Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Matter Aspires

MATTER holds and expresses material energy, the subtlest and highest form of which is electric energy. Should Matter be confined to that alone or can it express or create, by and out of itself, non-material energy also? What about mental energy and thought movements-can they too be made a function of Matter?

For example, the computing machine. It has been developed to a marvellous extent. Not only big but complicated calculations are done by it, not only the four major arithmetical operations, but higher algebraic and trigonometrical problems too are tackled successfully. The electronic computer seems to possess a veritable mathematical brain.

It is asked now if the machine is capable of so much mathematics, may it not be capable also of poetic creation? The possibility has been discussed in a very lively and interesting manner in The Hibbert Journal (October, '49 and january, '50). The writer Sir Robert Watson-Watt thinks it is not impossible, indeed quite possible, for a machine to write, for example, a sonnet. Only the question will be with regard to the kind-the quality and standard--of the poetic creation. What will come out of the machine will depend upon what has been put into it, that is to say, what the brain that constructed it succeeded in transplanting into it. The writer after weighing the pros and cons arrives at the remarkable and amusing conclusion that a machine built by a second class brain may succeed in producing a poem of third class merit, but it can never produce anything first class. To produce a first class poem through a machine at least a first class brain' must work at it. But the pity is that a Shakespeare or a Milton would prefer to write straight away a poem himself instead

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of trying to work it out through a machine which may give out in the end only a second class or worse production.

I said it is an amusing discussion. But what is apt to be forgotten in such "scientific" discussions is, as has been pointed out by Rev. Trethowan in his criticism of Sir Robert, that all genuine creation is a freak, that is to say, it is a movement of freedom, of incalculable spontaneity. A machine is exactly the sum of its component parts; it can give that work (both as regards quantity and quality) which is confined within the frame and function of the parts. Man's creative power is precisely this that it can make two and two not merely four but infinity. There is a force of intervention in him which  upsets the rule of the parallelogram of forces that normally governs Matter and even his own physical brain and mind. There is in him truly a deus ex machina. Poetry, art, all creative act is a revelation, an intrusion of a truth, a reality from another plane, of quite a different order, into the rigid actuality and factual determinism.. Man's secret person is a sovereignly free will. A machine is wholly composed of actualities-the given-and brings out only a resultant of the permutation and combination of the data: it is a pure deduction.

But there is another even more interesting aspect of the matter. The attempt of the machine to embody or express something non-mechanical, to leap as high as possible from material objects to psychological values has a special signi­ficance for us today and is not all an amusing or crazy affair. It indicates, what we have been always saying, an involved pressure in Matter, a presence, a force of consciousness secreted there that seeks release and growth and expression.

The scientific spirit, that is to say, man's inquiring mind, even when it specifically deals with Matter and material phenomena, cannot be made to confine, to limit itself to that region alone. It always overleaps itself and stretches beyond its habitual and conventional frontiers. The yearning of Matter for Light is an extraordinary phenomenon of Nature: physically speaking, we have reached the equation of the two. But that light is only a first signpost or symbol: it invites Matter towards higher and freer vibration. The old determinism has given place in the heart of Matter to significant eccentricities which seem to release other types of élan. When

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the brain-mind indulges in fabricating clay-images of God, it is not merely a foolish or idle pastime: it indicates a deep ingrained hunger. All this reveals a will or aspiration in Matter, in what is apparently dead and obscure (acit), to move and reach out towards what is living and luminous and supremely living and luminous (cit). Matter finally is to embody and express the Spirit.

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