by Nature in her long course of evolution: the human cerebrum. Indeed, one of the greatest triumphs of evolution is the elaboration of the 'electrochemical apparatus' that has become the human brain. The brain of an ant contains only about 250 cells, while that of a bee has nearly 900. In contrast, the human brain contains some 13 thousand million cells!
As regards the brain size, the range in the cranial capacity of chimpanzees and gorillas is about 325 to 650 cubic centimeters, of the man-apes of South Africa 450 to 650, of Java Man 750 to 900, of Peking Man 900 to 1200, but of Homo sapiens from 1200 to 1550 !
And as a by-product of this phenomenon, of all creatures man has the greatest possibility of being educated. As indicated by the old saying "You can't teach an old dog new tricks", dogs more than 2 years old lose learning ability rapidly, chimpanzees cannot learn much beyond the age of 12 years, but most humans can learn up to 40 years, many up to 90 years and more.
Man is indeed man because of his brain and those parts of this marvellous gift that are more complex in him than those of any other animal are the ones concerned with memory, with such symbolic operations as speaking, writing and understanding, with the solving of problems and with the projection of images. With the human brain appeared the first "thinking being in an unthinking world".
f) Oh, I am "I"!
"To the Life-Spirit, the individual in whom its potentialities centre is pre-eminently Man, the Purusha..,. He is conscious Name or Numen accepting and utilising form as a medium through which Person can deal with substance."15
One of the greatest developments of evolution has been the emergence of the human individual as an important and unique being in his own right, rather than as a member of a swarm of similar beings. Unlike "ants or bees or maple trees" all of which are pretty much alike in a species, each human being has a different
15. The Life Divine, p. 46.
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personality. "When an ant is killed, he can be replaced by another ant exactly like him: worker ants of a given variety are alike even to their brain patterns. But this is never true of a human being."16 Also, the distinctive character of man is the much greater importance of the exceptional individual. Non-conformism is the brand of the human species. The society turns around the individual virtuoso. Indeed, in the case of man, the individual 'novation' always leads the way, institutionalisation follows suit when the society tries to assimilate it through a process of natural ankylosis.
g)The pilgrim of three seas
"A portion of us lives in present Time."17
Man is an earth-bound creature but possessing two invisible wings: Memory and Imagination. 'Launched into his small corporeal birth', imprisoned in his 'body's house', he is the first creature to revolt against his bondage and venture to break asunder the stonewalls of the present. Indeed, he is the first creature to escape even partially from being a prisoner of the present. He re-lives his past through his memory, he fore-lives his future through imagination. He hears the fading rumblings of the past, he gazes into the future and dares the still-to-be-born. "Man is the first to realize how far he has come along the path of being alive, and to sense how much more alive he can become. Standing on the highest rung yet built on the ladder of life, faltering frequently, he is yet building still higher sections of the scaffold."18
h)He babbles and conquers!
"If there had been no speech, neither virtue nor vice could be known, neither the true nor the false, neither the good nor the bad, neither the pleasant nor the unpleasant. Speech alone makes known all this. Meditate upon speech."19
16.G. R. Harrison, What Man May Be, p. 192.
17.Savitri, Bk. VII, Canto II, p. 484.
18.Gilbert N. Lewis, The Anatomy of Science, p. 205.
19.Chhandogya Upanishad, VII, 7, 2.
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The day of all days dawned in man's calendar when he first developed speech as his most direct means of communication; for, this articulated utterance ushered in the birth of true human personality. No animal other than the human possesses a true language which communicates ideas. Though young chimpanzees can take care of themselves much better than human babies of equal age, a chimpanzee can never learn to talk. In contrast, human babies babble at random almost all the kinds of sounds found in known languages.
Man can produce sounds and modulate them purposefully far beyond the ability of any other animal. And he is indeed indebted to his anatomical structure for this wonderful gift of articulated speech. It is the special conformation of his lower jaw-bone coupled with a most supple larynx that has enabled man to develop as a talking animal.
