Science, Materialism, Mysticism

Science Materialism Mysticism

by

Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna)

Foreword to the second Edition

The Clear Ray Trust, Pondicherry, is happy to publish the second Edition of Amal Kiran's book "Science Materialism, Mysticism".

The Issue Materialism versus Mysticism now seems to be an important point of intellectual debate and this book throws a considerable amount of light on the subject and helps to clarity many concepts relating to the subject.

Did Classical Physics Bear Out Materialism?

One of the distinguishing marks of the present century is the revolution in physics. This revolution has swept away many of the old theories, and the new ones that have replaced them have brought an extreme mystery which does not rule out the possibility of even a mystical conception of the universe. But when we declare that relativity theory and quantum theory permit us to ask whether matter be not a phenomenon of something other than material, must we assume as we generally do that classical physics which knew nothing of them barred the way to a non-materialistic philosophy? No doubt, the majority of classical physicists were opposed to such a philosophy; yet it may not follow that the actual findings of classical physics had no significant features conducive to uncertainty and mystery, features perilous to dogmatic materialism. Might not those physicists have somehow indulged in a tremendous illogicality that has deluded even us to take as legitimate the interpretation they put on their data?

Electricity, the Ether and the Atom

Let us begin with the frequent assertion that, while modern physics has moved away from the mechanical view of the world, classical physics was wedded to it. This is hardly true. Several physicists were anxious that every process of nature should allow a mechanical model to be made of it, but long before the advent of relativity or quantum physics the mechanical model was found insufficient. For, what after all renders such a model possible? Galileo and Newton believed that all events could 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. 3

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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. The first non-conformity was found by Oersted when experimenting with a voltaic battery and was stressed by Rowland's experiment with a charged sphere; it amounted to the fact that the electric force acted not along the line but perpendicularly to it and depended on the velocity of the electric charge instead of only on the distance. The second non-conformity arose in connection with light. The mechanical view of light led to a jellylike ether which, paradoxically, was found to interact with matter when light passed through glass and water but offered not the least resistance to the motion of the planets. With the coming of Faraday and Clerk Maxwell, it was realised that not the charges nor the particles but the space or the "field" between the charges and the particles was essential for the description of physical phenomena. The field-concept harmonised what the mechanically viewed ether had left disparate, and Clerk Maxwell's equations were divested of all mechanicality by Hertz, while in the hands of Lorentz they resulted in the electromagnetic description of matter itself. So we can see from any history of physics that it is not relativity theory or quantum theory that first questioned the applicableness of the mechanical model to the whole of nature and suggested processes no engineer could ever satisfactorily duplicate, processes intelligible only in abstract mathematical terms.

Even when the mechanical model was sought to be extended everywhere, the results were not such as should lead to any complacence about reality. The physicists seem to have been pretty complacent in the main but we would be deluding ourselves if we thought that physics was in tune with this complacence. The ether, as mechanically conceived, got credited with a hundred conflicting properties. Among other things, it had to be denser than the densest solid and yet so "void" that we could pass through it without feeling anything; it had to be elastic but could not be

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distorted; it had to be mobile but its motion could never be detected; it could exert force on matter but matter could exert no force on it. Could such a self-contradictory substance make for peace of mind or give rise to a clear unchallengeable

materialism?

And it was this mysterious ether which was also regarded as the world's substratum. We commonly think that nineteenth-century physics rested with what is usually termed matter as the stuff constituting the atom. Newton, as page 375 of his Optics (4th edition, 1730) will prove, did believe that the atom was composed of matter. But the nineteenth century put not matter but the ether first. Lord Kelvin was representative of the general mind when he brought forward in 1867 in the Philosophical Magazine (vol. 34, page 15) the concept of the atom as a spinning vortex ring in the ether, something like a smoke ring in air. As Paul Heyl puts it on page 16 of New Frontiers of Science: "In this concept Kelvin reversed the Newtonian idea that hard particles might make soft bodies and taught us to look for the explanation of the hardness of matter in the rapid motion of something soft and yielding." And when we know what a paragon of paradox the ether was we see how matter, instead of remaining matter-of-fact, retreated into a mystery.

Nor was the ether the sole headachy item. Some years ago Professor Arthur Smithelis called attention to a controversy which took place as far back as 1882. In that year a book was published entitled The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics, written by an American, J.B. Stallo. Commenting on the controversy, Herbert Dingle writes in Through Science to Philosophy (page 91): "Stallo was not a physicist - he was a judge; but (or should I say therefore?) he had an extremely logical mind, and with rigorous exactitude he pointed out the inconsistencies in the scheme of thought which physicists everywhere adopted. His book was reviewed in Nature by P.G. Tait, one of the most prominent practising physicists of the time.... On one hand, there is Stallo.. .having a right royal time exposing the contradictions in which the kinetic theory

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of gases had become involved; and on the other, Tait, unable to answer the arguments because they were indeed unanswerable, but yet knowing as Stallo could not know that the kinetic theory of gases was an instrument which science could not possibly abandon." The state of affairs Stallo disclosed was, in short, that from one angle science had to regard the atom as perfectly elastic and from another as perfectly inelastic, from one angle as something which was wanted to explain hardness and from another as something which already had the very hardness sought to be explained by it! Could such a glaring contradiction in matter itself be said to leave everything clear and unperplexing?

Apropos of the property of elasticity in reference to the atom we may offer a few observations which take us from apparently clear, obviously materialistic conceptions straight into the cryptic and the inconceivable. If one had asked a classical physicist how he would explain the compression that is possible of even a seemingly close-packed piece of solid matter he would have answered: "The original packing represented a porous mass: the molecules were so packed as to leave interspaces, like the holes in a sponge." If we had asked him again why, after moderate compression, the solid resumed its original shape and volume, he would have replied: "The material was elastic." But now comes the rub. As F.M. Denton puts it: "We can hardly say that the empty pores do themselves exert forces; the forces must be due to the walls of these pores, and these walls at any rate must consist of close-packed particles. The elasticity of a mass of close-packed particles then has to be attributed to the particles themselves. If these particles are the molecules we know that they have a structure; they are built up of atoms and built so loosely that the atoms move about within the molecules. We might attribute elasticity to change in the closeness of the packing of the atoms, but to the atoms themselves must then be attributed the real elasticity." Consider the implication of these words. If the atom is, as many classical physicists believed, the ultimate brick of the

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universe, how can it be elastic? Elasticity would mean that the atom is capable of being compressed and afterwards of resuming its original shape and volume. But if it is thus capable it cannot be structureless, it cannot be without component parts. Without its having parts the idea that it can suffer a change in volume is preposterous. If we suppose it to have suffered a compression of, say, 1% of its original volume, that little element of volume must have been occupied, previously, by a part of the atom - an idea that is inconsistent with the assumption that the atom has no component parts. Neither can we suppose a structureless atom suffering change of shape. Change of shape means re-arrangement of component parts.

The nineteenth-century physicist, with his atomic theory of the constitution of matter, lands plump into an obscure and unphysical conception the moment you probe the most simple-seeming property of things. And it would have helped him as little as it would help us now if the atom were given a structure and its compression made comprehensible by regarding it as a very loosely packed system of electrons. For then the electron would have to be itself elastic and possess parts! Otherwise the property of elasticity would have no physical explanation. But even if we went beyond the findings of modern physics which takes the electron to be structureless, we should not be out of the wood: the electron's components face us with the same predicament. We shall have to go on ad infinitum - the property of elasticity getting ascribed to the last member of an unending series of ever diminishing particles. As Denton says: "The ultimate particle of matter presents great difficulty: it need not be the electron - probably it is not - but the atomic notion of the constitution of matter does surely demand an ultimate particle, and such reasoning as has been suggested shows that to this ultimate particle no properties of any sort - not even magnitude - can be assigned." The atomic theory, whether it stops with the nineteenth-century atom or with the twentieth-century electron or with any minute grain that

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is the final brick of the universe, ends with matter becoming a total mystery. Nor can the alternative of pushing the responsibility on to the last member of an interminable series of particles be said to satisfy the mind with a clearly physical or dogmatically materialistic view of nature. The scientific mind fails and we are in the realm of magic, and some power which is not bound by our mind's capacity of physical conception but can achieve the impossible and whose working can be grasped by only some speech-transcending faculty such as the mystics claim confronts us as soon as we question the commonest scientific notion entertained by even the most materialistic physicist of the nineteenth century.

The Force of Gravitation

Beating the atom and even the ether in mysteriousness was Newton's force of gravitation. We are often told that the straightforward mechanical pulls contemplated in the old theory of gravitation are gone now and bodies are deviated from their straight path by the "curved" condition of the medium in which they move and not by a force exerted on them by a distant body. Is it not, however, plain that this new explanation is actually less mysterious than the Newtonian? As Denton points out on page 39 of Relativity and Common Sense, the Newtonian explanation "is one which involves a process impossible of conception - namely, that of 'action at a distance'. We can conceive of a force acting through a medium, but Newton's explanation of the force of gravitation demands no medium; two masses attract each other with a force proportional inversely to the square of their distances apart, even though the masses be separated by empty space or, if there happens to be an intervening medium, Newton's explanation allows this to interfere in no way with the transmission of the force. Human minds - or at any rate many very reputable human minds - revolt against the notion of such 'action at a distance', regarding it as

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absurd." L. Bolton on page 144 of An Introduction to the Theory of Relativity stresses the same fact: "If the new point of view which Einstein invites us to adopt presents a difficulty, it is useful to remember that the Newtonian view presented no less difficulty to philosophers in his day. Their great objection was that it involved action at a distance, attributing to bodies a power to act where they are not. It seemed incredible that the sun acted across intervening space and pulled a planet out of the straight path which it would otherwise follow. Only the clearest evidence that this theory actually did give an explanation of the planetary motions and presented a picture of what, in fact, went on in the solar system, surpassing by far in adequacy and accuracy any theory previously advanced, induced philosophers as a body to accept such action as possible." Bolton, of course, is asking us not to reject Einstein on the score of contradiction of common sense or logic; but his reference to Newton serves excellently our purpose of showing that the suggestion of the supra-physical or occult is as strongly ascribable to Newtonian gravitation as to Einstein's curving of planetary motion by means of the "curved" medium around. Sullivan on page 77 of Limitations of Science develops the hint dropped by Bolton, in the passage already quoted, that Newtonian gravitation is not hampered by any intervening agent: "No- thing acts as a screen to it. We have substances that stop light, that stop heat, that stop the electric and magnetic forces, that stop even X-rays, but we know of nothing that stops gravitation. A body held up in the air weighs just as much however many bodies we interpose between it and the surface of the earth. The pull of the earth on it is not affected in the slightest." A page earlier Sullivan casts into relief another strange aspect of the gravitational force as conceived by Newton: "It seems to act instantaneously. Light, as we know, takes time to travel. So does every other form of radiant energy. But all efforts to bring gravitation into line with the other forces proved ineffectual." Added to the fact of action at a distance without any ether capable of transmit-

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ting it, the fact of an instantaneous action and of an action unaffected by any screen renders Newtonian gravitation the most mysterious, the most unphysical agency science can ever posit.

Russell on page 140 of The ABC of Relativity refers to the oddness of the old gravitational concept. "Aristotle," he writes, "thought that heavy bodies fall faster than light ones. Galileo showed that this is not the case, when the resistance of the air is eliminated. In a vacuum, a feather falls as fast as a lump of lead. As regards the planets it was Newton who established the corresponding facts. At a given distance from the sun, a comet, which has a very small mass, experiences exactly the same acceleration towards the sun as a planet experiences at the same distance. Thus the way in which gravitation affects a body depends only upon where the body is and in no degree upon the nature of the body. This suggests that gravitation is a characteristic of the locality, which is what Einstein makes it." In pre-relativity physics, therefore, there was the glaring oddity that in a given gravitational situation all bodies behave exactly alike. The modem concept is, in a certain way, far more close to commonsense. The old oddity got covered up for succeeding generations of scientists by the formula they had learned from childhood about the equality of inertial and gravitational mass. Part of Einstein's anxiousness to dispense with Newton's gravitational concept was due to his keen aware- ness of its supra-scientific metaphysicality. And we may remark that Einstein's aversion especially to action at a distance is itself a lingering attachment to the mechanical view. This view receives its greatest blow from untransmitted instantaneous action at a distance, and the blow was given not by modem but by classical physics. Surely Einstein has not played more strikingly than Newton a new St. Paul, crying: "Behold, I tell you a mystery!"

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Absolute Space and Time

In connection with the physics of Einstein and the Newtonian physics by which the nineteenth century of materialism swore, it is curious to note that Einstein's first criticism of the latter was on the ground that there was too much metaphysics in the ideas of absolute space and absolute time. Sullivan well remarks in the introduction to his Three Men Discuss Relativity: "We can say that changes in the scientific scheme have gradually converged towards a system of interpretation where none but observable factors are considered as in causal dependence. We must not interpret the word 'observable' too narrowly in this statement. It would be more correct to substitute for 'observable' definable in terms of physical processes. If an entity is to be considered as a scientific entity we must be able to say what physical processes would enable us to detect it. This is the basis of Einstein's objection to Newton's absolute space and absolute time. There are no physical operations, according to Einstein, which enable us to distinguish absolute space. As regards absolute time, Newton himself confessed that there may be no natural processes which enable us to measure it. We can never, in the nature of things, say whether we are dealing with absolute time or not. Both these entities therefore are described by Einstein as metaphysical, with no real place in science. Newton said that the centrifugal force developed by a rotating body was due to the body's relation to absolute space. Here an unobservable factor, absolute space, is involved as the cause of an observed physical phenomenon. According to Einstein, science could not invoke such an entity as the cause of anything. Absolute space and time, so far as science is concerned, belong to the same class of entities as the Will of God, Beauty, the Principle of Evil and so on. They may even be realities, and some kinds of knowledge may find it necessary to assume them, but since they are not definable in terms of physical processes, since we know of no physical apparatus which can measure them

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or even detect their existence, they are not to be imported into scientific descriptions."

These words of Sullivan's suggest two features of modem scientific procedure. On the one hand, it is implied that science is a game played according to certain rules which deliberately limit its scope and thereby indirectly grant the possibility of other types of inquiry leading to truth, though not to scientific truth. This is a definite pricking of the balloon of scientific dogmatism. On the other hand, however, nineteenth-century physics is shown to be functioning with a loose scientific conscience and hobnobbing with types of inquiry that arrived at entities like the Will of God, Beauty, or the Principle of Evil: in short, its procedure, unlike that of modern physics, was essentially akin, in several respects, to that of non-scientific religion, aesthetics and ethics! If that is so, dogmatic materialism has in classical physics no leg to stand on.

Entropy

With mention of the Will of God we may bring in the subject of what is termed Entropy. About the middle of the last century, Clausius, the discoverer of the mechanical theory of heat, was impressed by the fact that when mechanical energy is converted into heat, a large part of it is never reconverted. He argued that a time must come when all energy would exist in the form of heat and all activity other than the vibration of molecules would cease: there would at last be no utilisable energy left. The process towards this state is called Entropy. As it is well known that the stars are radiating away heat, a heat-death of the universe may be expected, one dead level of temperature, a condition of maximum disorganisation in which all energy will be dissipated. In the nineteenth century there was no possibility of arguing from any natural facts that the maxi- mum disorganisation could ever be counteracted. But the progressive disorganisation involves that the further back we

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go in time the energy of the universe is to be considered more and more highly organised. Can the higher and higher organisation proceed indefinitely? The answer of science was "No " We must reach a moment of time when the energy was wholly organised with none of the random element in it. In Eddington's phrases: "The organisation we are concerned with is exactly definable, and there is a limit at which it becomes perfect. There is not an infinite series of states of higher and still higher organisation: nor is the limit one which is ultimately approached more and more slowly." This means that science, if unable to contradict the law of Entropy, has to admit a moment of maximum organisation which could not have been preceded by any other of less organisation since Entropy was taken to be irreversible, a moment which also must have immediately been followed by a less organised state since Entropy was seen to go on unchecked. How are we to regard such a puzzling moment? Nineteenth-century physics has no scientific explanation for its origin. Nothing within the system of nature could account for it. We should have to say that the moment was veritably the birth of time and some eternal power other than nature created or emanated the universe and, winding it up to the full, set it going. Or we should have to opine that the universe always existed but with a power other than nature immanent in it and this Pantheos miraculously did the winding up. Or else we should hold that a power other than nature was coeval supra-cosmically with the ever-existing universe and wound it up by special intervention from beyond. Most of the classical physicists did not favour the Will of God, but here their atheism and materialism flew flagrantly in the face of the indication to be found in the data of physics. Even today scientists are hard put to it to deny Entropy or explain away its philosophical consequences. Yet some alternative to the Will of God may, in this particular connection, be considered as scientifically formulable, how- ever lamely, at the present; in the last century it was absolutely out of the question.

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In view of the various points of uncertainty and mystery and at least one point of actual mysticism, which we have brought out in the old scientific scheme, the dogmatic materialism of most of its adherents must be adjudged an unparalleled aberration in the history of the human mind. And, emboldened by this judgment on the materialistic doctrine in its very heyday, we may well ask whether, on the strength of any findings and theories, physics can ever bear out materialism.

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Mysticism and Einstein's Relativity Physics

I

When Archbishop Davidson, in the early days of relativity theory, asked Einstein what effect his theory would have on religion, Einstein answered: "None. Relativity is a purely scientific theory and has nothing to do with religion." This answer seems to give short shrift to any attempt at aligning with a mystical view of the universe the revolution in scientific thought which Einstein brought about. But Eddington suggests that Einstein's remark must be under- stood in the context of the times in which it was made. In those days, Eddington, explains, one had to become expert in dodging persons who were persuaded that Einstein's four- dimensional continuum was what spiritualistic seances were supposed to reveal: Einstein's hasty evasion was therefore not surprising. But, according to Eddington, the compartments into which human thought is divided are not water- tight: fundamental progress in one cannot be a matter of indifference to the rest. He caustically offers an analogy:

"Natural selection is a purely scientific theory. If in the early days of Darwinism the then Archbishop had asked what effect the theory of natural selection would have on religion, ought the answer to have been 'None. The Darwinian theory is a purely scientific theory, and has nothing to do with religion'?"

Is Eddington's interpretation of Einstein's remark correct? Before we pass judgment we must note, by the way, that Eddington's excuse for Einstein does not seem quite pertinent. Einstein may have wished to dissociate his theory from the claims based on table-rapping and the ouija board. But Archbishop Davidson could scarcely have appeared to him their champion. The more serious-minded among the religious interpreters of relativity theory believed that Einstein confirmed an attitude which was usually considered favour- able to religion, the attitude of subjectivism. When, for

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instance, Einstein declared that space and time are not absolute but relative and that measurements of them depend on the state of the observer, he appeared to make the observing mind the determinant of space and time. Physics prior to Einstein was supposed to present us with a world in which the observing mind made no difference to what was observed; but if space and time vary with the state of the observer, does not the world become permeated with subjective values and does not the materialistic world-view based on 4he old physics collapse, giving precedence to the power of the mind?

