Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Evolution or Special Creation

THE point is still being debated and, it seems, is still debatable whether evolution is truly the fact behind the origin of species. or is it special creation. The latter, we know, was the old- world pre-Copernican theory advocated by theologians and religious minds. It was thoroughly discredited and demolished by the new illumination that Science brought in with the nineteenth century. Till lately it was considered as a pure superstition and to be its advocate would be nothing but blind bigotry. But evidently things in Nature are not so simple; what at one time is brushed aside as a meaningless futility comes back later with a meaning and suggestiveness and truth of reality. We were once laughing at the corpuscular theory of light advocated by the great Newton and putting on a patronising air at the frailty of an otherwise mighty intelligence.  But the tables are now turned and we accept it as an undoubted fact when Planck says today that a light ray consists also of particles {quanta) of light. Similarly if in some scientific quarter a doubt has arisen as to the absolute and exclusive truth of the principle of evolution and if the old conception of special creation is exhumed for fresh consideration,  well, one should not be astonished at the turn over.

The most serious lacuna in the concept of evolution, at least in the Darwinian form of it, is, as is well known, the missing link. The transition stage between one form of life and another, between one species and its higher evolute is always absent, has left no trace of any kind and it is a matter of any man's guess. So the theory of mutation, saltum, sudden change, has been advanced. But that only restates the fact, clinches the matter, but does not explain it. If a sudden and thorough change is possible, if one object can be transformed

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into something quite different and unpredictable, one can as well call it special creation. That would, some might say, be facing the fact squarely.

According to the Yogic or occult view of things, however, the two conceptions that human mind sets against each other need not be and are not contradictory. Indeed both are true and both are factors working out the progress of life. Evolution is a movement upward, the urge of consciousness to grow and expand and rise to a higher and greater articulation: the change follows a scale of degrees. But there comes a point in the progressive march when a change of degree means a change of kind and the phenomenon presents itself as a sudden, unforeseen mutation. This is due to the fact that there happens at the moment, in answer to a last call as it were from below, a descent of consciousness from the higher into the lower. All the grades of being or consciousness are always there in the cosmic infinity, only it is a matter of gradual manifestation in the physical world. The higher scales are kept in the background,  the march of life starts from the lowest, the material rung. One by one they manifest or descend, formulate themselves  in the lower as these grow and rise and get ready to receive the descent. The gap or missing link means the irruption  of a new principle or mode of consciousness, the bursting of the cocoon, as it were, at the end of the period of gestation in the previous mode. Thus we can say that in the beginning there was only Matter and Matter was being churned until a point of tension or saturation was reached when Life precipitated  and became embodied and evident in Matter. In the same way, out of a concentrated incubation that Life underwent,  it brought down Mind from the hidden mind-plane and the vegetable kingdom gave birth to the animal. Latterly when Intelligence and self-consciousness descended, it was Man that appeared on earth.

Looked at from below, as the lower marches forward and upward, the scene presents itself as Evolution, growth, Nature's gradual unfolding of herself: looked at from above, as the higher seems poised and descends when the time and occasion are ready, creation appears as a series of special intervention. Both movements are facts of Nature and implement each other.

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