With the development of the spoken language as a great set of symbols followed by the equally important development of its written counterpart, man provided himself with a most potent means for carrying information across time and space. "The bee stores honey for posterity, the bird teaches its young to fly, but what are these compared with the enormous hoards of material and spiritual wealth that man accumulates from generation to generation!"20 Language provided man with an alternative system to the genes for passing on human characteristics, operating on the social level instead of the molecular. Race memory could thus be supplanted by individual acquisition. Hereditary instinct was replaced by direct transmission and immediate adaptation on the individual level. Language and tradition could create conditioned reflexes in the short span of a few years and these reflexes no longer needed to be hereditary, effected only through an extremely slow process of biological adaptation. The tempo of evolution could thus be greatly accelerated. The exteriorisation of man in the form of hoarded knowledge became the order of the day. Homo sapiens took on the lead of the evolutionary march.
i) He twinkles and wonders!
"A mind looks out from a small casual globe And wonders what itself and all things are. "21
20.Gilbert N. Lewis, The Anatomy of Science, p. 205.
21.Savitri, Bk. II, Canto V, p. 167.
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In man alone, amongst all earthly creatures, 'the interested curiosity' has given place to a 'disinterested curiosity'. In fact, any sign of pure knowledge removed from the field of the concrete and of the necessity for action, is altogether absent in other animals. Every theory of action holds that an organism in need is under tension for satisfying the need. One distinguished group of investigators has found that man, as an animal, could very well "get along with a list of thirty needs or attitudes - the abasive, the achievant, the acquisitive, the affiliative, the aggressive, the ambitious, the autonomous attitudes and so on with twenty-three others".22 But what characterises man most is that beyond and above the satisfaction of his essentially biological needs, he is seized with the sense of some "golden superfluities". He does not respond only to the "prick of need". He exhibits altogether "gestes inutiles" - a phenomenon that never occurred during the millions of years of evolution preceding him. Before him, only one imperative preoccupation haunted the biological field: battle with one's enemy, struggle against hunger, periodic excretion of the immortal cells that are the gametes, and finally death. But with the appearance of man, 'wonder seized the great automaton' and man manifested some "unnecessary gestures" - unnecessary in the sense that they are not indispensable to the preservation of the species. He became athirst for pure knowledge, beauty beckoned him as the twilight star, he looked out from his earth-born eyes and sang out songs - he knew not why. Look at the wonderful cave-paintings of early men - the Cro-Magnons - who lived more than 30 thousand years ago. In fact, this manifestation of the "golden superfluities" may be considered to mark the most important date in the whole of human history. Man was no longer a mere animal, his life became a "forward-rippling stream".
j) He laughs and weeps!
"Her greatest progress is a deepened need."23
Finally, man is not only the tool-using creature, he is, also the valuing animal, constantly making judgments, of "better" and "worse". As Hazlit wrote: man is the only animal that laughs and
22.Edwin G. Boring. "Psychology" in What is Science, p. 311.
23.Savitri, Bk. II, Canto IV, p. 134.
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weeps, for he is the only animal struck by the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. "Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul": this is the burden of all man's aspiration. "The animal is satisfied with a modicum of necessity; the gods are content with their splendours. But man cannot rest permanently until he reaches some highest good. He is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations. He alone, perhaps, is capable of being seized by the divine frenzy for a remote ideal."24
Evolution Becomes Reflexively Conscious
The appearance of man upon earth marks a crucial step, a decisive change in the process of the evolution: it is no more a mere continuation of the old lines. Indeed, evolution has got its own evolution. According even to the orthodox scientific view, biological evolution is only one aspect of evolution in general. Our present knowledge forces us to the view that "the whole of reality is evolution - a single process of self-transformation." Let us note that these words come from one of the most eminent biologists of our time, Julian Huxley, who was rightly regarded in the scientific realm as one of the world's foremost authorities on evolution. For the present we are concerned only with the conclusions derived from purely scientific findings. In order to dispel all possible doubts that any bias may very well creep in in the form of a transcendental interpretation - or as the materialist might argue, 'misinterpretation' - of the process of evolution, let us offer the floor to Prof. Huxley and listen to his elaboration of the theme of world evolution and to his evaluation of the advent of man in that wider perspective. Indeed, the rest of this present section is only an adaptation from his interesting paper "Evolution and Genetics".25 This universal evolutionary process is divisible into three main sectors or phases - the inorganic or cosmological, the organic or biological, and the human or psychosocial. Each sector has its own characteristic mechanism of self-transformation and its own maximum rate of, change and each produces its own characteristic type of results.