No doubt, Einstein himself employs the word "subjective", yet to connect his theory with religion via subjectivism in the common acceptation of the term is to misconstrue him. The word has a special connotation in physics, and what Einstein calls subjective has, in the universe of discourse to which it belongs, no psychological content in any determinant sense: it does not mean that the differences in measurement arise from the state of the observer's mind and occur because he is making use of his consciousness. On this point there is a consensus of scientific authorities. Sullivan, in his article The Physical Nature of the Universe in An Outline of Modern Knowledge (page 99), writes: "It is hardly necessary to say that by referring to an 'observer' we do not imply that there is anything 'subjective' or 'psychological' about this theory of relativity. Instead of 'observer' we could substitute the phrase 'automatic measuring apparatus' without affecting the validity of any of our conclusions." Whitehead, on page 142 of Science and the Modern World, has the same thing to affirm: "There has been a tendency to give an extreme subjectivist interpretation to this new doctrine. It is perfectly legitimate to bring in the observer, if he facilitates explanations. But it is the observer's body that we want, and not his mind. Even his body is only useful as an example of a very familiar form of apparatus." Jeans makes a similar statement on page 65 of Physics and Philosophy: "It is the body of the observer we want and not his mind; a laboratory equipped

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with cameras and various instruments of measurement would serve our purpose just as well." Eddington also, on page 183 of Space, Time and Gravitation, speaks of relativity employing "the different possible impersonal points of view..., those for which the observer can be regarded as a mechanical automaton and can be replaced by scientific measuring appliances." Bertrand Russell explains on page 219 of The ABC of Relativity: "People have been misled by the way in which writers on relativity speak of 'the observer'. It is natural to suppose that the observer is a human being, or at least a mind; but he is just as likely to be a photographic plate or a clock. That is to say, the odd results as to the difference between one 'point of view' and another are concerned with 'point of view' in a sense applicable to physical instruments just as much as to people with perceptions. The 'subjectivity' concerned in the theory of relativity is a physical subjectivity which would exist equally if there were no such things as minds or senses in the world."

All these pronouncements have, of course, to be taken in reference to a particular limited issue and not to the general philosophical problem whether anything can exist independently of consciousness or else, existing, be to consciousness anything other than what the constitution of consciousness makes it like. They should also not be taken in reference to the truism either that even physical subjectivity can have no meaning and no place in physics in the absence of conscious- ness or that it is, for the purposes of science, always a part of the plan and procedure which emanates from and depends on consciousness. The question fronting us is nothing more than the following: Is the observer's consciousness directly and immediately necessary for the "odd results" of relativity physics? To return a true answer let us pause a moment on the phrase "physical subjectivity". It is worth while bringing the meaning of it to sharp focus by marking it off from other species of subjectivity similarly leading to disagreement between observer and observer. Subjectivity by which, within our sphere of discussion, differing statements can be made are of three types.

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There is psychological subjectivity. If I recite Sri Aurobindo's Savitri to an audience, half of whom know English and half do not, those who know it will understand him, while, for the rest, wonderful lines like

The superconscient realms of motionless peace

Where judgment ceases and the word is mute

And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone

will be no more than a series of rhythmically arranged sounds. Nor will all those who know English find in the lines the same wonderfulness. Lovers of mystical poetry will be enchanted and exalted, lovers of modernist poetry will not respond so whole-heartedly; lovers of the so-called matter- of-fact will be quite out of tune with Sri Aurobindo's profound and spellbinding vision of superconscient peace and will perhaps feel because of it only a desire to stretch their legs and have a quiet nap in a comer. All these different impressions are instances of psychological subjectivity. Then there is physiological subjectivity. My audience may be composed of those who hear well, those who are hard of hearing and those who are stone-deaf. So, some will catch every word, some will miss a word or two here and there, some will only see my lips moving inaudibly. The different impressions result not from states of mind but from the body's normality or defectiveness. Then there is physical subjectivity. Fart of the audience may be near me, part far from me. Or else some hearers may be standing in one place, others moving about. What I read will be received differently by the near, the far, the standing and the moving. The differences will depend neither on the mind's condition nor on the state of the body's organs but only on the circumstances of situation and motion. The minds may be all akin, the bodies may be utterly similar, and yet these differences will come to pass. For, they are purely physical and can be reproduced exactly by putting, in place of the people, recording instruments all alike. They arise from "observation"

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in a sense in which observation can go on without minds or bodies being present, since all that is required is recording instruments. And if the human observer himself acts as such an instrument the character of the subjectivity involved is not changed: it remains physical and, within our sphere of discussion, has no bearing in the least on any problem connected with psychological subjectivity.

Physical subjectivity is what all physics, classical or Einstein speaks of. According to Einstein, if the observer is moving at such and such a speed relative to an object under observation, a particular kind of effect will be observed in the object: the object will have a certain behaviour. Change the speed and the behaviour of the observed object will be changed. Obviously what affects the observation is the state neither of the observer's mind nor of his bodily organs but the motion of his body. This implies that the point about the difference either of mental or bodily condition does not arise:

were the mental and bodily condition exactly the same in all observers but the rate of motion dissimilar, the variations observed would still be there. The essential factor is not psychological, not even physiological but totally physical. And if it is totally physical we can break up the observation into two parts: an instrument's recording an effect and the observer's reading off what is thus recorded. It is with this break-up in view that Philip Franck, in Between Physics and Philosophy, makes what is the final elucidation in brief of the whole issue. He writes: "It is only essential in relativity that in accordance with the motion of the measuring instruments the results of the measurements will be different. But in this there is nothing psychological, at any rate not more than in classical physics. The role of the observer is in both cases entirely the same: he merely substantiates the fact that in a certain instrument a pointer coincides with a division mark on a scale. For this purpose the state of motion of the observer is of no account." To sum up in our own words: a moving laboratory fitted with recording apparatus can be a substitute for both the mind and the body of the observer

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and, though the observer's mind-body accompanies the moving laboratory in order to substantiate its readings, the mind-body need not move at all for a particular behaviour to be registered of an object. The observer plays no determinant part in any immediate sense raising a special subjectivist issue.

So, relativity theory, in this context, is to be understood simply as changing our old ideas about what happens when one frame of reference or co-ordinate system or physical standpoint is in relation of motion to another: the term "observer" can be dropped from a formulation of it with as much or as little impunity as from a formulation of classical physics. And, unless we choose general philosophical grounds having nothing to do in particular with any physics, we cannot here subscribe to subjectivism in the common acceptation of the term. In all physics the "subjective" does duty only for the "variant", and the "objective" for the "invariant." The variant is the different characteristics an object or event has in its relation to diverse physical stand- points outside itself, carrying measuring instruments: the invariant is what characteristics must be possessed by it or be attributed to it in order to correlate and unify the variant characteristics. The variant is the pointer-readings unique to a particular place: the invariant is the common factor found in or suggested by the unique pointer-readings from all possible places. The variant is the local or relative feature of an object or event: the invariant is the feature that is universal or absolute.

If Einstein, as Eddington believes, was discouraging popular confusions when he refused to see any religious significance in his theory, the mixing up of the scientific variant with the psychologically subjective was more probably in his mind than seances. But it is doubtful whether any excuse that could be found for him has force. Einstein's remark is really of a piece with all his other pronouncements on science and religion. Religion, in his view, is of two sorts:

either it considers God to be personal, a Being other than the

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universe and interfering with natural events, or it feels that a mighty intelligence is within the universe, imbuing it with a rationality, an ordered regularity, which nothing can break and which is discovered progressively by the human mind when this mind functions as scientist. Science, according to Einstein, is in conflict with the first sort, while it is actually based on the second. "What deep faith," he exclaims, "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!" But, beyond the derivation of science from a "cosmic religious feeling", there is for Einstein an utter divergence between science and religion. Science, he believes, deals with what is, religion with what should be: the one with truth, the other with value. Science is impotent to provide principles necessary for judgment and action, it is not even able to justify its very basis - the value of the search for truth. Religion is equally impotent to give any knowledge of the world-process, it is not able to tell us what principles operate in the working of cosmic nature. "Science without religion," says Einstein, "is lame; religion without science is blind." When the two, by being complementary, are entirely different in field and function, how, asks Einstein, can science have any bearing on religion and how can we talk of any religious significance in the theory of relativity?

Einstein's conception of science and religion is open to criticism on many heads. We, however, do not need to go into a detailed philosophical discussion. Suffice it to say that his cutting asunder of science as the realm of truth, from religion as the realm of value, is arbitrary. What science gives is a certain type of truth: surely we cannot restrict the discovery of truth to the scientific method. The human consciousness has many modes of operation and each comes into contact with reality in a different aspect: we cannot dogmatically deny that the artistic imagination or the mystical intuition is incapable of finding truth. The truth they find may be of another type than the scientific, but truth it can

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remain no less. The knowledge of what is cannot be confined to science; even the realm of value is concerned with the discovery of what is, for unless we know that our ethical aspirations are supported, however secretly, by the nature of reality we shall have no genuine sanction against selfishness and cruelty and deception. As Einstein realises, the pursuit of scientific truth itself has no justification without our being convinced that reality is such as to make it worth while for the researcher in pure science to tear himself away from immediate practical life and devote himself to the terrific exertions without which pioneer creation in scientific thought can never come into being. It is not only a "cosmic religious feeling", a sense of an ordering mind within the universe, that inspires a Kepler and a Newton and an Einstein, but also an admitted or unadmitted reliance on the discovery by intuition that reality supports by its nature the ideal of truth. Take away from the non-scientific domain the quest for knowledge of what is and you make the disinterested passion of the pure researcher in science a mighty foolishness. Religion without science is not blind: it is blind merely to scientific truth while being open-eyed to truth of a different class.

And this different class of truth comprises not only value but also, in a subtle sense, structures, as should be evident even from what "cosmic religious feeling" implies. If there is an ordering mind within the universe, then that mind has an order within itself, owing to which the universe is ordered in such and such a way. The mind that is expressed in the structure of phenomena must have, as a support for its expression, its own structure. Religion is concerned with - among other things - the experience of this structure and has made pronouncements about it. For, religion tells us not merely that God is good and blissful and beautiful in a perfect superhuman manner or that He is omniscient and omnipotent but also that He has certain purely existential characters - namely, that, while being omnipresent and manifested in space and time. He is beyond them, too. If this

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is so, it would be an entirely legitimate question whether one scientific theory is more favourable than another to religion. Eddington is justified in holding that human thought is not divided into watertight compartments. His citing the example of Darwin's theory of natural selection is most apt. Samuel Butler revolted against Darwinism by shouting: "It banishes mind from the universe." Strictly speaking, he is not right. Darwinism merely stated that evolution proceeds not by an urge in the organism towards a certain way of living but by a series of accidental variations out of which some are accidentally preserved by the fact that they happen to fit in with the environment while the others do not. How can such a theory banish mind from the universe? It just banishes the operation of mind in the evolution of species. To banish mind from the universe can mean either of two things: there is no consciousness present in the world or, if there is, it is totally explicable in physical terms. Darwin points to neither conclusion. But his theory does definitely lessen the importance of consciousness in the world-process. If religion involves stress on the play of consciousness, as it certainly must, the Darwinian theory is anti-religious. If there is an intelligence at the back of the world, we surely do not deny it by saying that it chooses natural selection as the means of evolution; but we cannot overlook the extreme oddness in this intelligence's manifesting itself in a mode which so little stresses the role of consciousness. The unimportance of the role of consciousness strongly suggests, though it does not prove, that there is no intelligence at the back of the world and that soul and freewill and miracle are non-existent. Similarly, a theory in physics may favour materialism or lean towards a mystical world-view: all depends on the implications of the mathematical structure it regards as final. The terms employed are not abstract symbols as in pure mathematics: they are a symbolic language interrelating, at the end of a long or short process of deduction, actualities of observation and experience. In physics, unless the contrary is proved, every formula of

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structure can be taken to correspond to a world-reality, and the nature of that reality to be suggested by the manner in which the terms of the formula are combined. We commit no "howler" in inquiring whether relativity theory sheds on world-reality a light in the direction of mysticism.

2

To come to the correct conclusion it is best to make a short survey of the rise and development of Einsteinian physics. Einstein versus the ether! That is the form in which the first battle was fought between the new physics and the old. For, the ether was vitally bound up with the problem with which he was occupied: Newton's absolute motion, absolute space and absolute time.

To observe absolute motion we should have a frame of reference absolutely at rest. Otherwise motion would be merely relative - that is, a body' to which reference is made when calculating another body's motion may itself be moving but is taken to be at rest for only convenience's sake and so the rate of motion it yields for the other body is not absolute. Thus the sea is moving relatively to the earth which seems to be at rest, but the earth is itself moving round the sun and the sun too is moving relatively to the so-called fixed stars and they in turn are moving relatively to one another. Newton, however, declared that though all bodies are in relative motion the frame of reference that is absolutely at rest is space and that such a frame is necessary for the purposes of physics. He further declared that there is one time flowing uniformly so that at any chosen moment we can say that events are happening everywhere in space simultaneously with it. Indeed, as motion is measured as a certain number of space-units traversed in a certain number of time- units, time as well as space has to be absolute if we are to

' A "body" in physics does not mean a human body: it is a brief way of designating a frame of reference or a co-ordinate system.

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have absolute motion. But is any experiment possible by which these absolutes can be verified?

Space can hardly prove a frame of reference absolutely at rest if we regard it as empty. Luckily, to explain the phenomenon of light the undulatory theory was invented. Light was found to behave as if it were a wave. To be a wave was thought to imply something in which the wave could form. A universal substance called ether was postulated to fill all space to permit light's vibratory motion. Having postulated the luminiferous ether, physicists naturally attempted to discover its other properties than that of being vibrated. Certain experiments seemed to show it to be dragged with celestial bodies, like a super-atmosphere, as they moved; many more seemed to show it to be not dragged with such bodies but fixed in space, though capable of internal movements such as light.

Taking it to be some sort of subtle material stuff, composed of particles like all matter, Michelson devised an experiment which has often been repeated. Our earth's atmosphere is dragged with the earth, but for moving objects on the earth it is fixed as a whole, though capable of internal movements. That is why we find an air-drift when we speed through air in a plane. When we are stationary, there is no air-drift of the same kind. Similarly, if the ether is dragged with the earth, an appropriate stationary apparatus will record no ether-drift. But if it is not dragged and is fixed in space the apparatus will record the drift. By measuring the speed of the ether-drift we should know our own speed through a fixed ether and thus know the earth's motion in reference to something not only at absolute rest but also practically playing the role of space by being all-pervasive. Here was a chance to get at absolute motion and absolute space. Further, by knowing one piece of absolute motion we can translate all known motions into absolute terms. Thus, we can know the absolute speed of light and by making allowance for the time-lag between the moment when light leaves a source and the moment when it reaches us we can

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know what moment anywhere in space could be considered as simultaneous with the moment at which we receive the light-rays. So absolute time also can be found if we can measure the ether-drift.

Of course, the ether is too subtle to tackle directly. But if light is an ether-phenomenon we can get at the drift by marking light's movement in a particular fashion. Michelson's experiment was meant precisely to do this. In principle it consisted in sending two beams of light from the same source in two directions, one in the direction in which according to astronomical observations the earth was judged to be moving and the other at right angles to this, and then getting them reflected by mirrors fixed at equal distances from the source. The reflection of the beam sent in the direction of the earth's movement would naturally take less time to reach the source than the other reflection, for the earth would be moving forward to meet it and there would be less distance for the beam to travel. The difference in the two times would indicate the speed with which the ether- drift was felt by the moving earth and therefore the rate at which the earth was moving in reference to a fixed ether. The experiment was a masterpiece of delicacy and could have detected even one-hundredth of the extremely minute difference expected; but it failed totally. There was no difference at all. Light coming towards us as we moved towards its source travelled with the same speed as from other sources!

Could it be there was no ether? Michelson, rather than face an etherless physics, concluded that the ether was dragged with the earth and thus counteracted the difference in speeds. But the majority of physicists, relying on astronomical data, would not hear of any dragging. Fitzgerald opined that somehow the rod with which the distances travelled by the two beams on their return journey were measured had contracted when put in the direction of the earth's movement. Lorentz went further and deduced from the then-current laws of electrodynamics that the electrons composing the rod would so readjust themselves in the

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direction of the rod's movement with the earth that the rod would get short by exactly the amount that would be needed to make the two distances travelled by the returning beams appear equal. According to Lorentz, there was no wonder that the times taken were the same and that light behaved so paradoxically: the null result of the Michelson experiment was due not to absence of the stationary ether but simply to rod-contraction.

Einstein was the only thinker unsatisfied with Lorentz's idea. He brought three arguments against it. In the first place, if rod-contraction would always exactly hide the speed of anything in reference to a stationary ether, then, whatever other functions the supposed ether might serve, the function of being a concrete form of Newton's absolute space would never be served by it. A subtly material stationary ether is as good as non-existent for physics, since every measurable quantity it might have yielded is precisely compensated for by a contraction in the measuring rod. Such an ether is a useless hypothesis. In the second place, if we take for reference a body which is moving relatively to another body but which for convenience's sake we regard as being at rest relatively to our own motion, our rod will show exactly the same contraction as we attribute to it in reference to a hypothetically stationary ether. So there is no reason to believe that the rod-contraction conceals from us a stationary ether, an absolute frame of reference. By means of the rod- contraction there is no possibility of distinguishing between an absolute and a relative frame. In the third place, since in all relativities of motion between two bodies the mathematical terms remain the same whether the first body be accounted as moving and the second as at rest or the second as moving and the first as at rest, the rod on either body must be thought of as showing the same contraction. The unchanging mathematical terms imply that from the standpoint of the one body the rod going with it would contract while from the standpoint of the other body the contraction would occur in its own rod. The contraction is a common and mutual

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feature of relative motion and gives not the least indication as to which of the two bodies is moving in reference to a stationary ether. In the face of this ambiguity, what sense can there be in talking of it as compensating for and hiding any particular quantity of motion which reference to such an ether might yield?

Why then cling to a subtly material ether which must be considered as capable of being a frame of reference at absolute rest? Why even hypothetise that it is dragged and therefore inaccessible as such a frame? Do we require it as a medium for light's vibrations? Clerk Maxwell proved light to be a species of electromagnetism. For several years physicists tried to figure out an electromagnetic wave in terms of waves of air or water or a jelly-like solid; but all attempts failed. Hertz, to some extent, and Lorentz, fully, made it clear that light could not be explained as a vibratory movement carried on from particle to particle as in the case of matter. If light was a wave, it was a wave sui generis and could not be understood in terms of oscillating particles, like all other waves. The medium postulated for light's transmission was left sufficiently immaterial by its being not composed of particles. And if a subtly material ether was unnecessary for even the mathematical description of motion, why not eliminate it?