24.The Life Divine, p. 46.
25.Contributed to the symposium What is Science (Ed. by J. R. Newman).
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The inorganic sector, the largest in spatial extent and in mass, is governed by physical and occasional inorganic chemical interactions. The resulting processes of transformation are in general extremely slow, so that the life-history of a star is to be measured in thousands of millions of years. Finally, the resultant products, always of a very limited variety, never attain to any but very low or simple levels of organization.
In the biological phase the time-scale is relatively shorter -nearly 1200 million years since the first appearance of life on earth. The amount and rate of change produced, however, is immensely greater. Biological evolution has produced organisms as diverse as starfish and roses, men and toadstools, tapeworms and oak trees, birds and bacteria. There are now in existence about a million and a half distinct and separate species of animals and plants, all of them presumably derived from one original form. Most remarkable of all, however, is the rise in the level of organization. Starting with the earliest submicroscopic organisms of the unicellular level, later evolution has managed to elaborate that almost miraculous machinery - the human cerebral cortex - the most complex system of which we have any knowledge.
When we survey the biological panorama as a whole, we see that evolution is from one point of view the progressive realisation of new possibilities of living substance. Further, we are driven to the rather surprising conclusion that some time during the late Caeno-zoic, probably about five million years ago, all the purely material or physical possibilities of life had been actualized and had reached the upper limit of realization. One major avenue of advance, however, remained - the further realization of mental possibilities. It was this direction which was taken by our earliest hominid ancestors and led to the emergence of our own species as the latest dominant type of evolution.
With the advent of man, evolution on this planet enters the human or psychosocial phase. Man's tool-making capability, his distinctive property of conceptual thought, with its objective correlate in the shape of true speech, assured him his position of biological dominance by providing him with a totally new method of evolutionary change - the method of cumulative transmission of experience. What this exclusively human mechanism of inheritance transmits is not a system of material units as in biological inheritance, but a system of knowledge, ideas and attitudes. We
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may sum up the essential difference between the three sectors of evolution by saying that whereas evolution in the biological sector depends on its new property of the self-reproduction of matter, in psycho-social evolution it depends on the self-reproduction of mind.
Let us now close this section with the following pregnant words of Prof. Huxley: "Evolution can be envisaged as a progressive realisation of intrinsic possibilities. Man is the latest dominant type in biological evolution, and the first (and up till now the only) dominant type in psycho-social evolution. His destiny is to act as the agent of the evolutionary process on this planet, by enabling it to realize new and higher possibilities. Biological evolution, though it often displays direction, is directed from behind, by the blind and automatic force of natural selection: psycho-social evolution can be, to a lesser or greater extent, directed from in front, by the anticipatory force of conscious purpose."26
The Flute-Call of the Future
But what should be the exact form of this conscious purpose? "The long-range task of the human species is to establish a fully conscious common purpose, based to the fullest possible extent on scientifically established knowledge."26 And what are after all the findings of modern science? "It is not ego-centric on the part of man to consider himself the most highly evolved creature in nature. But any tendency to consider himself its end-product would be short-sighted, for evolution is taking place to-day faster than ever before. Physical evolution has been almost completely short-circuited by man as applied to himself. But social, emotional, and mental evolution are now carrying him on to ever greater complexity and awareness."27
But a further - may be, virtually infinite - extension of the social, emotional and mental capacities and capabilities, is that all that is in store for the human race? Can there not be a far more glorious future of our wonderful species? Can there not be a further phase of evolution? Indeed, may we not pertinently raise
26.Julian Huxley, "Evolution and Genetics," in What is Science (Ed. by J. R. Newman).