Einstein eliminated the ether composed of fine particles which had stood for Newton's absolute space. Absolute space, he said, does not exist for physics. If absolute space is non-existent for physics, no absolute motion can be measured. And if absolute motion cannot be measured, how shall we measure absolute time? To know what time it is at a distant place when the clock here shows a certain hour, we must have a message from that place, a signal by light or radio: every message, be it ever so fast, travels at a finite speed and, if we never know the absolute value of any speed, how to allow correctly for the time-lag between the starting and the arrival of the message? Hence physics has no means of judging absolute time: a time flowing uniformly in

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the whole universe cannot figure in our equations. With the impossibility of the ether's serving as a frame of reference at absolute rest, the entire construction of Newtonian physics topples down.

Einstein began a new construction founded on the fact that light's speed is constant, whether we move towards it, away from it or stay where we are. Speed being measured, as we have already said, in terms of certain space-units travel- led in certain time-units, Einstein argued that not only rods shorten because of movement but also clocks slow down. This conclusion at once illumined the equation Lorentz had based on rod-shortening, for in it there had figured a term which could not be identified: now Einstein identified it as a sign of change in time-measurement owing to the slowing down of clocks. He even indicated a method by which the slowing down could be experimentally confirmed in a direct fashion by studying rhythmically vibrating atoms. In 1936, H. Ives of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, New York City, carried out the experiment with positive results. So Einstein has sound experimental backing. According to him, both the shortening of rods and the slowing down of clocks are proportional to the rate of movement of one body in relation to another which is itself moving. Reading of space and time made on a moving body are shared by another only if the latter has the same speed. When the speeds differ, the readings also must differ. As a consequence of relative motion, there is a relativity of space and time.

We have nothing non-materialistic, nothing mystical, so far. But to get to the heart of relativity theory we must fix our attention on one fact pointed out by Einstein and already noted by us: the reversibility of relation when motion is considered relatively. Just as our rod is shortened and our clock slowed down when we are in a certain relation of movement to a body which is itself moving, a rod and a clock on that body would in relation to the body which is our frame of reference undergo exactly the same changes which we observe in our instruments. If the mathematical terms

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denoting relative speed remain the same, whether we regard one body as at rest and the other as moving or vice versa, the question crops up: on which of the two bodies can really the rod be said to shorten and the clock to slow down? Well, if we consider both the bodies together as standpoints, the judgment of Daniel would be that the change really occurs in rod and clock on both. If we adopt one of the two stand- points, the change is real on one of them. If we adopt neither standpoint but some entirely other, a different reality will be registered by our measuring instruments. They give us variants according as we adopt one standpoint or another. To say this is to say that measuring instruments like clocks and rods can never give a reading that would be invariant from all standpoints.

But physics always aims at invariants. The laws of nature must be so formulated that they hold for all standpoints. It is not sufficient to find a "transformation" rule by which we may make the requisite adjustments in calculation as we pass from standpoint to standpoint. We must find a rule for the same reading from every standpoint: then alone can we give a description that is universal and absolute, a calculation of the fundamental quantity that different standpoints differently evaluate. But how are we to get beyond the relativity Which Einstein disclosed of all space-measurements and time-measurements?

The mathematician Minkowski showed the way. When the time-measurements are multiplied by themselves - that is, squared and then substracted from the square of the space-measurements we get a quantity which is the square of what is universal, absolute, invariant. Distance of space and distance of time alter with the rate of motion, but as soon as we follow Minkowski's rule we strike upon a distance or interval between two events which is found to be unaltered no matter what the rate at which we move. This rule is somewhat analogous to the one for calculating the distance or interval between two points in three-dimensional space. The latter rule is: Take the three co-ordinates of both the

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points, x and xi, y and yi, z and 2,1, and deduct the lesser co- ordinates from the greater and, squaring the result, add up all the squares: the sum gives the square of the distance or interval. Considering x, y and z to be the lesser co-ordinates, we write the equation:

D²=(x₁-x)² +(y₁-y)²+(z¹-z)²

Minkowski's equation introduced a fourth co-ordinate, as it were, which was time, and had a minus sign unlike the others:

D²=(x₁-x)² +(y₁-y)²+(z₁-z)²-(t₁-t)²

Mathematicians, however, cannot be completely at ease with this equation. In the first place, the minus sign is not quite to their liking: it is an irregularity. Minkowski comes to their rescue by saying: "Multiply the minus-signed time- measurements by the square root of minus one and, as every schoolboy knowing mathematics will understand, we reach immediately a plus quantity like all the other dimensional quantities, and the equation becomes:

D2 (x_i-x)²+(y_i-y)²+ (z_i-z)²+(t_i-t)².

.

Everything is now symmetrical and there is no technical distinction between time and the other variables. It is as if we had, instead of a continuum of three space-dimensions, a continuum of four space-dimensions completely isotropic - that is, similar in all directions - for all measurements; no direction can be picked out in it as fundamentally distinct from any other." But one step more is required to systematise everything for mathematical purposes. In the new equation, as in the old, time-measurements are left in time- units. How can units like seconds be added to or subtracted from units like inches? We can multiply or divide time-units and space-units by each other: for example, we divide the number of inches a moving object traverses by the number of

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seconds elapsed and we get the velocity of that object. But every schoolboy knows that it is mathematically inadmissible to subtract seconds from inches or add them. Minkowski again comes to the rescue. He says: "Luckily, in all the measurements concerned in relativity theory the speed of light remains constant. So we can use it as a common denominator. Thus, we can consider one second as equal to the 186,000 miles which light travels during a second. So we substitute for the time-measurements the miles which light would travel. Then we have complete symmetry, and the whole equation is completely as of a space of four indistinguishable dimensions. Further, the new statement of the equation facilitates the employment of the equation and any development that may be possible."

The procedure adopted by Minkowski in the interest of systematisation is often looked upon as vital to the conception of the four-dimensional continuum. This is a capital mistake and is responsible for the notion that the four- dimensional continuum is created by artificialities. It is argued: "What can be the justification of the square root of minus one and how can the substituting of miles for seconds give us a time-dimension really like the space-dimension?" Well, if Minkowski's systematisation did create the concept, we can look on his two steps as acts of analytic insight discerning and supplying what was missing in the steps by which a necessary concept was to be created. This way of looking is open as an alternative to the view of his steps as being artificialities, though that view is likely to be more stressed. But the alternative is not even called for. There is a fact which modifies the entire complexion of the controversy. The fact is: when Minkowski found that the time-measurement had to be subtracted from the space-measurements in a certain manner in order to get the invariant without which physics ceases to be physics, he found space-time to be the unavoidable invariant without needing to flourish in the face of the world his square root of minus one and the miles equivalent of a second. In Minkowski's original formula

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which can be accused of waving no such stage-conjuror's wand as the square root of minus one and the miles-equivalent of a second might seem, we have space-time no less than in the new formula, since it actually subtracts time terms from space-terms and therefore implies terms that are neither space nor time or are both together and are best described as neutral. Of course, we have not shown why, if space and time are indistinguishable, there should be a subtraction sign: we shall touch on this point later. It is not crucial here: here we are concerned not with the de jure indistinguishableness but the de facto indistinguishableness which is involved by subtracting one quantity from another. To such indistinguishableness Minkowski's seeming artificialities make no odds. We can drop them without jeopardising anything essential. When we realise this, we learn to see them as neither artificialities nor creative acts of analytic insight, they lead not to the creation of the concept but to the schematisation of it so as to make it most amenable to mathematical employment and possible development.

All the same, it must be admitted that the concept would never have emerged clearly without the schematisation. For, thus alone the invariant wanted by Einstein's physics was cast into a proper mathematical mould of four indistinguishable dimensions and brought to a focus. But, when we avoid the impression that it was not implicit in Minkowski's original equation, we must also avoid the impression that Minkowski gave us a four-dimensional space. Time is indeed spatialised by the form he put forth as mathematically the best for the four-dimensional continuum, and the process begun by physics of reckoning time in space-terms by means of a clock or any other clock-like space-mechanism reaches its apex in a manner undreamt of by the old physicists. But it would be a mistake to think that the four-dimensional continuum is conceived with a space-bias. Of course, a clock stands for time in physics, but after multiplying time-terms by the square root of minus one in order to get a plus sign we can perform the next operation in just the opposite direction:

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we can reduce space-terms to time-terms by considering 186,000 miles as equivalent to one second. The temporalisation of space instead of the spatialisation of time is equally possible. The point is that somehow space and time should be made indistinguishable dimensions. The four-dimensional continuum, therefore, is best designated as space-time or time-space rather than space or time. The dimensions, being equally designable as four of space or four of time, cannot be reckoned in terms either of time or space. The reading made for any event must be taken to be in units which are neutral. Also, the interval between any two events must be read in neutral units.

The neutral character can be realised, too, from another angle. It was found, mathematically, that to get the invariant interval between two events we had to attend to three conditions. If the space-distance between the events is such that an object can travel from one to the other before light from them can reach an observing standpoint, the interval between them for all standpoints is just what a clock on that object would record as the time taken by the object during its travel. The interval is then to be called "timelike." But if an object cannot travel between two events before light from them reaches a standpoint, the interval is just what a rod on that object would record as the space-distance travelled by the object. The interval is then to be called "spacelike". If the two events are the leaving of a ray of light from a source and the reaching of it at any standpoint the interval is such that both a rod and a clock would record it as zero. For, at the progressive rate at which, during motion, a rod shortens and a clock slows down, the rod would be shortened to nothing and a clock stop completely if they were put on a ray of light which travels 186,000 miles per second. The progression-rate can be understood if, for instance, we look at the increase of mass due to motion: here there is a progressive increase instead of decrease but the essence of the rate is the same. At half the velocity of light the mass of an electron or any object is increased by one-seventh. At nine-tenths the velocity the

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mass is nearly two and a half times greater, while at ninety- nine-hundredths of the velocity the mass has seven times its value at relative rest. At higher speeds the mass increases with such leaps that at light's velocity it must become, mathematically, infinite. From this we can say that no object can travel as fast as light: light becomes a limiting velocity. We can also say that like the mass-increase the decrease in the size of a rod and in the rhythm of a clock would be, mathematically, infinite. The interval, therefore, in terms of an object carrying a rod and a clock and travelling with light from the event which is light's leaving a source to the event which is light's reaching a measuring instrument is nil, if the interval is to be invariant from all standpoints. To sum up: the interval is in certain cases reckonable as timelike, in others as spacelike and in yet others as no time and no space! Obviously, it must be a neutral unit and we get clean beyond space-terms and time-terms to terms of space-time or time- space in which the interval cannot be legitimately deemed either space or time. If it can be either in different cases and neither in particular cases, it is something sui generis: we can also regard it as a fusion of space and time, in which both are indistinguishable and become a tertium quid, a "third some- thing".

The indistinguishableness of space and time is most commonly underlined by also pointing out that from different co-ordinate systems in relative motion at different rates the interval between any two events will be differently split up into time and space. Suppose we take the famous eruption of Krakatoa and the outburst on the star Nova Persei. The interval between these two events may be measured from a coordinate system on the earth as so many years and so many millions of miles. But a system on the Nova will measure it as a different number of years and miles. A third system, neither on the earth nor on the Nova, will have still different readings. And what figures as miles in one measurement will figure as years in another!

We must not conclude, however, from the indistinguishableness and from the fusion,

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that Minkowski meant to deny the difference between space and time in common human experience by any given individual. In this experience they are indeed inseparable - at least as far as measurements are concerned, no place having been measured except at an instant and no instant having been measured except at a place. But they are felt to be different in spite of their inseparableness. Space has three dimensions, while time has only one, since we can move only from past to present to future as in a straight line. There is also a difference psychologically in the very texture, so to speak, of extension which is space and duration which is time. Even in physics the experimental modes are dissimilar: a clock is indeed a measurement in space-terms, yet it is not at all a mode like the measurement in space-terms which we call a rod. Moreover, when a physicist measures his own movement in space-coordinates and a time-coordinate, the two are never interchanged. Relativity leaves all these unlikenesses what they are in common human experience by any given individual of his own history and what they were in the old physics. What is new is, in the first place, the discovery of the way in which with relative motion both time-terms and space-terms vary in measurement. A variation of a kind had been acknowledged in space-terms in even the old physics. Thus, if a stone falling from a tower to the ground were measured from different standpoints moving at different rates, the space-coordinates would be different. But the difference did not take into account the rod-shortening and it was fitted into the context of absolute space. Also, it did not go hand in hand with any difference in time-measurements. Time was thought to be unvarying and every moving stand- point was thought to give the same measurements of time. Now that both time-terms and space-terms are declared to be radically variant with standpoints, a novelty is introduced, which, when we search for the goal of all physics - the invariant, the uniform, the absolute from all standpoints, the universal reading - necessitates the concept of fused space

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and time. Therefore what is new is, in the second place, the concept of a four-dimensional continuum in which the dimensions are indistinguishable.

What is the precise import of the concept? And is it merely a mathematical convenience or does it represent a state of reality of which we have no cognisance in common human experience and the old physics had no idea? Is it an utterly revolutionary concept with serious supra-physical consequences?

3

Einstein, in several places, has made pronouncements tending to dissipate the air of mystery which comes with the idea of four-dimensionality. Thus, in collaboration with Infeld, he writes on page 219 of The Evolution of Physics: "Four numbers must be used to describe events in nature. Our physical space as conceived through objects and their motion has three dimensions, and positions are characterised by three numbers. The instant of an event is the fourth number. Four definite numbers correspond to every event; a definite event corresponds to any four numbers. Therefore: the world of events forms a four-dimensional continuum. There is nothing mysterious about this, and the last sentence is equally true for classical physics and the relativity theory." On pages 54 and 55 of his book. Relativity, the Special and the General Theory, Einstein informs us: "The non-mathematician is seized by a mysterious shuddering when he hears of 'four- dimensional' things, by a feeling not unlike that awakened by thoughts of the occult. And yet there is no more common- place statement than that the world in which we live is a four-dimensional continuum.... That we have not been accustomed to regard the world as a four-dimensional continuum is due to the fact that in physics before the advent of the theory of relativity, time played a different and more independent role, as compared with the space-coordinates." Again, on page 30 of The Meaning of Relativity, Einstein

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declares: "The conception of something happening was always that of a four-dimensional continuum; but the recognition of this was obscured by the absolute character of the pre-relativity time."

Is not Einstein forgetting that the new role played by time in his theory has converted the old inseparableness of time and space into indistinguishableness? Is he not ignoring the essence of the situation by labelling the old inseparableness as four-dimensionality? To count a continuum's dimensions just by the descriptive numbers required for an event is a loose manner of specification. Space is a three-dimensionality strictly and precisely because its dimensions are indistinguishable in basic character and composed analogously to one another and form one methodical block. If pre- relativity time which is the time of common calculation can only accompany but never fall in step, so to speak, with this methodical block and increase a dimension systematically instead of by a mere tackling-on, can it legitimately be held to constitute, together with space, a four-dimensional continuum? And would the mere loss by it of its absolute pre- relativity character bring any completely satisfying difference? Let us make a brief inquiry into the meaning of the terms involved in this discussion and ascertain how dimensions must be conceived if they are to build up a continuum.

A continuum, of any number of dimensions, is something that is continuous, admitting of no gap anywhere. Mathematically, this is expressed by saying that between any two specified components of it there can be an infinite number of arbitrarily small steps. If the number were finite and the steps not arbitrarily small, there would be no continuity: each step would be distinct and disparate and, instead of a continuity, we should have a mere aggregate. A line is a one- dimensional continuum and it is made up of an infinite number of successive points. A surface is a two-dimensional continuum and it is made up of an infinite number of successive lines. A volume is a three-dimensional continuum and it is made up of an infinite number of successive

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surfaces. Thus each continuum is formed by a continuous succession of components of the next lower number of dimensions. And a four-dimensional entity would consist of an infinite number of successive volumes. Suppose we take a brick which is a three-dimensional object, and ask how we are to conceive it as constituting by continuous succession an entity of four dimensions. Just a row of bricks will not do: it will not give us a four-dimensional entity. Moreover, a row is not a continuity such as we want: between any two bricks we cannot put an infinite number of bricks. Also, no fourth dimension of space is available: the only dimension other than the available three of space is time, the continuum of moments or instants. But if we take time to be the fourth dimension to make a four-dimensional entity, the continuous succession of a three-dimensional entity in it must be properly understood. Time must be a genuinely new dimension which was not there for any of the entities of the other dimensions. As a line is strictly one-dimensional, a surface strictly two-dimensional, a volume strictly three-dimensional and none of them has any other dimension than those already specified, an entity having time as its fourth dimension must be something that extends in time in a sense in which none of these entities do. But time, as ordinarily understood, is already there for a line, a surface and a volume: all of them need it in order to be themselves. Simply to continue in time as normally things do is not to have the genuinely new fourth dimension we require. To revert to our brick: a brick existing in time will not thereby become a four- dimensional entity any more than an infinite number of bricks in a row in three-dimensions will do so. It will have to exist in the time-dimension in an entirely new way. What the new way must be can at once be grasped by analogy. A line has a co-existence of continuously consecutive points, a surface a co-existence of continuously consecutive lines, a volume a co-existence of continuously consecutive surfaces: similarly, our four-dimensional entity must have volumes coexisting along the time-dimension in a continuous

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consecutiveness. In other words, all the moments of time in which a brick continues must be co-existent! This is the sole valid sense we can attribute to time as a continuum adding a fourth dimension not already present for entities made up by the other three.

It is in this sense that time operates in Minkowski's continuum. Evidently, here is much more than is meant by the necessity felt even by the old physics to regard space and time as inseparable though not indistinguishable and to use four numbers in describing an event. Nor have we here what Einstein appears on occasion to suggest in The Evolution of Physics: merely a four-dimensional form of the representation known to us in a geometrical graph. The stone falling from a tower, which we have mentioned before, can be geometrically plotted, after it has fallen, as if the time-dimension were also stretched out like a space-dimension and all the moments during the fall were co-existent. There would be a time-axis perpendicular to a one-dimensional space-axis showing the one direction "down", and lines joining different moments on the time-axis to different positions on the space-axis would be time-coordinates and space-coordinates and a line drawn through the joinings of the coordinates would indicate the path of the stone's fall downward through space and time. Indeed, what is done here with two dimensions is implied with four-dimensions in Einstein's concept. But there are two dissimilarities beyond the fact that a four-dimensional representation is not picturable and can be expressed in nothing save mathematical terms, a mathematical and not a graphical geometry. One is that the time- dimension is not concerned with only what has already occurred: it is also concerned with what is occurring and is going to occur, all the moments are co-existent in it. The other is that because of the co-existence of all the moments we cannot equate the graph with things as we ordinarily observe them. The line showing the stone's fall answers to what was observed: the "world-line", as Minkowski called the path of events in his continuum, crosses the present and

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the future no less than the past and we can answer with it to observed things only by choosing not to conceive it in its total significance. The four-dimensional concept is more than a plotting out °f Nature, it plots out that which seems to transcend or underlie Nature, and of which Nature seems a projection within a certain framework. This means that even the loss by time of its absolute pre-relativity character would not give us the co-existence of continuously consecutive volumes we want. The loss would indeed point to something more than inseparableness of time and space: it would be an index to indistinguishableness and make the time and space we know a truer limited projection of what is beyond Nature, but it could never cover the full character of the Wonder that is the authentic being of the world we live in. So, all matters considered, Einstein misses the mark when he deprecates the mysterious shuddering and the thoughts of the occult which he finds in the non-mathematician on hearing what he calls the commonplace statement that the world in which we live is a four-dimensional space-time continuum. There is really nothing commonplace in the statement if the reference is to Minkowski's concept which Einstein accepts as integral to his own theory; and the mathematician, deluded by the ease with which he can abstractly tackle any number of dimensions through his symbols, is likely to overlook the definitely supraphysical suggestion here. To be precise, Einstein's continuum carries the suggestion of what philosophers have conceived as Totum Simul, the All-at-once, a state of existence in which the whole past and present and future are a grand simultaneity and all that is in space is not only existent together but each thing is existent in its reality at all moments past, present and future!

This state of existence is deterministic in one sense, for all is already there and cannot be changed, but the determinism is not of the ordinary kind, since in ordinary determinism the present is dictated by the past and the future by the present whereas here there is no sign of any direction and we can with the same justification say that the future dictates the

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present and the present the past or that the present dictates both the past and the future! In the last alternative we have room for an utter freewill; in the first alternative we have room for an utter fixity of fate; in the middle alternative we have room for - God knows what! Living as we ordinarily do in the present, with the past vanished and the future unrealised, we are permitted by Einstein's concept as much to believe in freewill as to be determinists.

The concept of freewill is a most difficult one to state, for in common statements it looks like asking for something which is unconnected with the past to the degree to which the freedom is granted. Especially scientific thought feels foreign to such a lack of connection, since in it the convention has been to regard the past as leading to the future: most of experimental physics is concerned with expecting results which, however unforeseeable at times, are supposed to follow from antecedents and all theoretical physics is concerned with forming mathematical equations of rigorous interconnectivity. No doubt, indeterminism is ascribed by many to quantum phenomena, but Einstein is not one of these many: he is an out-and-out determinist, hoping for a "unified field theory" which would account for all quantum phenomena without the assumption of indeterminism. And he is unable to conceive of freewill. "Honestly I cannot understand," he remarks, "what people mean when they talk of the freedom of the will. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it, but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills." Evidently, Einstein implies that if we allowed the statement "I will that I will to light my pipe", we should have to explain the new willing and say "I will that I will that I will": we should have to go on like this without end and that seems meaningless as well as contradictory of our experience. The reasonable thing, in Einstein's opinion, is to postulate, behind every act of willing, a number of events we are not

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aware of whenever we have the feeling that we are free to will something. In other words, our willing is determined by other events that are themselves determined and we can never significantly be thought free. Einstein's idea is that all happenings hang together without any break and with complete continuity, the whole universe thus hangs together at every instant and its hanging together every instant hangs together with all that precedes and follows every instant. The idea is in consonance with the four-dimensional continuum and the geometrical mode of representing events in all space and all time. But, as we have seen, determinism which makes the future an effect of the present and the present an effect of the past is only one of several conclusions from it, and, philosophically speaking, Einstein's continuum does not negate freewill. All it negates is discontinuity such as quantum physics seems to demand, and Einstein is a determinist essentially in the sense that he is all for continuity: the view that negates freewill and makes the past determinative of everything else is merely a conventional interpretation of the kind of continuity involved in a continuum of four dimensions - a kind which, if established over even quantum phenomena, would not philosophically discomfit freewillists.

Perhaps our knowing only the present and having the past and the future clipped off is a clue to the alternative we should regard as the best of the three offered by the continuum. Instead of saying the future dictates everything or the past dictates everything we may say the present dictates both the past and the future and holds them actually co-existent in itself. Then the Totum Simul would be also a Nunc Stans, an ever-standing Now. But it is impossible to equate the ever- standing Now with any space-terms or time-terms or both terms merely combined. A neutral factor is to be posited and this can only be called what traditional language has called Eternity which is also Infinity. Not, of course, an Infinity- Eternity negating space and time: it holds in itself their essence, as it were, and that is why it allows itself to be

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materialist? He may protest that there is no security for the non-materialist either. But that is surely to confess that fundamental issues go into the melting-pot as soon as we warm up to relativity theory. And when a large look is taken at the riddle of the universe, even the most rabid materialist must grant that the Totum Simul is more in tune with the concept of God than with the concept of a universe having no consciousness at its back and bearing a soulless insignificant humanity on its blind breast. Mystical experience gives the closest description possible of a God, who, besides being many other wonders, is a Totum Simul. And if the Totum Simul is a reality and no convenient device for calculation, mystical experience seems more to be trusted than anything else. The poor materialist is in for a severe headache once he concedes the reality of Einstein's continuum.

Has he any ground for not conceding it? We have now to find an answer. Let us ask what would be meant by calling this continuum a mere convenient device. We have seen that no charge of artificiality can be levelled against the concept of it as put forth by Minkowski. Perhaps it will be urged: "Time in physics is measured by a clock or some clocklike mechanism which gives space-quantities and no genuine time at all. If such artificialised time is shown to be fused with space, we have only a convenient device." But, Mr. Convenient Device, are you not forgetting that time, even in the old physics, was measured in space-quantities by a clock? Nobody ever maintained that in the old physics space and time helped materialism just because time was measured in space-quantities. To think spatially of time through a clock was more than irrelevant to the issue of materialism, for everybody was saying that though time was measured spatially by a clock it could never be fused with space and any suggestion of a fusion would have occasioned a doubt about materialism. So, if the fusion has to take place, the clock-measurement of time cannot logically be pressed against the fusion having a significance which is non- materialistic.

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Is there any other argument left? Well, the very idea of looking for an argument becomes ridiculous if we but analyse the phrase "convenient device". There are many convenient devices in physics. Have they any resemblance to the fusion of space and time? If the fusion is a convenient device, it is one on which hangs the whole status of physics as a science. If physics cannot reach the invariant, uniform, absolute, universal description of phenomena, it cannot satisfactorily move forward. There is an unavoidable and basic necessity here. To compare the fusion of space and time to any mathematical quantities created for convenience is to fail to mark this necessity; none resembles it in being unavoidable for the very basis of physics. They are also dissimilar in never involving the literal fusion of any two terms combined. Take the concept of "light-year". Two entirely different ideas are joined to render easy the indication of astronomical distances. Instead of running into inordinately long series of integers to indicate how distant a star or nebula is, we adopt the device of employing as a unit the number of miles traversed in a year by light travelling at the rate of 186,000 miles per second. The light-year is no necessity: it is an arbitrary combination, we can do without it altogether and nothing in physics will suffer: it may be called also a figurative fusion and not a literal one, since in no sense are light and a year to be taken as indistinguishable. The light-year is not in the least comparable to space-time: it falls into another category.

Now look at a quantity like momentum or horse-power. We multiply mass and velocity to give momentum, divide energy by time to give horse-power. Is space-time like these quantities? Hardly. They may not be dispensable conveniences like the light-year; they may be necessary to physics but even they are necessary only for getting variants. Like mass and velocity themselves, momentum is always a variant; like energy and time themselves, horse-power is always a variant. They change as the standpoint changes. Space-time is an invariant. The two necessities are not on the same footing.

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Besides, when we construct momentum or horse-power, there is no implication that mass and velocity are indistinguishable, or energy and time are indistinguishable. The implication would come only if one is added to or subtracted from the other. It is only addition or subtraction that, according to mathematics, shows the essential sameness of terms.

Perhaps the sole concept that gets nearest to the fusion of space and time is the interchange ability of mass and energy a conclusion drawn by Einstein himself from his own theory of relativity. We shall not explain this concept at the moment, but it has two characteristics relevant to the discussion in hand. First, the interchange ability implies a genuine one- ness, so much so that we can actually convert mass into energy and energy into mass. There is no question of a device here. Second, the genuine oneness is still on the level of the variant. Space-time is on the level of the invariant. It is, thereby, a deeper necessity for physics and, in any case, it is not shown to be a device. So to call it a mere device adopted for convenience is to institute everywhere in congruent comparisons. It cannot be likened to any other combination or fusion effected by physics of two different kinds of terms. In short, no meaning attaches to the labelling of it as a convenient device!

It is possible that a difficulty may be sought to be conjured up by thrusting under our noses some oddities connected with space-time. Thus, there are what are called "lumber" equations. Relativity mathematics grinds out equations that seem to have no equivalents in perception, nothing we can verify by experimental observation. If we regard space-time as a reality, how are we to act Sherlock Holmes to their missing perceptual equivalents? Perfectly easy, my dear Watson! We have only to fall into the arms of Eddington and agree with him to regard the "lumber" equations as the mathematical symbols of unperceived properties of some- thing objective. To Eddington, even perceived properties of the world are subjective in the Kantian sense that they are

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imposed on an unknown objective reality by the constitution of one's mind. But the lightness or wrongness of this point is not of importance here: what is of importance is that all the mathematical symbols ground out by relativity correspond, in the ordinary sense, to objective properties: some of these properties are perceived, some unperceived. The unperceived are shadowed in the "lumber" equations.

It may be argued by the Convenient Device: "Aren't you bringing in our old friend, the 'unobservable', under the disguise of 'lumber' equations and giving him a lodging in physics?" The first answer would be the cocky one: "What if we are? How does that affect the controversy we are engaged in - namely, whether space-time is a convenient device or a reality? Even as a convenient device, space-time has to avoid being like the other device: absolute space and absolute time. That is to say, in its own manner it would have to avoid being what would otherwise be called an 'unobservable'. And the 'lumber' equations, as accompaniments of a convenient device, would still raise the query: Aren't they like absolute space and absolute time, that other and rejected device? If they are suspect in our scheme, they would in your scheme be equally suspect. So no advantage accrues to you on suggesting that they are our old friend or, rather, our old enemy the 'unobservable'. Surely, you do not wish relativity theory to be jettisoned because of the 'lumber' equations?"

The truth is that the only person who has a right to challenge with a hopeful gleam in his eyes our acceptance of the "lumber" equations is the anti-relativist. And to his jibe that they introduce by the back-door such entities as Einstein threw out by the front one, our answer is: "Einstein threw out what insisted on being regarded as the basis of the observable when it was really playing no such indispensable part. The 'lumber' equations do not pretend to be basic in the least. They are not at all in the same case as the 'unobservable' rejected by Einstein: they do not introduce by any back-door entities like the latter. If they were not there,

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nobody would urge that what was there became foundation- less, lost all rationale. In fact, most of us would be happy to find them nowhere on our horizon. Discussion of the legitimacy of our theory would be involved as little by their absence as by their presence and at least the bother of pointing out their differences from the 'unobservable' would be spared us."

The "lumber" equations constitute really no difficulty on any ground. And once we interpret them as corresponding to unperceived objective properties we get a new "slant" on the fact that no experimental observation has found anything to contradict them. They may not be confirmed, but why are they not contradicted? Some equations of Einstein's are marvellously confirmed, some are not, but none are contradicted. Is this not curious? One single contradiction would disprove his theory. Einstein, being no epistemological physicist like Eddington, does not dare to say that no contradiction will ever appear. But it is a tremendous tribute to his theory that the last forty years and more have not disclosed anything to throw doubt on its essential correctness within the domain of macro physics. With all objections out of the way, this tribute gains the colour of an argument that "caps, crowns and clinches all."

To sum up: nothing disproves the actuality of the four- dimensional continuum whose concept seems so much a mathematical formulation of the mystic's vision.

4

When we go from the special or restricted theory of relativity propounded in 1905 to the general theory developed in 1915 after years of intense concentration on several possibilities, the implication of a supra-physical reality becomes acuter.

The special theory proved Newton's invariants to be no invariants for physics, but it did not cover all the problems Newton had dealt with. The chief problem it kept aside was

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"acceleration". Newton had divided motion into two parts:

one was uniform, the other was accelerated. Accelerated motion meant change in the rate of speed or in the direction of speed. There was one factor which was" thought by Newton to induce on the widest and most general scale acceleration both in rate and direction. This factor he called gravitation and enunciated a law for it. The law extended to a vast range of phenomena, but at certain points it broke down. Its failure as well as the invalidity shown by Einstein of Newtonian invariants in physics made it impossible of acceptance. An alternative was badly required and to search for it became the master-passion of Einstein, particularly as, in the first place, gravitation involved both types of accelerated motion which still remained outside the relativistic scheme and, in the second place, gravitation involved peculiarities marking it out from any other force - namely, that heating or cooling a body, difference of chemical constitution and the interposing of a screen have no effect in the least on gravitational attraction, and the attraction is across a distance without any medium seeming to convey it.

Broadly speaking, the problem was to explain how the planets of the solar system remain moving in their elliptical paths round the sun and how at certain arcs of their paths they move faster. Newton said that all objects have an attractive force and an enormous object like the sun must draw towards itself smaller ones like the planets. The sun, according to Newton, would bring all the planets crashing into it, were it not that they were in motion and this motion acted so as to make them fly away from the sun but was not strong enough to free them from the sun's gravitation and, as the result of balance of forces, could only set them moving round it in elliptical paths. On analysis, we see that Newton's picture is systematic only if we grant one thing: an object in motion tends to follow a straight path in space unless disturbed by another object, either through impact or through gravitation. If we do not grant this, there is no compulsion to believe that the planets are held in elliptical

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paths by the sun's gravitation, thus being prevented from moving straight away into outer space. Gravitation as a force directly acting on objects is not a necessary concept without the concept of the straight path as the most natural for motion. The change in speed, on the other hand, can be ascribed to gravitation only if we grant that an object tends to move not only straight but also at a uniform rate. Einstein, therefore, - when faced with the question: How are the facts ascribed to gravitation to be accounted for, so as to need none of Newton's absolutes nor his law, which had been found faulty, of a force of gravitation? - decided to throw doubt on the concept that straight uniform motion is the natural one for bodies.

In this he was helped by Minkowski's equation of a continuum of four symmetrical and isotropic dimensions. For, Minkowski had formulated a geometry of the continuum symbolised by his equation. Geometry, we may remark, is essentially an abstract Science and the mathematician does not bother what meaning in terms of common human experience is to be attached to the dimensions he symbolises. On the analogy of a geometry of three dimensions such as worked out by Euclid the mathematical geometrician can build up many self-consistent systems. Whether a system applies to the conditions of common human experience is an issue to be tested by instrumental observation. In the nineteenth century, mathematical geometricians like Gauss, Lobatschewsky, Bolayi and Riemann built up strange systems different from Euclid's. They admitted that if Euclid's initial axioms and postulates were right all his propositions logically followed. But they refused to admit that his axioms and postulates were self-evident as truths. Neither would they admit that Euclid had been completely borne out by instrumental observation. Riemann emphasised in particular the fact that a triangle drawn on a curved surface does not have the sum of its angles equal to two right angles, nor the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter equal to n, the well-known Ludolph number 3.14159265... .

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And just as Euclid had extended to three-dimensional space the geometry of a flat surface, Riemann dared to extend the geometry of a curved surface to three dimensional space. He posed the query: "Why should geometrical figures in space not exhibit properties as do geometrical figures on the curved surface of a sphere?"

His query remained academic because nothing was found to contradict Euclid directly. There was the indirect contra- diction in the faultiness of Newton's law of gravitation in small isolated cases; for, the law assumed space to be Euclidean, with the straight line as the shortest and therefore most natural path for an object in motion to pursue. But everything else was overwhelmingly on Euclid's side. When the special theory of relativity dethroned Newton's absolutes and, with them, his law of gravitation, it became possible to think of space non-Euclideanly. But not till Minkowski's genius came to the aid of Einstein's was the possibility taken advantage of. Minkowski rendered it easy to tackle the mathematics of Einstein's continuum and thus tackle also the riddle whether the world of common human experience, the world of space and time which this continuum was meant to correlate by means of invariants, was Euclidean or no.

Minkowski's own answer, in effect, was: "When you have the geometry of a continuum which is as much time as space, Euclidean geometry which is exclusively of space cannot be wholly valid. Take a triangle ABC. In terms of space, if you measure with a scale from A to B and B to C, the sum of your readings will be greater than the reading obtained from A to C. Two sides of a triangle are greater than the third. But if you take three events A, B and C and measure with a clock the time which would be taken in moving from A to B and B to C, there crops up a condition which is unique. To measure with a scale from A to B, the scale must lie so as to touch A with one end and B with the other: the scale has to be present at both A and B. Similarly, the clock has to be present at A as well as B. This means that when the events A and B happen, the clock must run with

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such speed as to be present at both the events. Now, speed affects the rhythm of a clock: the faster a clock moves across space the slower its rhythm. So, if the distances from A to B and B to C are very great, while that from A to C is small, the clock in running along the two greater distances will go much slower than in running along the one shorter distance. The sum of the readings of the two sides of a triangle formed by three events will be less in this instance than the reading of the third side. Euclid's geometrical rules will not universally .hold. The geometry of space-time is not quite Euclidean: it is semi-Euclidean./'

The suggestion that a geometry other than Euclid's could be actually applicable to the invariant reality whose variants are observed by means of scientific apparatus fell like a most fruitful seed into Einstein's mind. Could gravitation be accounted for in terms of the geometrical structure of space- time? In answering that it might be thus accountable Einstein was aided considerably by his realising more and more that gravitational effects could not be distinguished from other phenomena of acceleration. For instance, when a lift starts to rise, the occupants feel all the effects of a sudden though temporary increase of weight. Indeed a mass hung from a spring-balance would weigh heavier till the upward speed of the lift becomes uniform. Further, it is not logical to say that when an object is falling freely through space it gives rise to the phenomenon of weight which we attribute to gravitation:

only when it is prevented from falling by a weighing machine placed under it the phenomenon of weight is shown. Weight therefore may be regarded as due to upward acceleration impressed on the object by the bombardment of the molecules of the piece of the weighing machine upon which it drops. Again, a motorcyclist riding in a circle and trying to keep at a uniform speed will feel that the constant bending of his movement, the constant change of direction he has to maintain, acts as if he were drawn towards the centre of the circle. This draw would make him fall inside the circle unless, to avoid the slant induced, he inclined his machine to the vertical.

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Finally, the mass of a body as measured by the amount of resistance to another body colliding with it or dragging it and thus being liable to produce non-gravitational acceleration is exactly equal to the mass as measured by the amount of attraction between them according to Newton's law. In all these instances are such effects as are attributed to gravitation.