27.G. R. Harrison, What Man May Be: The Human Side of Science, p. 125.
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the query: just as the inorganic phase of evolution was followed by the biological phase wherein 'life invaded the material sheath', just as towards the close of the biological phase the cerebral cortex began to be elaborated and with it 'earth-plasm first quivered with the illumining Mind', just as again at the end of the biological phase, with the development of the cerebrum, evolution started on a new course when 'man was moulded from the original brute' and
"Across the thick smoke of earth's ignorance
A Mind began to see and look at forms
And groped for knowledge in the nescient Light",28
similarly now, with the attainment of maturity by man, evolution may very well turn another leaf and pass on to an altogether new phase: the supramental sector of world-manifestation. For surely man as he is now constituted is too imperfect a creature to be the final product of evolution. Also, it is all too evident that
"Ever since consciousness was born on earth,
Life is the same in insect, ape and man,
Its stuff unchanged, its way the common route.
If new designs, if richer details grow
And thought is added and more tangled cares,
If little by little it wears a brighter face,
Still even in man the plot is mean and poor."29
No doubt, man is the crown of all that has been done, but creation's labour cannot be finally justified with him; he can, by no means, be Nature's last poise;
"And if this were all and nothing more were meant,
If what now seems were the whole of what must be,
If this were not a state through which we pass
On our road from Matter to eternal Self,
Well might interpret our mind's limited view
28.Savitri, Bk. II, Canto I, p. 101.
29.Ibid., Bk. II, Canto V, p. 164.
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Existence as an accident in Time,
Illusion or phenomenon or freak."30
Who is then there to answer our query? Least of all, the scientist. For, even if he may not become positively hostile and vociferous in his opposition to our suggestion of the fourth phase of evolution, he will certainly remain "mum" over this question, for he cannot possibly venture to overstep his domain of immediately verifiable empirical fact. But there is needed, indeed, such an adventurous probe into the future - may be, into the heart of the imminent future - which stands at our door-step with its golden harvest of the marvellous Dawn. So we have to leave here the scientists' findings and fall back upon the vision of the seer. And whom else can we approach for the necessary Light if not him who has not only demonstrated the theoretical possibility, nay the inevitability, of this supramental phase of evolution, but actually made it his life's mission to hasten and actualise the glorious day when
"The world's darkness had consented to Heaven-light And God needed no more the Inconscient's screen."31
Now, what is the destiny of man as envisaged by this supreme prophet of super-humanity? Let us pass on to the consideration of this theme.
The Seer's Vision
According to the vision of Sri Aurobindo, man's importance in the world is that he gives to it that development of consciousness in which its transfiguration by a perfect self-discovery becomes possible. The real sense of man's progress does not lie in a mere restatement in slightly different terms of what physical Nature has already accomplished. Nor can the ideal of human life be simply the animal repeated on a higher scale of mentality. Indeed, "Man has seen that there can be a higher status of consciousness than his own; the evolutionary oestrus is there in his parts of mind and life,
30.Savitri, Bk. II, Canto V, p. 166.
31.Ibid., Bk. X, Canto IV, p. 664.