Instead of stipulating a gravitational force acting directly from body upon body across a distance, why not formulate laws embracing all phenomena of motion both uniform and accelerated? The only conceivable laws which would not exclude gravitational phenomena would be of some change worked upon whatever is between bodies, some change guiding the less massive body into the accelerated motion which imitates or is equivalent to the assumed effects of a direct gravitational force. In other words, what is between the two bodies should be so affected around the massive one as to induce the acceleration of the less massive. Gravitational force as such will not be denied, but it will not be a force of the Newtonian, kind: a body will involve a certain structuring of what is between bodies and this structuring will make the less massive behave towards the more massive as if pulled in its direction at a constantly increasing rate.

Now, what is between bodies is, in ordinary computation, either empty space or some medium filling space. There is no air in the outer expanses of space where gravitation still acts. The luminiferous ether, even if it exists, has never been found competent to explain gravitation. But electromagnetism itself, of which light is a phenomenon, is proved impossible to interpret in terms of an ether composed of particles - that is, a subtle material ether which can serve also as a static frame of reference for absolute motion. Einstein opened Lorentz's eyes to the mathematical superfluity of postulating a static frame. So a subtle material ether cannot be thought even to exist. Empty space is all that remains - unless we introduce a new concept.

But before we introduce a new concept we must recollect

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that there can be no concept without a background of space- time. Acceleration, like all quantities, is relative: from different coordinate systems different readings would be obtained. The laws of motion both uniform and accelerated which would cover gravitational phenomena as well as others and which would operate through a structure of what is between bodies must arise from a four-dimensional continuum of fused space and time. The symmetrical and isotropic equation of Minkowski, involving a semi-Euclidean geometry, turned Einstein's attention to the many systems of non-Euclidean geometry of symmetrical and isotropic dimensions built in the near past. Riemann's extension of the geometry of curved surfaces to three dimensions struck him as the most promising. He extended the geometry to four dimensions and took the simplest formula for what would be an unobstructed body's natural path in them. The natural path of an unobstructed body on a flat surface is the straight line between two points: it is the shortest path. On a curved surface it is the shortest curve. The shortest distance or interval is called the geodesic. Einstein found the formula for the geodesic in a four-dimensional continuum and, translating it into terms of separate space and time, compared the result with gravitational observations. Eureka! The problem was solved. As Whetham puts it on page 255 of The Recent Development of Physical Science, Einstein's geodesic of space- time is found to bend in space towards a mass of matter and, in time, to move faster the nearer it passes to the mass - precisely like the path of a planet swinging round the sun.

Einstein then connected the amount of mass with the character of the geodesic. Geodesies are different according as the amounts of mass present. If the masses are not disproportionate the geodesic describes in space the natural motion of a body as Newton conceived it. If they are disproportionate, the natural motion in space would not be a straight line but a curve. The curve is not due to a pull of gravitation directly from body upon body: it is due simply to the structure of space when disproportionate masses are

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present in space-time: space is as if non-Euclidean or Riemannian in the neighbourhood of bodies - not flat but curved.

With the help of his Riemannian geometry Einstein found he could explain all the facts of gravitation Newton had explained as well as one important fact which the Newtonian theory had not explained - the erratic behaviour of the planet Mercury in certain sections of its elliptical path. On top of this, he offered beforehand the calculations which would be obtained if two crucial experiments were carried out. One concerned the passing of the rays of stars through the sun's neighbourhood and the other the rate of vibration of atoms in the sun. The study of the star-rays was made by several astronomical expeditions during two eclipses of the sun when alone the rays could be distinctly measured. Einstein had predicted the curved continuum would deflect the rays to such and such an amount: his prediction was as good as confirmed as against that which the Newtonian theory allowed. The measuring of the vibration-rate of the sun's atoms proved very difficult but the results were regarded as a satisfactory approximation to what Einstein had foretold. Hence the curved four-dimensional continuum was accepted as scientifically proved.

Not only gravitational phenomena but all other motions become natural deductions from the formula connecting the character of geodesies in space-time with the amount of mass present. An immense simplification is achieved: a vast correlation is made. But we seem to be confronted with a puzzle in the idea of curved space and also of the curved space-time that results in space-curvature. The puzzle, however, is verbal. We mean by curved space nothing more puzzling than what we mean by flat space. How do we conceive space, which is not a surface, to be flat like a surface? What is the sense in calling space Euclidean? All we can mean is simply that, just as on a flat surface, the shortest line is the straight line between two points, the shortest line between two points in space is straight. On the basis of this

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we deduce a whole geometry of how bodies behave in space:

a triangle in space would have the sum of its three angles equal to two right angles. Similarly, by non-Euclidean or Riemannian or curved space we simply mean that the shortest line is a curve. And in the geometry of curved space a triangle would not be found to be as on a flat surface. In no other sense is space-curvature to be understood. That is to say, it must not be understood literally any more than space- flatness. When forms existing in three dimensions are measured, they exhibit certain geometrical characteristics. It is these geometrical characteristics that we meet with our instruments when we meet curvature.

In manifesting these characteristics Einstein's theory of gravitation specifies mathematically the phenomena of gravitation. But this is not the end of the story. The characteristics come about because of something happening between bodies. When we think of something happening between bodies so that they exhibit non-Euclidean characteristics we bring in again the notion of some kind of force. The characteristics describe a "potential" or "stress" or "strain" in what is between bodies. If what is between is empty space, there can be no stress manifesting itself in the Riemannian behaviour of bodies: empty space cannot get structured so as to guide bodies into Riemannian behaviour. On Einstein's theory of gravitation space becomes "substantial" without being composed of particles or having any qualities which would lead us to deem it subtle matter like the old ether or would make it serve as a frame of reference for motion. Inasmuch as it is "substantial" and not void, it is legitimate to bring in the term "ether" again: only, this ether does not fill space but is itself identical with space!

In the sense that it is not empty Einstein calls this ether- space physical. Physicality, however, is here Pickwickian: it is devoid of all that can properly be called physical unless we can speak of physical emptiness. Emptiness is itself a disconcerting concept, but becomes physicalised when we fill it with an all-pervading ether which is subtle matter. Take

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away such an ether, and what is left? Surely not something which we can clearly identify as "vital" or "mental" or "spiritual", yet something so non-material, non-physical and still substantial as to look like the most natural emanation, as it were, of a conscious omnipresent Being in terms of a stretching out of itself for the holding together of objects that are physical and material.

So much for Einstein's space. What about his time? If ultimately time and space are fused, it is impossible to regard time as an emptiness either. No empty space, no empty time. A time-ether, non-physical, non-material and still substantial, has to be conceived - the most natural emanation, as it were, of a conscious omnipresent Being in terms of a stretching out of itself for the deployment of a movement carrying physical and material objects.

When we take the space-ether and the time-ether in fusion, we have as a result of the curvature-concept a space- time explicitly substantialised. All the more it becomes no fiction, no convenient device but a reality existing in its own right. And there is now yet another helpful feature which emerges on our asking: Are the material masses, which lie at the centre of the curvature-pattern and whose amounts bear a fixed ratio to the pattern, the cause of this pattern or themselves a peculiar manifestation of it? On the mere strength of the general theory of relativity we cannot give an entirely decisive answer, but important indications are against their being the cause. The fundamental quantity termed interval of space-time yields a number of mathematical expressions which call for comparison with mathematical expressions concerning what physics names matter. Matter, for instance, is conserved. It is curious that precisely an expression for conservation is derived also from the quantity named interval. But what is here derived refers to some property of space-time - a specific kind of curvature. We may, therefore, submit that where there is this curvature there is, in another language of mathematical equations, conserved matter. Several other observations we associate

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with matter are similarly matched. The physical quantities we know as density, velocity, internal stresses etc. obey certain mathematical relations. Now, some equations got by analysis from the interval happen to have exactly the same number of components as matter, and these components are put together in exactly the same way. The query, as stated by Sullivan, inevitably occurs: "May we not affirm that these components which express features of the space-time continuum are identical with density, stress and the like?" That is to say, what we usually name matter may be what space-time holds as curvature of a certain sort. The curved four- dimensional continuum appears to be the original reality and matter its manifestation.

What relation matter has with space and time as we normally know them we need not here consider. It is sufficient for our purpose to have shown how the general theory or relativity drives home more vividly than the special theory a reality which, to say the least, renders materialism utterly inadequate and, to say the most, suggests a spiritual substance of Totum Simul variously manifesting itself.

A question, however, which we must tackle is raised by the concept of curvature vis-a-vis our description of the four- dimensional continuum as Eternity-Infinity. An ever-new endlessness of time is not doubted by science, but there is the phrase current in Einsteinian physics: "boundless yet finite space". Some years ago, the astronomer Edwin Hubble calculated that on the average the distribution of masses in the universe known to the telescope is .0000000000000000000- 00000000001 gramme per cubic centimetre. According to Einstein's equations of the relation between masses and curvature, Bubble's figure involves a small uniform curvature of all space over and above the non-uniform curvatures involved by the different masses. Thus space becomes a hypersphere, finite yet unbounded in three dimensions in a way analogous to that in which the two-dimensional surface of a sphere is limited in area yet allows endless repetitive movement over it. Hence curved space-time, it may be

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argued, cannot be an infinity, and infinity is negated by science and a barrier set up against mysticism which talks of an infinite Being.

Two answers may easily spring to the mind. We may argue that all concepts of curvature call for room in which the curving can take place: beyond the hypersphere there must be space to accommodate it, just as the curving of the two- dimensional surface is accommodated by a third dimension. Or we may argue: "Let us be clear about the terms we use. Curved space means that there is no straight line except as a short-distance illusion and consequently the universe is 're- entrant' in space. If one could ferry oneself across space and survive for an enormous number of years and always continue along what one would believe to be a straight line, one would at length arrive somewhere near one's starting-point. Nothing can escape the 're-entrance'. But surely here is just the fact that there are geometrical limits to our exploration of space. Boundless yet finite space implies this fact: it does not imply the negation of space-infinity by science."

Unfortunately, neither argument is cogent. The first is built on a double error. To begin with: a two-dimensional surface has room to curve in because it curves in space which has three dimensions; but a hypersphere has itself three , dimensions and if it curves in anything it would be in a fourth dimension, but a fourth dimension of - what? The hypersphere, being three-dimensional, exhausts all the dimensions of what we call space; so, what it might curve in cannot be space! By the analogy of a two-dimensional surface we do not get the space-infinity that is denied. Furthermore, in geometrical physics the term "curvature" has no reference to room to curve in. Surface-geometry in physics, though having a background of actual flatness or curvature, is essentially concerned only with the behaviour of measuring- rods and the properties deducible from various arrangements of them: it abstracts the rods, as it were, from the surface on which they are laid and omits reference to the surface's actual shape. A reference to it would stop all

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extension of geometry from a surface to space which is evidently not a surface; and the reference is technically avoided by the device of calling a surface itself a space. Thus a curved surface is called a two-dimensional space with a curvature measured in terms of arrangements constituted by rods. The question of curved shape within room to accommodate it is ignored and rendered irrelevant from the beginning: the physical presence of the measuring rods is the sole connecting link between two dimensions and three:

unless this were so, the concepts of surface-geometry could never be adapted to three dimensions or more. If there is known to be room to curve in, we accept it but scientifically no such room is considered in our concepts and when we speak of a hypersphere we confine ourselves to the behaviour of measuring rods and never bring in a hypothetical room in which it can be hyper spherical. We have to hold on to relations which exist within the space we speak of and drop reference to anything external to it.

The answer to the second argument - and this could apply also to the first - is quite short: "Since in very principle we can never observe what may lie beyond our 're-entrant' space and since under no conceivable circumstances can anything beyond it figure in our equations any theory assuming such a beyond is superfluous in science and science can supply no basis to any philosophy erected on such a theory."

We have to look for other arguments if we are to talk of infinity of extension on scientific grounds. Only one argument is possible. It is admitted by all that, according to its very nature, Einstein's finite though boundless hypersphere cannot be stable: it must either contract or expand and the current astronomical interpretation of the red shift in the spectrum of nebulae as a sign of their recession tends to show that the hypersphere is expanding. Eddington computes that the present circumference of the universe is between 6,000 and 60,000 million light-years but that the size of the universe is doubled about every 1,300 million years.

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A curious point is that it is not the masses of matter that are expanding but the space between them: if these masses expanded together with the space there would be no means of measuring any expansion. But an expanding universe, however "re-entrant", involves the concept of more and more space not merely in the sense of boundlessness through which we may move over and over again as on the surface of a sphere: it is analogous to a growing larger of the very surface! And though at each stage of the expansion the amount of space remains finite, it is a greater finite each time and what we have is extra and new space. The extra and new space definitely involves a beyond of space to each amount of finiteness. The hypersphere could not have this extra and new space if none were available beyond the geometrical limits of our exploration at each stage. And once we admit this availability constantly coming into our observation we break through the concept of the finite and though we do not directly have the infinite we have it indirectly in the constantly realised possibility of the hypersphere's expansion. Hence physics with its curvature does not shut the door against the infinity of the four-dimensional continuum but points in its direction, and the boundlessly finite space that is expanding can be taken to correspond to a certain diminishing delimitation within the limitless Spirit - a selective play, as it were, of the original reality so that a particular range of possibilities is actualised with a wider and wider scope. There is nothing here against the infinite Being of whom mysticism talks.

Even if there were anything, we should do well to remember that while non-uniform curvatures connected with different masses are accepted by science as proved, Hubble's estimate has no finality and the small uniform bending of all space is only a rather plausible speculation. Convincing proof is wanting - and it can come only if the light of a distant object in the sky, sent out in all directions, reaches us not only from the front of it but also from behind it by getting curved in the long run and arriving on earth by the

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opposite route! General space-curvature should enable us to see a remote nebula twice — in a front-view and a back-view in parts of the sky exactly opposite to each other. Unless the new 200-inch telescope recently set up at Mount Palomar gives us the two views the hypersphere offered us will not pass from plausibility to certainty and infinite space will not be disproved. Astronomers have little hope of getting these views. Of course, the failure may be due to the radius of overall general curvature being too great; but it may just as well be due to utter lack of such curvature.

5

Two topics remain now to be dealt with in order that we may have a complete picture of the mystical implications of relativity. One is the equivalence of mass (or what is commonly called matter) and energy, about which we have already spoken en passant.

Before Einstein came on the scene of physics, the atom of matter which had been supposed to be the ultimate constituent of things had already been broken up and found to consist of electrons and protons. Today we know of many other particles - neutron, positron, meson. But to approach Einstein's concept of equivalence of mass and energy we need consider only the electron, the particle of negative electricity. The electron in very rapid motion had been observed to increase in mass while ordinary matter in all the motions that had been observed never disclosed any in- crease. Of course, one could have said that ordinary matter had never been observed moving so fast as the electron. But here it was pointed out that Maxwell had established certain equations of electromagnetism, which described the behaviour of electric energy. From these equations we could deduce that if the electron was a concentration of electric energy it would show exactly the increase of mass that it did. Since the atom of matter was electrically neutral, ordinary matter was supposed not to increase in mass with motion.

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Einstein broke down this distinction. There are several ways of indicating how he did it. We may choose a few simple ones. As change of velocity of any kind brings about a change in our measurements of the space-quantity of length and the time-quantity of duration, whatever is associated with velocity must undergo a change as measured by our instruments: mass, therefore, of all bodies and not simply that of an electron can never remain constant. Again, motion being relative, we can reverse the relation of movement and quite legitimately regard our frame of reference as moving and the electron as at rest, instead of doing the opposite as at present. So, not the electron only but our own co-ordinate system from which we observe it can be said to increase in mass: from the electron's point of view it is our co-ordinate system that is whizzing past at 100,000 miles per second and getting its mass increased! Electrical properties have thus no monopoly of conducing to increase of mass. Finally, when we consider the rate at which with increase of motion rods shorten and clocks slow down we observe that the progression of shortening and slowing down is such that at light's speed - represented in physics by the letter c - rods would shorten to absolute nothingness and clocks stop dead. This shows that nothing can exceed the speed of light. With this conclusion before us, we can reason in the following manner:

"When motion increases, momentum increases with it. Momentum is mass multiplied by velocity, but if a body were to move at c, the momentum would not increase by an increase in velocity, since c cannot be exceeded. So what would be affected and change is the mass. The extra momentum would be as if a body with more mass were moving at velocity c. This means that, since there would always be an impossibility for the motion of a body to increase so as to reach c, there would be with every increase of momentum a certain increase of mass resulting from the thwarted development in motion." The increase mathematically calculated by Einstein from several angles happened to be exactly the same as had been experimentally observed in

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the electron before the relativity theory was formulated. It was proved all-round that the electron's increase in mass is not due to any electrical properties and that it was observed merely because its speed is sufficiently large to make the increase perceptible and that all bodies whatever have the

mass-increase though their small speeds prevent it from being perceived.

Nor was the universality of mass-increase with motion the sole revolutionary concept introduced by Einstein in this context. Still more revolutionary was the new concept of energy in general, which implied that we could consider matter itself and all particles constituting matter as a state of energy. How the concept was arrived at can be grasped if we examine the rate at which the mass of a body increases with motion. The rate, as we have already noticed, is such that if motion reached light's speed the mass would become infinite. This, meaning as it does that motion can never reach c, means too that as motion increases we find it more and more difficult to increase it further. According to Newtonian physics, the speed of matter makes no difference to the amount of force wanted to increase the speed: a certain amount of matter needs the same force to increase speed from 10 miles per hour to 11 miles as to increase speed from 100 miles to 101, and this force depends exclusively on the amount of matter. Now, if motion, the faster it becomes, is found to resist increase more and more, it acquires the property usually attributed to matter - resistance to whatever acts upon it - the property which makes a greater amount of matter resist more than a smaller one does. This property is inertia, involving mass and weight. Now, motion is a form of energy: as a body moves, it acquires what is named kinetic energy. Kinetic energy, therefore, behaves like matter. Nor is this all. The increase of mass the material body gets by motion is exactly the increase of mass the kinetic energy exhibits. The two masses are one and the same - we can look upon the extra mass as either the kinetic energy's or the material body's. Hence the kinetic energy and the material

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body must be the same kind of entity. But kinetic energy is only one form of energy: it can be converted into other forms - chemical, electric, radiant. It is the conversion of one sort of energy into another that leads to the law of conservation of energy: the amount of energy remains constant throughout the conversions. So all energy must be deemed the same kind of entity as a material body. And if it is the same kind, all energy and all matter must be inter convertible. In that case, how can the law of conservation of energy be kept apart from the law of conservation of matter which tells us that matter remains constant in amount throughout its conversions? The two laws get merged into one law based on the inter convertibleness of matter and energy. And through calculation of the amount of energy which leads to the increase of mass the law can be made to tell us that a very small amount of matter represents a very great amount of energy - in fact, the amount of energy into which matter can be converted is 34,596,000,000 times the amount of matter.'

Here the question becomes pertinent: If matter and energy are inter convertible, is matter proved to be energy or energy proved to be matter? In physics, energy used to be defined as matter's capacity for doing work. The capacity was considered a property of matter and matter the more fundamental reality. Now it is shown that the capacity itself possesses the essential property of matter: inertia, mass, weight. If energy is a property of matter, it cannot itself possess a materiality of its own and bring extra inertia, mass, weight to matter whose property it is! This argument is irrefutable and final. Energy, therefore, cannot any more be regarded as a property of matter. Can we say that it has itself become a state of matter because it exhibits inertia, mass, weight? How can we? It exhibits something else, too - namely, work-capacity: otherwise it would not be energy. Can we then say that matter has become a state of energy?

' It is Einstein's new law of conservation and his calculation of the energy- amount to which matter is convertible that formed the basis of the research whose result was the atom bomb.

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Well, matter must be thought of as exhibiting inertia, mass, weight differently than energy does. The difference lies evidently in the work-capacity exhibited with inertia, mass, weight by energy. In matter there is no work-capacity shown. But, since matter and energy are inter convertible because of the common property of inertia, mass, weight, the work-capacity must be looked upon as what is hidden in matter and brought out in energy. To be more accurate:

when a certain quantity of inertia, mass, weight is in the phenomenon called matter, it hides the work-capacity which is brought out when the same quantity is in the phenomenon called energy. With the passing of the one phenomenon into the other and the conversion of matter into energy, this quantity does not disappear, as commonly supposed: it remains in existence but is part of a phenomenon not found before. Thus, in the sun's radiation that is the energy into which the sun's matter is converted, there is the precise inertia, mass, weight of the converted matter - the energy radiated every second is computed to weigh 4,200,000 tons - but there is with these tons something else not openly carrying them prior to the conversion. Hence the concept of energy is fuller than that of matter, and we can regard matter as concealed energy. Conversely, we can regard energy as matter revealed in its completeness. But this just means that there is an incompleteness in matter as such and energy is the more comprehensive and fundamental phenomenon whose checked and bound state is matter. It is because of being checked and bound that a very great amount of energy is represented by a very small amount of material substance.

When energy is no longer a property of matter but a more comprehensive and fundamental phenomenon which is work-capacity with inertia, mass, weight of its own, it cannot be considered purely physical, though we cannot explicitly designate it as Life or Mind or Spirit. Or, rather, it becomes something in which the physical is subsumed under a mysterious more-than-physical reality - quite unlike the old energy which was never independent of matter and was

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subsumable under a reality quite physical. An indirect testimony to the metamorphosis is the new definition found necessary in the fourteenth edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica: "That by which work is done and which diminishes in proportion to the work done." This is so vague that it is merely an effort to define the physically indefinable.

The mysterious more-than-physical energy to which, if we analyse Einstein's ideas, the entire universe is reduced joins up philosophically in the most natural manner with the curved space-time, the conscious divine Totum Simul suggested by relativity theory, because this energy renders modern physics open to a non-materialistic interpretation: the world as a Will at work. On the scientific plane itself, a connection between it and the curved continuum has been attempted. As we saw, what we ordinarily call matter seems to be what space-time holds as curvature of a certain sort. And, if matter is concealed energy, energy would be this curvature interpreted in terms of space and time instead of in terms of space-time, the Totum Simul. It appears to be the World-Will of the Infinite and the Eternal.

6

The second topic is the philosophy implicit in the scientific method established by Einstein. This method falls into two parts. To begin with, there is the principle of rejection of the unobservable. Every statement must be made with reference to what can be observed. Of course, this brings in always the observer, but, as we have already shown, there is no subjectivism here. By observation we mean in physics the procedure of reading off the results produced on scientific measuring instruments by nature's phenomena either as they are or as adapted to particular ends in the laboratory. The observer in Einstein's physics plays the same role as in classical physics. To quote Sullivan: "we must not interpret the word 'observable' too narrowly. It would be more correct to substitute for 'observable' 'definable in terms of physical

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processes'. If an entity is to be considered as a scientific entity we must be able to say what physical processes would enable us to detect it. This is the basis of Einstein's objection to Newton's absolute space and absolute time." That is to say, we know of no physical operations, no experimental techniques, no manipulation of scientific apparatus and instruments by which absolute space and time can be measured or even their existence detected.

By "observable", however, is not meant something of which we" must have direct experimental evidence. Consider the interior of the earth. There are no experiments by which we can observe it. But the absence of observation is due to practical difficulties. We disregard practical difficulties and, on indirect evidence, assume that the earth has an interior. Einstein has no quarrel with an unobservable of this kind. Nor are such quantities as the electron's mass rejected. We do not directly observe an electron's mass, but there are observations from which we infer or deduce this quantity. It is the imperfection of scientific apparatus that keeps the electron's mass away from observation. The unobservable that came under Einstein's censure is not due to imperfection of scientific apparatus or to practical difficulties.

It is due to a special factor which may be called compensation. When a quantity investigated is always and automatically and exactly compensated for by an equal and opposite one, it can never be observed. There seems to be a conspiracy on the part of nature's processes to keep certain quantities for ever beyond observation. If, when an effect x is supposed to be produced on phenomena, we find that there is also produced a countervailing effect -x, all processes of nature appear to be in a league against the observer. How are we to interpret such a perfectly organised conspiracy of compensation? Are we to go on saying that the quantity under inquiry still exists although unobserved? If we do, what utility are we to ascribe to it? Since physics will never come across it, it is for physics an utterly useless and gratuitous supposition and as good as non-existent. It will

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never figure in the observations we make by experiments: so, we must build our equation as if it were not there at all. It may be in itself logically conceivable, but it is not logically admissible in physics; it may be in itself philosophically necessary, but the philosophy of physics can have no place for it.

Not that physics should be confined to the observable actual or potential. What it has to do is, in the first place, no1 to allow a quantity that is in utile by compensation to enter the equations built on the observable, and, in the second place, not to allow such a gratuitous quantity to enter fundamental theory. Fundamental theory is the postulate or set of postulates by which we seek an explanation of observed phenomena: it correlates and unifies them. If compensated quantity enters it, the postulates will never admit real verification: there will always remain in th6 alleged verification a hypothetical and superfluous component. After rejecting the unobservable, the method O1 physics a la Einstein is, therefore, concerned with finding the correct type of fundamental theory beyond observation actual or potential.

Here we strike upon an extremely significant characteristic of Einsteinian science. Although Einstein acts th8 "observer" in essentially the same manner as Newton or Galileo or even Archimedes and imports no special subjectivism into physics, yet when it comes to correlating the data of observation and reaching fundamental theory he worK5 with a radical dissimilarity to the manner of physics in the past: his mind so proceeds as to give consciousness a'"1 entirely new value and to convince us that the path t0 ultimate truth in physics lies not in an effort to arrive at a mere generalisation from the observed world but in a creative flight breaking away from observation. Doubtless, observation cannot be dispensed with: we have to start from it for reaching fundamental theory and we have to return to it in order to test the theory, but our theory is no longer at the mercy of what is observed. The mind is made to act with a

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certain degree of independence of all observation of the world, and in this independence is a hint not only that truth in physics is to be found subjectively but also that the reality at the back of phenomena is of the nature of consciousness.

Perhaps the most concise approach to this hint is in some passages of Einstein's The World as I See It. Writes Einstein on page 180: "The theory of relativity admirably exemplifies the fundamental character of the modern development of theoretical science. The hypotheses with which it starts become steadily more abstract and remote from experience. On the other hand it gets nearer to the grand aim of all science, which is to cover the greatest possible number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms. Meanwhile the train of thought leading from the axioms to the empirical facts or verifiable consequences gets steadily longer and more subtle. The theoretical scientist is compelled in an increasing degree to be guided by purely mathematical, formal considerations in his search for a theory, because the physical experience of the experimenter cannot lift him into the regions of highest abstraction. The predominantly inductive methods appropriate in the youth of science are giving place to tentative deduction. Such a theoretical structure needs to be very thoroughly elaborated before it can lead to conclusions which can be compared with experience. Here, too, the observed fact is undoubtedly the supreme arbiter; but it cannot pronounce sentence until the wide chasm separating the axioms from the verifiable consequences has been bridged by much intense hard thinking. The theorist has to set about this Herculean task in the clear consciousness that his efforts may only be destined to deal the death-blow to his own theory. The theorist who undertakes such a labour should not be carped at as 'fanciful'; on the contrary, he should be encouraged to give free rein to his fancy, for there is no other way to the goal. His is no idle day-dreaming, but a search for the logically simplest possibilities and their consequences."

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What have we here? An underlining of "purely mathematical, formal considerations" rather than "the predominantly inductive methods appropriate in the youth of science" and a clear realisation that the final formulas are "abstract and remote from experience" and an open admission that the theorist has "to give free rein to his fancy". Surely this is no denial of the principle which rejects the unobservable: theory is not to assume quantities unobservable through compensation but, provided it does not assume them, it can be any kind of mathematical construct, no matter how unfamiliar and unvisualisable in its terms. What makes direct contact with the world known to experiment is not the theory but only the consequences logically deduced from it: the theory itself remains akin to pure mathematics - that is, to structures raised with no immediate practical aim but as mere expressions of imaginable possibilities, it is what Einstein, on pages 135 and 136 of his book, calls a free fiction or free invention or free creation of the mind. Its only difference from the various other structures that can be freely created is that it is not only self-consistent but also makes the fewest possible assumptions from which consequences are to be logically derived for verification by means of scientific apparatus.

Apropos this difference Einstein makes on page 136 a pronouncement which is the most significant in the methodology of modern physics. "If the axiomatic basis of theoretical physics," he says, "cannot be extracted from experience but must be freely invented, can we ever hope to find the right way? Nay more, has this right way an existence outside our illusions? Can we hope to be guided in the right way by experience when there exist theories (such as classical mechanics) which to a large extent do justice to experience, without getting to the root of the matter7 I answer without hesitation that there is, in my opinion, a right way and that we are capable of finding it. Our experience hitherto justifies us in believing that nature is the realisation of the simplest

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conceivable mathematical ideas.' I am convinced that we can discover by means of purely mathematical constructions the concepts and the laws connecting them with each other, which furnish the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Experience may suggest the appropriate mathematical concepts, but they most certainly cannot be deduced from it. Experience remains, of course, the sole criterion of the physical utility of a mathematical construction. But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients believed. '

Free creations thus fall into two classes - those that correspond to reality and those that do not. What is the precise significance of the former for a philosophy of physics? First we must note the status which, among ideas, Einstein accords to free creations. Can they be put on a par with what Kant calls a priori ideas? The so-called a priori ideas are those that some other philosophers label as logical generalisations from experience: Kant considers them forms of thought inherent in the mind and imposed by it on the stuff of sensation. When Einstein declares the fundamental concepts of physics to be no generalisations from experience, he sets them outside the class of ideas taken to be a priori. The fundamental concepts, according to Einstein, are not dictated by any necessity arising either from experience or from the mind's inherent forms of thought. Of course, they must have contact both with experience and whatever inherent forms of thought there may be in the mind, but they are still free and found by a creative activity of the mathematical conscious- ness, akin to the activity of the artist.

Being artistic in quality they are reached by a sort of inner vision, a sort of intuition. They are divined. In Einstein's view, the mathematician's mind has a capacity of sheer

' "Simplest" does not mean for Einstein the easiest to conceive or memorise:

as already mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, it means the ideas which, however difficult or complex, are the minimum required to correlate the greatest number of observations.

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insight into reality. The capacity, as far as Einstein knows, is not quite like what the ancients believed - a royal and plenary penetrativeness; it does not carry an absolute self- certainty and must get its final seal from experiment after logical deductions from the axioms found by it have been made, but something it still retains of the self-guidance, the direct grasp, the interior apprehension attributed to pure thought by the ancients. Such a capacity implies, however pin-pointedly, that somehow the mind is able to be one with reality and know it from the inside, as it were, by getting identified with it. The oneness, the inside knowledge by identification, argues for reality itself having a secret nature analogous to the mind.

No wonder Einstein believes in a world-intelligence and regards physics as a search for truth which has at its source a unison between one's mind and the world-intelligence, a pre-established harmony without which neither the search for truth nor the divining of truth can have sufficient explanation. Einstein is a Spinozist, affirming with Spinoza that the ultimate reality is a universal Substance with the dual aspect of mind and matter. He also calls himself a pantheist, with - in his own words - "the firm belief, which is bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind revealing itself in the world of experience."

Here we may hark back for a moment to Einstein's contention, noticed at the beginning of our essay, that only science can find truth and that what religion finds cannot be given the same name. "'Religious truth,'" he has said, 'conveys nothing clear to me at all." But once intuition is granted a place in knowledge, we should be arbitrary if we ruled out of court various other kinds of intuition than the one which the mathematician practises in physics. Mystical insight is an intense type of intuition and there is no point in denying off-hand that it can both arrive at fundamentals of the universe and perceive their unfoldment in a wider banner than mathematical intuition plus mathematical logic can. What mystical insight would lay bare may not be

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mathematical structure; but that does not invalidate it as knowledge, as discovery of truth, as the formulation of what is.

Spinoza himself does not seem to have depreciated mystical insight as a gateway to knowledge. Einstein's Spinozism is therefore somewhat faulty and narrow. Nor is Spinozism an entirely satisfying philosophy in itself. For one thing, it does not realise that if universal mind and universal matter are dual aspects of one Substance they need not be merely parallel attributes but must be capable of interaction. Again, it puts the two universal aspects on an equality in spite of universal matter seeming to be expressive of universal mind's scheme and purpose and therefore to be its manifestation in a new form. Further, this logical primacy of universal mind argues the one Substance to be an ultimate Existence that is Consciousness. Lastly, Spinozism leans towards an impersonal divinity and does not account for the individual human soul and its supporting truth in a Super- person who is more than the universal existence He has emanated. Yes, the metaphysics of Spinoza, for all its sweep and grandeur, does not go far or high enough. But the general theoretical method of Einstein's physics unequivocally suggests that if Spinozism is to be criticised the criticism must come from above it and not below. A cosmic consciousness into which we have a pin-point entry through mathematical divination is the irreducible minimum this method implies. To make that minimum yield a Spinozistic philosophy is to express a particular type of intellectual and emotional disposition. A deeper and richer Weltanschauung may be extracted from it. So we need not take Einstein's Spinozism as the only possible scientific philosophy to which the free mathematical creativity exemplified by his theorising from the data of relativity is a pointer. But, while something more than Spinozism may be approached, nothing less than it will serve. This means that the general theoretical method of Einstein's physics turns away from materialism in a subjectivist manner foreign to classical physics. Not that

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classical physics knew of no divination, no intuitive leap of the mind, by which a gap in physical knowledge was filled - a leap which necessity could justify neither from experimental evidence nor from inherent forms of thought. Clerk Maxwell made such a leap when in stating his famous equations for electromagnetism he postulated a certain term which was not necessitated by anything at the time and which was found correct by experiment many years later. Without that term wireless and radio and radar would have been impossible. But the Maxwellian leap figured in the method of classical physics as an astonishing freak and had no pervasive significance. Einsteinian theoretical physics, making it the common rule instead of an astonishing freak, acquires an utterly new orientation. Although the attempt to escape materialism by putting a subjectivist interpretation on the role of the observer is misguided, the moment Einstein's physics tries to correlate and unify facts found by observation it stresses a creative and intuitive activity of the mind, by which, from subjective depths within us, a glimmer is brought of the vast subjectivism of a Supreme Spirit who is the single secret self of human observers and of the whole universe and whose consciousness not only pervades but seems to have become all things.

7

We may now briefly take stock of our conclusions from Einstein's relativity physics. By three independent routes we arrive at an undeniable implication of the supra-physical, the mystical: 1) the Einsteinian "field" whose four-dimensional continuum of indistinguishable space and time is revealed by the special theory of relativity as a mathematical approximation of the mystic's Infinity-Eternity and by the general theory of relativity as an utterly non-material space-time ether rendering the approximated Infinity-Eternity all the more real and even originative of matter; 2) the Einsteinian "energy" which, by positing something indefinable by any

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scientific concept, points beyond materialism to a World- Will; 3) the Einsteinian theoretical method with its "free creation", involving the discovery of scientific truth by our mind "insighting" a World-Intelligence that seems all-formative. The independence we have given to each of the three routes results in a threefold strength to the suggestion of the supra-physical and the mystical.

Einstein himself does not appear to be always aware of the direction in which his theory leads. This is because of many reasons. He lacks a full intimate grasp of the relation between science and religion. There is missing also the reading of the true philosophical significance of four-dimensionality. Again, little philosophical endeavour is made to identify the sense of his new concept of energy. Only in connection with his theoretical method he seems to discern a direct liaison between science and the religious frame of mind which, he confesses, can never be absent in the true scientific pioneer. Einstein is content in general to affirm an indirect liaison - a liaison merely of an original stimulus and initiative to scientific research by a pantheistic feeling and outlook. But the fact that he has not himself sounded all the philosophical depths of his own theory is no argument against the existence of those depths. Neither is it an argument against the supremacy of scientific genius that is Einstein's. We should be extremely thankful to this supremacy for providing us, independently of mysticism, with mathematical formulas and processes which we can interpret best in terms of mystical experience.

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Einstein's Four-dimensional Continuum

1

On April 18, 1955, passed away the most original scientific thinker the world has seen. A host of exceptionally revolutionary ideas were let loose by him from the beginning of his scientific career in the early years of this century up to the very end of his life: it is not more than a couple of years since he propounded his last version of what he called the Unified Field Theory, the fullest expansion of the relativity theory with which his name burst on us in 1904. Perhaps the most notable contribution by his work to the world of thought is the concept of a four-dimensional continuum of space-time to replace Newton's of a three-dimensional space and a one- dimensional time. But the exact significance of it is seldom realised. It is worthwhile glancing at it from several sides.

There are thinkers who tell us: "The new concept has so revolutionised the view of reality in physics that science would do well to look in a direction beyond materialism." Others say: "It is indeed revolutionary, but its revolutionariness is confined to physics and has no bearing on a philosophical view of reality. By itself it has neither a materialistic nor a non-materialistic implication." A third group declares: "The question of any implication is idle, for the concept stands for no reality at all, not even a physical one. It is simply a geometrico-mathematical picture, an abstract symbolic representation of the connection between phenomena of space and time as they figure revolutionarily in Einstein's physics. It is a mere convenience or device for calculation." A fourth school brings another sort of damper: "It is a revolution, yet not quite a radical one. Physics always recognised four-dimensionality when it took four co-ordinates - three of space and one of time - to specify an event. Relativity theory has added some important details of far-reaching usefulness, but the general framework is still the same."