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the aspiration to exceed himself is delivered and articulate within him: he has become conscious of a soul, discovered the self and spirit. In him, then, the substitution of a conscious for a subconscious evolution has become conceivable and practicable, and it may well be concluded that the aspiration, the urge, the persistent endeavour in him is a sure sign of Nature's will for a higher way to fulfilment, the emergence of a greater status." 32
And what is then that greater status? "The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realisation of that which she secretly is."33 And here Sri Aurobindo sounds a note of warning to the race: "Mind is only a middle term of consciousness, the mental being can only be a transitional being. If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and supermind and superman must manifest and take the lead of the creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to what exceeds it, then there is no reason why man himself should not arrive at supermind and supermanhood or at least lend his mentality, life and body to an evolution of that greater term of the spirit manifesting in Nature."34
The Mutant Minority
But the question is: who amongst the present mankind are ready to attempt this impossible and dare the Unknown and thus usher in the new creation? For does not the goal held by Sri Aurobindo seem to be too good and too glorious a prospect for humanity to be actualised even in some distant future? - Far be it to speak of an imminent realization. In fact, most men are still very conservative and dominated by social customs. They vegetate mostly around what is in vogue. Their preoccupation with the present possibility is almost absolute. Fear of being called eccentric, i.e., 'out of the
32.The Life Divine, p. 843.
33.Ibid., pp. 3-4.
34.Ibid., p. 847.
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circle', is in their bones. To both savage and civilized are indeed applicable the lines which Henry Sidgwick composed in his sleep:
"We think so because all other people think so: Or because - or because - after all, we do think so: Or because we were told so and think we must think so: Or because we once thought so and think we still think so: Or because, having thought so, we think we still think so."
Thus, opposition to this 'new Dawn's call' comes from both the ranks of humanity: from the traditional spiritualist as well as from the rationalist. The materialist basing himself on the past animal evolution of mankind ventures to equate man to nothing more than a glorified animal. He tries to explain away all of man's behaviour as an ingenious extrapolation of animal propensities. What is more, basing himself on the fact that man's body is after all made up of inorganic matter, he even ventures to pronounce in a desperate mood that man is nothing but a somewhat complex physico-chemical machinery. Did not one biologist jump to the conclusion that 'love' is merely manganese when he found that mother mice deprived of this element in their diet no longer paid attention to their offspring? In this connection, G. R. Harrison's humour is indeed enjoyable: Is pity phosphorous and justice oxygen, simply because without oxygen, phosphorous and some dozens of other atoms, there could not possibly be any life on earth thus debarring the appearance of justice and mercy?
The orthodox spiritualist is no less dogmatic in his opposition. To him the ideal of supermanhood is nothing but perverse and presumptuous. For firstly, according to him, the Absolute can have no purpose in manifestation except the delight of an objectless self-revelation; secondly, even if there is an evolution, then, man must be the last stage, because through him there can be the rejection of an embodied life and an escape into some heaven or Nirvana.
Sri Aurobindo has discussed in detail and refuted all these arguments. He has proved that to say so is to miss the whole meaning of the terrestrial evolution. In fact, a spiritual unfolding on earth, as distinguished from an escape from this cosmic Lila, is the hidden truth of our birth into Matter and it is fundamentally an evolution of consciousness that has been taking place in Nature.
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Who can, in that case, bid her pause at a given stage? "If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth."35 And Sri Aurobindo assures us that even if man refuses his high spiritual fate, 'yet shall the secret truth in things prevail.' And this realisation is not located in some unforeseen future; indeed, the process of supra-mental transformation is already at work. There are even now some 'sun-eyed children' of humanity whose wings are daring to cross the Infinite, although their feet may still be 'steadied upon finite things'. And who does not know that the evolutionary future belongs to the 'mutant minority' and never to the 'vegetative majority'? Moreover, has not the Prophet of the Life Divine declared:
"Even as of old man came behind the beast
This high divine successor surely shall come
Behind man's inefficient mortal pace,
Behind his vain labour, sweat and blood and tears.
Inheritor of the toil of human time
He shall take on him the burden of the gods."36
Well, such is the prophetic Vision of Sri Aurobindo: but, what have science and philosophy to say on this point?
35.The Life Divine, p. 4.
36.Savitri, Bk. III, Canto IV, p. 344.
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