To strike on the true significance of the new concept we

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should follow briefly the development of relativity theory by which a revolution was effected in Newton's physics. Newton had held that though every known material mass is in motion and therefore no motion of matter can be measured against any material mass at rest, we are not confined to merely relative measurements among moving masses: there is a motion absolute and not relative, for there is a universal space which is at absolute and not relative rest and which can serve as a frame of reference for measuring absolute motion. Further, if absolute motion is a valid concept, we can know what moment can be regarded as being the same moment at different points of space. For, it is by signals from point to point that time at different points can be expressed and even the fastest signal - light - takes a finite time to travel and, with the possibility of measuring the absolute speed of light against static space, we can allow in an absolute manner for the time-lag between the sending of a light signal from one point and the receiving of it at another. Calculating the various time-lags we can calculate what moment anywhere is simultaneous with a moment here: simultaneity throughout the universe is a valid concept. That is to say, time can be thought of as uniform everywhere. Absolute time follows from absolute motion and absolute space.

Soon after Newton's life a substance called the ether filling all space was considered inevitable for the explanation of the wavelike movement of light. Because of certain astronomical observations it was also considered as fixed in space. For all practical purposes the ether and absolute space became synonyms. So an opportunity was provided in a concrete form to measure motion against a frame absolutely 3t rest. A most delicate experiment, repeatedly performed, to "measure earth's motion through the ether in the direction of its own orbit showed that somehow the absolute measurement always evaded us. This null result of the Michelson- Morley experiment Lorentz and Fitzgerald sought to explain "Y calculating that physical changes always take place in our measuring instrument in such a way that they constitute a

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minus quantity compensating for and cancelling the plug quantity necessary for the absolute measurement. Thus the static ether and through it absolute space were saved for physics.

Einstein launched a double attack on this interpretation. He said that if no absolute measurement can ever be obtained, then whatever be the reason for the failure the Newtonian concept of motion and space is quite gratuitous and serves no useful purpose in physics. Further, if absolute motion cannot be measured, the same moment at different points of space can never be absolutely ascertained. Universal simultaneity is an "unobservable". The concept of absolute time is metaphysics and has no useful place in physics. In addition to the practical in utility, Einstein proved the logical in utility of the three absolutes. He said that the situation of a minus quantity exactly compensating for and cancelling the required plus quantity would arise even if we made measurements against a body moving relatively to another body but acceptable for convenience's sake as at rest relatively to our own motion. So if any compensation or cancellation is taking place, it will not uniquely distinguish an absolutely static frame from a relatively static one. To suppose that the compensation or cancellation conceals an absolute ether or space is logically unwarranted. Again, since in all relativities of motion between two bodies the mathematical terms are not altered by our taking the first body to be at rest and the second to be moving or vice versa, the compensation or cancellation can be thought of as happening on either body and does not indicate which of the two bodies is having its motion measured in reference to a static space or ether. This ambiguity leaves us no logical ground for talking of a space-absolute in reference to which the positive quantity of a body's absolute motion is somehow precisely compensated for or cancelled by a negative quantity. And, of course, once absolute motion and absolute space are logically superfluous, absolute time also logically fades out of the picture.

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Measurements of space and time were proved by Einstein to differ with the rates of relative motion. No more can we speak of motion occurring within an unaffected space and time: no more are space and time universal uniform receptacles in which matter in motion exists. There are as many spaces and times as there are relative rates of matter's motion. The sole bond between them is a transformation-rule formulated by Lorentz when he tried to co-ordinate the compensating or cancelling factors proposed by him before Einstein's appearance. The new relativistic interpretation which did not deny those factors but dispensed with their implications of an absolute Newtonian background took over Lorentz's rule as a means of passing correctly from one relative reading to another. It also, by the way, threw light on a somewhat obscure term in Lorentz's rule. The rule allowed for a change in the instrument of measuring space, the shortening of a rod's length in the direction of its motion, but could not explain a corresponding change which appeared to apply to the instrument of measuring time, the slowing down of the rhythm of a clock during its motion. Einstein legitimised the changing time-term since he clearly brought out the relativity of time no less than of space.

The first or restricted theory of relativity stopped here. It did not offer any new absolute or absolutes in place of the Newtonian ones. And those who regard as a mere mathematical device or convenience the four-dimensional continuum or space-time which was later suggested to be the appropriate Einsteinian absolute are evidently of the belief that only relativities really exist. The sole real revolution effected by Einstein is for them the joint difference which space- measurements and the time-measurement undergo according to the difference in motion-rate. Inasmuch as space and time together undergo this difference, unlike in Newton's system, these quantities figure revolutionarily in the system of Einstein, but space is space and time is time and no amount of hyphenating them can be anything save a purely formal affair: there can be no actual fusion of them. The so-

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called fusing is a useful picture or symbol of the Lorentz transformations which tell us how the space-numbers and the time-number vary with different co-ordinate systems and how the variations are mutually related.

The implication of this "formalist" view of the four- dimensional continuum is that though the Newtonian absolutes of space and time are abolished the relative space and time of Einstein are in fundamental nature the same as Newton's: Newton too was aware that at different stand- points different quantities are obtained for space and time and if he believed that the difference could be adjusted and a uniformity calculated in terms of absolute space and time it was because he did not know of the greater variations introduced by varied standpoints, but this cannot stop space and time from fundamentally differing from each other or involve their fusion.

The exponents of the "formalist" view, in further elaborating their thesis, exploit for their own ends the argument which is properly of the fourth school of interpretation. They inform us: "In a certain sense space and time have always constituted a four-dimensional continuum. Our experience in common life is that nothing happens at any place except at a particular time and nothing happens at any time except at a particular place: space and time are co-existent and inseparable. Similarly, science uses four numbers to describe events in nature. Positions are characterised by three numbers and the instant of an event is the fourth number. Four definite numbers correspond to every event: ergo, the world of events forms a four-dimensional continuum. Even the old physics never denied this. In the new physics the numbers undergo some interesting changes and we have to deal with them more jointly than before, but there is no four-dimensional continuum in a fundamentally different sense than before - a different sense which blurs our common experience that space is space and time is time. Relativity theory, studying them more penetratively and dealing with them more jointly than before, does not involve the equivalence of the space-

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co-ordinates with the time-co-ordinate. The former co-ordinates are defined physically wholly differently from the latter: a rod is used in the one case and a clock in the other."

Well, it is indeed true that the physical operations by which the numbers for space and time are obtained are entirely distinct and never fuse, but the rest of the "formal" view has little substance and when we understand its hollowness we shall learn to see this distinction in a proper light. To start with: it is illogical to say that Einstein's space and time are in fundamental nature the same as Newton's. Newton could pass to his absolutes because whatever relativities he acknowledged were of a certain sort: if for Einstein his own relativities did not differ from Newton's in a fundamental way he could have no ground for rejecting those absolutes: some mathematical adjustment would be possible. He could not pass to those absolutes because his relativities were different in fundamental nature. If they were thus different his space and time must also be so. The formalists recognise as much when they emphasise, though mistakenly, that in Einstein's physics as at first propounded there is no real absolute and that, unlike in Newton's physics, only relativities really exist here. But they deny a real Einsteinian absolute on account of missing the important point which emerged when Einstein stated his relativities and stopped short of any absolute.

Einstein stopped short not because any absolute was bound to be really inexistent: he did so because his own immediate aim was limited and he never looked in the direction of an absolute. However, one point emerged suggestively. If the relativities were not ultimate and if anything absolute could be found, it would not be in terms of motion, space and time as commonly understood. Another mode of putting this is: the absolute, if any, would not just raise, as those of Newton did, commonly understood motion, space and time to a universal plane of conception. And it would not for a simple reason: the relativities them- selves do not involve motion, space and time as commonly

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understood. They are more radical than Newton thought and the three terms in each relativity are knit together in a way utterly beyond Newton's thinking. To say that there are as many spaces and times as there are relative rates of motion does not merely abolish Newton's idea of space and time as universal uniform receptacles in which matter in motion exists. Over and above finding measurements of space and time to be variables of motion, it implies that the space and time of each frame of reference differ with motion in a close co-operation between themselves: when the space-numbers change, the time-number changes too and vice versa, as if space and time were quantities perfectly analogous though not of the same kind, instead of being as in Newton's physics non-analogous though never dissociated. Of course, for practical purposes the old division of the space-co-ordinates from the time-co-ordinate is valid: we can assign a la Newton relative space-co-ordinates but an absolute time-co-ordinate to any event within common experience. Only when the velocity of objects ceases to be small and comes close to that of light the time-co-ordinate no less than the space-co- ordinates are found relative and we have the observation of both space and time changing instead of the former alone doing so. But the joint change, though mostly unobserved, is always there as of two perfectly analogous quantities. In other words the two quantities depend on motion as if they were differentiations of one and the same quantity: the rod measuring space and the clock measuring time seem two distinguishable modes of measuring a single system of dimensions. Briefly, space and time appear to be somehow the same in spite of being dissimilar: they give the impression of being an identity-in-difference.

The revolution in physical concepts here is surely pro- founder than what the formalists make out. Although no absolute is yet on the scene, the relativities already suggest some kind of fusion in the nature of space and time. The suggestion, however, loomed a little remote until Minkowski put his mind to the relativities. And it loomed a little remote

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because no direct mathematical demonstration of the actual identity was present and because the fusion suggested in each set of space-number and time-number was not yet shown to be of any immediate utility in either mathematical practice or mathematical theory. Minkowski was the first to remedy these lacks by seeking in the suggested fusion an invariant behind the Lorentz-transformations connecting the variants that are the relativities - an invariant concealed like a thread on which the transformation-rule hung them like beads and taught us how to pass from one bead to another. He showed that the different observations of space and time about an event from frames of reference moving at different rates could yield a common invariant quantity, an absolute measurement of a non-Newtonian sort corresponding to the non-Newtonian relative measurements, if the time-measurement obtained within each frame of reference were subtracted from the space-measurement. Mathematically, this not only gave the invariant but also illuminated the nature of space and time. For, it is a platitude in mathematics that we cannot add one quantity to or subtract it from another without the two quantities being of the same kind. We can multiply one kind of quantity by another, as mass by velocity to give momentum. We can divide one kind of quantity by another, as energy by time to give horse-power. But we cannot add mass to velocity or subtract energy from time to give any physical quantity unless they are somehow identical. Similarly we cannot add inches to seconds or subtract seconds from inches unless we mean to imply that somehow the same entity is measured partly by a rod and partly by a clock.

The suggestion emerging from relativity theory that in a certain sense a single system of dimensions rather than two associated systems was being measured came to a clear focus in Minkowski's description of this system as a four-dimensional continuum in which space and time ceased to be separate and fused into one fundamental absolute: space- time. The single entity, space-time, could be split into two

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systems of dimensions by taking cross-sections, as it were, of it and the various ways in which we make the cross-section give the Einsteinian relativities. If we imagine a geometrical graph of the four-dimensional continuum, then the influence of the different rates of motion on the measurements of space and time will be shown in that the three axes or co-ordinates x, y, z of space and the one axis or co-ordinate t of time will be differently orientated. And the relations between these different sets of axes will be those contained in the Lorentz equations.

Minkowski's space-time is the inevitable background of the Einsteinian relativities. Einstein himself acknowledged it and later developed the concept of it geometrically far beyond Minkowski. We are not concerned at the moment with the development. Suffice it to say here that space-time is inherently implied by the relativities and is just as real or unreal as they. Even, in the sense that the invariant, the quantity on which there is agreement from all standpoints, is more real than the variants or the quantities about which there is disagreement from all standpoints, the universal quantity that is space-time has a greater reality than the space and time that figure in the relative readings.

Having demonstrated that the hyphenating of space and time is no purely formal affair we should exhibit in a proper light the undeniable distinction between them as proved by the wholly different manner in which the numbers for space and for time are obtained. The fact is that the hyphenating does not slur over the distinction. It is a mistake to turn the hyphenating to mean that a fourth dimension of space is welded on to the three known to us. Only if such a welding is signified the distinction may be said to suffer a slurring over. Unfortunately this significance is liable to be caught from the final form in which Minkowski stated his description of the four-dimensional continuum. There by a couple of mathematical operations he altered to a plus sign the minus sign between the space-numbers and the time-number and substituted the number of miles light travels in one second - a

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constant 186,000 in all frames of reference - for the one second itself, thus making the time-dimension equivalent to

space-dimension. The justification of these operations is that thus alone the four-dimensional continuum becomes the absolute of Einstein's relativities in the simplest form possible and best explains the facts of scientific observation and experiment. The operations are a brilliant act of analytic insight into the truth of physical nature and, together with the original formula of subtracting the time-measurement from the space-measurement, constitute one of the peak performances of mathematical genius in our day. But they do not really add a fourth space-dimension to the other three. The very need of those mathematical operations which brought about an "isotropy" (or similarity in all directions) is proof enough of a certain difference between the three components and the one component in spite of their fusion. A true fourth dimension of space would require no such strange treatment. The treatment is administered just because space-time is an irregular and not a regular four- dimensional continuum or, rather, because it is a four- dimensional continuum irregularly regular. To employ a phrase already used by us, it is by all tokens an identity-in- difference. The criticism that Minkowski overlooked the distinction between a rod and a clock would hold only if the fourth dimension were a regular one - that is to say, spatial.

But, we must add, the irregular element makes no odds to the revolutionary character of this four-dimensionality. It is erroneous to protest as the fourth school of interpreters do, that after all science always recognised four-dimensionality when it took four co-ordinates - three of space and one of time - to specify an event and that we have nothing quite radically revolutionary now. No doubt, the actual basic four- dimensionality of nature is the same in the day of Einstein and Minkowski as it was in that of Newton; but science's recognition of it in the past never took it for a fusion of space and time. Now alone we know what exactly should be meant by our regarding the world we live in as basically a four-

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dimensional continuum that figures in our immediate measurements as spatial and temporal quantities changing in a joint interdependent manner; for now alone can we speak of this continuum as being not of space and time but of space-time. The general framework is not at all still the same.

The fourth school of interpreters, no less than the third Or "formalist" group, is off the mark. Space-time is not only real: it is also a radically revolutionary reality.

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If Einstein's four-dimensional continuum of space-time is, as we have shown, a reality and a revolutionary one at that because of the actual fusion of space and time in it, is the revolution introduced by it confined to physics, with no bearing on a philosophical view of the world, or does it call for a look by us in a direction beyond materialism?

The actual fusion does not, of course, reduce time to a space-dimension: time is still time, but it acquires the proper­ties of space. A fourth dimension of space would break the limitations of the three space-dimensions: for instance, if one had a fourth space-dimension to move in, one would not be limited by being enclosed in a room covered in the directions of length, breadth and height, for one more direction would remain without any cover and one could enter the room from it. But the time-element would not be changed in any basic sense: time would continue to be a movement from past to present to future just as much as it is now in our normal vision of it. When the dimension of time enters into a four dimensional continuum and is welded on to space in the way in which within space itself the three dimensions of length, breadth and height are welded to one another, then it is not the spatial limitations of these dimensions that are broken. What are broken are the limitations of time itself for those dimensions - limitations due to time's being a separate dimension from them. If time is fused with space in the continuum whose mathematical structure is specified by

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Minkowski's elucidation of the background of Einstein's relativities, time without ceasing to be time gets spatialised. To put it more concretely: just as all points of space are co­existent, all instants of time are co-existent - the past and present and future of spatial points co-exist as if they them- selves were spread out in space. .

Our heads are bound to grow dizzy with this import. But that is no test of its not being the truth. Nor can truth stop being truth when our heads grow dizzier still on our under­standing what the scientific concept of causality and deter­minism becomes in connection with this import. Strict causality and determinism are there in the sense of an unseverable hanging together: the very word "continuum" ensures unbroken ness. But pre-relativity physics took cau­sality and determinism to be working from past to present to future. In the four-dimensional continuum of actually fused space and time, where the three times co-exist, there is evidently no one such unique direction for causality and determinism to work in. So the scientific use of causality and determinism may be considered as representing for practical purposes the truth only if the experience which leads us to this use is the sole one or the predominant one. It certainly is not the sole one. We have the experience in which we feel a sense of freewill: there we appear to be to some extent unbound by the past and creative of the future and able to re­create the past by depriving it of the effect the scientific use of causality and determinism would ascribe to it as inevitable. We have also the experience in which we feel a sense of goals or ends, of a purpose that seeks realisation as if from a future through the present and which, by causing the present, determines also the past which the present constantly becomes. The whole time-flow then seems in the direction opposite to that which is assumed by science. But, inasmuch as the latter is also never absent in our experience even when We have a sense of freewill and a sense of pre-existing and purpose-realising future and inasmuch as there has been no sure ground for not regarding the future as still to be born

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rather than as something already real and for regarding the present as co-existent with the past no less than with the future, we have allowed the experience leading to the scientific use of causality and determinism to bulk in our minds above any other. We have let this experience cast on the others a colour of unreality or lesser reality, things to be somehow brought into line with it. With the concept of the four-dimensional continuum we find that there is no reason to give that experience any predominance. So the direction dictated by that experience to causality and determinism can have only a certain degree of truth. Degrees of truth are possessed also by the directions suggested by our sense of freewill and our sense of pre-existing and purpose-realising future.

Perhaps the greatest degree of truth is given by what is actually our time-experience. What we know as time is a continuous present with projections into both the past and the future, projections concealed in the one case except in the form of memory and in the other except in the form of imaginative or predictive anticipation. The primary datum is the present, from which past and future are arrived at by means of theoretical constructions. If this is so, then in view of the impartiality of the four-dimensional continuum, our sense of limited freewill which is associated with the present may be taken by us as the truth predominantly supported by the absolute arrived at in Einsteinian physics.

We may even say that the four-dimensional continuum is precisely such as predominantly must support this truth in the world of threefold time-experience that is ours. For, what do we mean by a co-existence of past and present and future? Do we not mean an all-comprehensive Now, with no succes­sion of events - a Now of which our continuous present is a faint inkling?

And taking a cue from our own limited Now and its sense of freewill we may surmise that the comprehensive Now of the ordered totality of events in all the three times is an immense multiple creativity. Such a conception does full

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justice to both the truths involved in the irregular regularity ~f the four-dimensional continuum: the truth of space by which points stand together and the truth of time by which instants succeed each other - a co-existence coupled with dynamism so that the spread-out events of the three times are the signs of an ordering creativity immense and multiple though non-successive.

It is difficult not to think this creativity the physical counterpart or expression of the freewill of a cosmic con­sciousness. We have definitely to look beyond materialism if we accept Minkowski's fusion of space and time to be actual. And Einstein's general relativity theory, which came ten years after his special or restricted one, does not in the least forbid us to do so. What that theory does is just to link up material masses with the four-dimensional continuum: it establishes a certain relation between these masses and space-time in the sense that the amount of material mass is proportional to a degree of geometrical structure of space-time and that the accelerations of the masses can be calculated according to the overall space-time structure answering to the comparatively larger or smaller mass-amounts neigh­bouring one another. Thus the movements of the planets around the sun are said to be in accordance with the more dominating structure in space-time answering to the sun's greater mass than the one answering to the smaller masses of the planets. Newton's force of gravitation which was sup­posed to act directly from mass to mass is dispensed with and an entirely new notion comes in by which the state of space-time between the disproportionate masses explains their mutual "gravitational" behaviour - a new notion which has passed some crucial tests in which Newton's calculations proved wrong.

The state of space-time involved is called in technical mathematical language "curvature". Newton had considered space to be "flat": just as on a flat surface the natural motion, as well as the shortest line between two points, is straight, so also in flat space the natural motion is straight and a straight

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line is the "geodesic" or shortest distance between two points. Space thus considered is known as Euclidian. Al­though some geometricians in the nineteenth century had evolved non-Euclidian geometries of space, nobody ever imagined that these could correspond to reality. But when, as we saw, Minkowski set up the formula of an irregularly regular four-dimensional continuum, the minus sign of the fourth dimension prevented the geometrical properties from being quite Euclidian as they would have been if no irregular feature had been there. His geometry was semi-Euclidian or hyperbolic rather than non-Euclidian. However, it opened Einstein's eyes to further possibilities and, when he attempted to bring into his scheme the accelerated motion characteristic of "gravitational" effect, he applied to the four-dimensional continuum the spherical geometry of Riemann, the geometry which Riemann had extended to space of three or more dimensions from a curved surface instead of the Euclidian geometry which had been extended to space from a flat surface. Einstein discovered that in space-time the sim­plest analogue of the quantity which for a curved surface is termed "curvature" solved his problem if he made the curvature proportional in a certain manner to the amount of material mass present. The curvature of space-time calcu­lated in the region of the sun's neighbourhood gave in space the exact orbits of the planets and in time the exact change of speed-rhythm which the planets exhibit as they move nearer or farther from the sun in their various ellipses.

What bearing have the several features of the general relativity theory on the beyond-materialism interpretation? First, if the continuum is capable of geometrical structure, it must be "substantial" in some sense: the ordering, immense and multiple though non-successive, would represent not only a cosmic consciousness but also a cosmic being. The pointer away from materialism seems strengthened. Second­ly, the material masses by being brought into relation with the "substantial" continuum may themselves be thought not only integrated with it in one whole but also identical with

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certain characteristics of it and appearing otherwise by simply being a certain manifestation of it. Of course, until all the characteristics of matter, particularly its atomicity, are explicable in terms of space-time structure, we cannot affirm this last possibility. Signs, however, are not lacking to persuade us that we are on the right track. They are noticeable in connection with the invariant "interval" in space-time which is the absolute of the relative distances and durations.

Sullivan, in his Aspects of Science (Second Series) puts the case very well. "From this relation, the interval," he writes, "various complicated mathematical expressions may be built up by purely mathematical analysis. At a certain stage in this process we reach expressions which obey exactly the same equations as density, stress, momentum etc. Now these latter quantities, density and so on, form what a physicist means by a piece of matter. But the mathematical expressions derived from the interval refer to geometrical properties of the continuum - to its curvature, for example. What is the meaning of the fact that certain geometrical properties of the four-dimensional continuum and certain physical quantities, characteristic of matter, obey the same equations? The suggestion is that the physical quantities and the geometrical properties are the same thing ... "

Their being the same and yet seeming different is ex­plained by Sullivan in the immediately next phrase in terms that are a little doubtful. He states the above suggestion in other words as "that what we call matter is, indeed, only the way in which our minds perceive the existence of these geometrical peculiarities of the four-dimensional conti­nuum." No doubt, the human mind has a good deal of say in the perceptual experience that it has of reality; but the more balanced view would appear to be that the world of matter and of relative space and time is itself an actual manifestation of the four-dimensional continuum and certain aspects of this manifestation are discovered and interpreted by the human mind rather than completely created by it in response

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to that hidden reality. That reality and this manifestation have both of them the look of a physical counterpart or expression of a Conscious Being at work; so the granting of an "objective" status to the world of matter and of relative space and time does not diminish the primacy of Conscious­ness and what the human mind does in its perceptual experience is just to get into a particular sort of commu­nication with the ultimate Consciousness. All is play of Consciousness, but a complex multifold play. And part of the play is the actual existence of Sullivan's "matter" and of scientifically measured space and time as differentiations of one and the same quantity, differentiations which seem distinctions as of two quantities so long as an event is studied in reference to a frame in relative motion at a rate very far from that of light but which reveal their true nature as soon as velocities nearing that of light are met with. The world or perceptual experience is very different really from our older pre-Einsteinian picture of it, yet it still remains objective in a certain valid sense so far as the human mind is concerned.

But, objective or no, the main point stands that material properties appear to be basically identical with space-time structure. And we may add that the whole implication of Einstein's repeated effort to create a "unified field theory" taking into its sweep electro-magnetism no less than gravita­tion and accounting for the particle-nature of matter is this very point. So the curving that the general relativity theory gave to space-time has brought in its train a many-sided accession of strength to the interpreters who feel drawn by the special relativity theory beyond the confines of physics and beyond a materialistic world-view.

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The Originality of Einstein

A "Close-Up" of the World's Greatest Scientist

On April 18, 1955, died Albert Einstein who had been born on March 14, 1879. To have lived in the time of a man like him has been a rare privilege. For, there is not the slightest doubt that he is the most original thinker in the whole history of science. }.W.N. Sullivan perhaps hits the mark when he says that while we can imagine Galileo's and Newton's work done by other geniuses we find it extremely difficult to believe anyone would have discovered relativity theory if Einstein had not lived!

An Entirely New Turn of Mind

Indeed so original was the discovery that for years even scientists did not know what exactly to make of it. It introduced an entirely new turn of mind. Its revolutionariness lay essentially in bringing to sharp focus a manner of looking at physical things which is at utter variance with our habits of thought for thousands of years. Our mental habits with regard to physical things have been based on the assumption that Nature can be described on any scale by the so-called "laws" we find in the phenomena familiar in our man-sized world, such as that an object coming to meet another moving object travels faster relatively to it than an object going at the same speed away from it or that two events in different places can be said to occur simultaneously or that, given the facilities, a straight line can be drawn through space as far as we like or that the sum of the angles of a triangle always equals two right angles. What came to be known as Newto­nian physics was an immense development of such "laws." The opposite of these "laws" was considered inconceivable and impossible; they were taken to be self-evident truths of the world and the essence of rationality. Before Einstein, there had been a little scepticism here and there about them,

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but it was Einstein who, in the strictest scientific sense, proved them wrong and showed the physical universe to be inexplicable in their terms. This is the fundamental revolu­tion by relativity theory: its crowning concept is the "curved" continuum in which space-measures and time-measures are indistinguishably fused, a mysterious continuum underlying the world we study with our instruments. The revolution has been interpreted in several ways by philosophers and, though some of the interpretations may be misguided, its ultimate import must bear positively, as we shall later see, against the materialistic and mechanistic world-view which was in fashion after Newton had completed the traditional trend of thought about physical things.

Grasping of Reality by Pure Thought

Thanks to Einstein, the mind of man has found an hitherto unsuspected "liberation" in its mode of understand­ing the phenomena of Nature. As part of this liberation is the Einsteinian method of arriving at basic principles. Formerly people believed that the basic principles of physics were to be reached by generalising from observations. Einstein made it clear that they can be reached only by a creative act of the scientific imagination: all mere generalisations fail to co­ordinate the large variety of observed phenomena and so in order to co-ordinate them we have to cast about creatively or inventively for mathematical formulas. These formulas can be of any sort, no matter how "fantastic" and "unphysical" they may seem in their significance: "pure mathematics" must be given a free hand and "axioms" hypothetised without any direct reference to observed events. The only reference these must have to them is indirect: deductions must be made from the hypothetised axioms, and conclu­sions at the end of a long chain of reasoning are alone to be experimentally tested. Of course, the experimental test is the crucial criterion, but the axioms themselves remain, as it were, metaphysical - beyond experimental or observational

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verification. "In this sense," says Einstein, "I agree with the ancients that pure thought can grasp reality." By pure thought Einstein here means a leap of intuition far above the range of observable phenomena, a leap which out of many imaginable alternatives strikes upon the fundamental truth which mathematically, by means of the fewest principles, correlates past observations and provides guidance for cor­rectly predicting future ones. "The really important factor is ultimately intuition," said Einstein to Alexander Moszkows­ki. And Einstein believes also that if mathematical intuition is to be a discovery of truth, there must be a pre-established harmony between man's mind and the nature of the universe and that this nature must be expressing a supreme Intelli­gence ordering things mathematically. Einstein has often declared himself to be a pantheist.

The Irony of the Nobel Prize

Both the method of Einsteinian physics and the non­Newtonian attitude towards Nature were an obstacle in the way of his getting the Nobel Prize. The popular idea is that the award of this Prize was most spontaneous. In fact, the Committee long debated whether the terms set up by Nobel - "a discovery in physics from which mankind has derived great use" - were satisfied by the highly abstract mathematical formulas of Einstein. Could these formulas be called physical discoveries and were they practically useful to mankind in general? Besides, Einstein was bitterly attacked by many schools of thinkers and his theory was even linked to political controversies. The Swedish Academy postponed giving him the Prize for a while. And when in 1922 it did give it to him the chief ground for the award was stated to be not relativity theory but Einstein's work in quantum theory! If Einstein had not done any work in quantum theory and not discovered the photo-electric effect and the photo-chemical law but rested only with the Special and the General Theories of Relativity which are his main life-work he would never

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have received the Nobel Prize in 1922.

This is ironical and seldom known. Yet it brings out a point which too is not known widely. Einstein is a genius who has affected the whole realm of physics and not merely the sphere of large-scale phenomena. Even in the sphere of the ultra-microscopic his wonderful mind has shone. It is a commonplace of scientific knowledge today that light which was supposed for several centuries to be purely a wave motion is now found to consist also of bullet-like particles called photons. Very few realise that nobody except Einstein gave the conclusive proof of Planck's brilliant hypothesis that light was composed of quanta, separate packets of energy; what is more, Einstein proved these energy-packets to be possessing mass and inertia like any material object. Even if he had no relativity theory to his credit, this research and several other subsequent discussions of atomic phenomena would rank him among the top scientists of our century.

Einstein and the Atom Bomb

At present his name is most generally connected with the Atom Bomb. For, the search for atomic energy started from Einstein's formula that energy is equal to mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. But this equation origina­ted not in any quantum theory; it emerged as a logical conclusion by Einstein of his own relativity principle. An application of this equation to atomic changes shows that when a heavy atom breaks to form a lighter one a part of the mass escapes as energy. Nuclear fission, on which the Atom Bomb is based, is the production of energy by changing the heavy uranium to a lighter element: a small amount of difference in mass is the result, but as a minute quantity of mass is, according to Einstein's equation, equal to an im­mense quantity of energy, gigantic power is released. Although the finishing touch to the theory of the Atom Bomb was provided by Fermi and Hahn and Lise Meitner, Einstein provided the foundation and without him there would have

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been no Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A man like him who is a pacifist by disposition and averse to violence could not be expected to take Hiroshima and Nagasaki coolly. He greatly deplored that such terrible devastation should have been wrought. But we shall commit a gross mistake if we think him to have regretted that the Atom Bomb was the conse­quence of his relativity theory. He was a pacifist, but neither a mawkish nor a blindly rigid one. And our understanding of his position vis-a-vis the Atom Bomb will help us understand the character of his mind.

During World War D, Einstein the pacifist lent the fullest

support of his distinguished name to the appeal made by certain scientists to the American Government to expedite the making of the Atom Bomb. Why? The clue to the riddle lies in his words to the Belgian pacifists who prior to the war asked him what they should do in case they were attacked by Hitler. Without the slightest hesitation Einstein replied: "You must fight Hitler and defend your fatherland." He explained that where there was a question merely of a war between governments all more or less similar in fundamental princi­ples one must refuse to shed blood, but when there was a diabolical power like Nazism ranged against a country, the refusal to shed blood would only help to strengthen what was most bloodthirsty. As shown by his reply to the American Youth Congress which opposed participation in war even between democratic states and Germany, he was never deluded by the cry that such a war would be merely between rival imperialisms. And when the war did come, he was aware that Hitler was bent on finding the secret of nuclear fission and if the secret fell into his hands there would be the end of civilisation. So he urged with all his might the American Government to forestall Hitler and with the deadliest weapon of destruction be capable of worsting all anti-civilisation forces.

Nor was he oblivious of the dangers of Soviet Russia

under Stalin. He was passionately opposed to all totalitarian­ism, all autocratic regimes which ruthlessly crush what he

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deemed most precious in life - the impressionable indivi­duality, the creative personality. Not that he was against the existence of an elite to rule the masses: democrat though he was, he knew that in order to attain any definite goal it is imperative that one person should do the thinking and commanding and carry most of the responsibility. But, as he put it, "those who are led should not be driven, and they should be allowed to choose their leader." Both Fascism and Stalinism ran counter to the grain of his nature, though he might fancy several aspects of communist sociology. And, as his biographer Philipp Franck tells us, he was not of the party which advocated the sharing of the atomic secret by all nations. In his opinion, there must be an effective organisation for world government before such a secret could be indiscriminately shared. He wanted it for the time being to remain with the original manufacturers of the Atom Bomb: the United States, Great Britain and Canada

A Mind Intuitively Plastic

Einstein's mind moved easily through complexities and arrived at the living truth in each particular. It was intuitively plastic. A homely illustration may be given of its freedom from cut-and-dried solutions. Replying to a man who had requested his opinion on the matter of Sunday rest, he said:

"Man must rest, yes. But what is rest? You cannot make a law and tell people how to do it. Some people rest when they lie down and go to sleep. Others rest when they are wide awake and are stimulated. Some must work or write or go to amusements to find rest. If you pass a law to show all people how to rest, that means you make everybody alike. But everybody is not alike." On another occasion he exposed the inadequacy of Edison's sweeping pronouncement that col­lege education had no value and that all education should be directed towards learning relevant facts. Edison drew up a questionnaire and challenged college graduates to prove their worth by answering it. Einstein was given a copy. As

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soon as he read the question: "What is the speed of sound?" he said, "I don't know. I don't burden my mind with facts that I can learn easily from any textbook. And the value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks."

Being intuitively plastic in thought, Einstein was also unhampered by ordinary environmental circumstances that so disturb others who laboriously use their intelligence. To his students he used to say: "I shall always be able to receive you. If you have a problem, come to me with it. You will never disturb me, since I can interrupt my own work at any moment and resume it immediately the interruption is past." Philipp Franck records how Einstein and he once decided to visit the Astrophysical Observatory at Potsdam together. They agreed to meet on a certain bridge, but since Dr. Franck was a stranger in Berlin he said, "I cannot promise to be there at the appointed time." "Oh," replied Einstein, "that makes no difference; then I will wait on the bridge." Dr. Franck suggested that that might waste his time too much. "Oh, no," was the rejoinder, "the kind of work I do can be done anywhere. Why should I be less capable of reflecting on my problems on the bridge than at home?"

When we ask what is the kind of work Einstein did, a general indication is in the attraction he always felt towards root problems. "The fascination of the difficult," to use Yeats's phrase, dominated him. He had no love for measur­ing superficialities. He attacked always the deep heart of a science, the most resistant core of a theory. Even to make a difficulty just more acutely felt was sufficient incentive to him: the hidden central things must be made our magnet, no matter if nothing comes out of our preoccupation for a long while. Einstein once remarked contemptuously about a fairly well-known physicist: "He strikes me as a man who looks for the thinnest spot in a board and then bores as many holes as possible through it."

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Personal Peculiarities

Living always in an atmosphere of deep and vast scienti­fic possibilities, a mind pressing beyond all common limits of theoretical physics, Einstein had a strange independence of bodily roles. Once when he had to go to Rio de Janeiro to lecture, his wife Elsa packed his case with everything he could possibly need on the way. When he returned, she found it intact - and, nonplussed for a moment, he laughed and confessed that he had never opened it! Prof. Plesch, one of his intimate friends, writes: "He sleeps until he is awa­kened; he stays awake until he is told to go to bed; he will go hungry until he is given something to eat; and then he eats until he is stopped - I can remember his consuming between five and ten pounds of strawberries at a sitting on more than one occasion at my country house at Gatow .... As Einstein never feels the ordinary impulses to eat, etc., he has to be looked after like a child."

He had certainly a child's unconventionality and lack of self-consciousness. In his home in Germany he never used to wear shoes or slippers. He would walk throughout the house in his stockings. In America later, where he resided at the Princeton Institute of Research, his happy idiosyncrasy was unabated. In summer, he was to be seen walking through the streets of Princeton in sandals without stockings, in a swea­ter without coat, eating an ice-cream cone, to the delight of his students and the amazement of the professors.

He was at home in any place, so little was he a creature of fixed habits and so free from individual or national attach­ments. When he and his wife left Germany for a trip to California Hitler had not yet denounced him. But, while getting out of his beautiful house at Caputh on which he had spent almost his whole fortune, he quietly remarked to his wife: "Take a good look at the house. We shall never look at it again." This remark shows not only his cool detachment but also his subtle sense of unperceived realities. His pro­phecy came true, for he never saw Germany again and his

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house was torn down by the Nazis and his property con­fiscated.

Though genial and warm when in company, Einstein's intense inner concentration on fundamental scientific pro­blems made him not only indifferent to trivialities and creature-comforts but also aloof in his mind from the human beings around him. Even in the midst of his generous activity on behalf of charitable, social and political organisations he would suddenly tell you: "Sincerely speaking, I have never been much interested in people but only in things." And if you had asked him what he meant by "things", he would have said: "physical phenomena and methods to handle them."

Philosophical Position

Here we strike upon a limitation which prevents his unusually intuitive mind from embracing fully the meta­physical. When he philosophises he is admirable up to a certain point. His grip on the pantheistic vision is firm, and not only at the source of art - especially music, his apprecia­tion of which is evident in his having been a keen violinist and an authority on Mozart - but also at the source of all genuine scientific thought which reaches down to basic realities he puts what he calls "cosmic religious feeling", the emotional sense of an all-pervading all-ordering Intelligence. But, in his eyes, the universal Intelligence is impersonal; for, Einstein seeks predominantly the metaphysics of impersonal physical facts, and his intuitiveness, though appreciating the variety and value of human personality and dealing most plastically with them, never pierces satisfactorily to the metaphysics of psychological facts. He does not conceive the immortal soul and its intimate relation to some divine Over soul who is the essence and perfection of the personal as well as of the impersonal. Also, the absorption in "physical phenomena and methods to handle them" lays too much emphasis on the mathematical function of the consciousness

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and leads Einstein to believe no path to truth is possible except the path of mathematical divination and its logical development. He has little understanding of the mystic's non-mathematical insight into reality's ultimate nature. That mysticism is more than a vague delightful feeling of a vast Intelligence, that it is an ecstasy whereby the human con­sciousness is luminously caught up into a direct perception, a direct cognition, a direct knowledge of a truth of the world deeper than scientific truth and more potent than it, a knowledge by self-identification with a Cosmic and Tran­scendental Being - all this escapes Einstein. But it must surely be said that, in spite of this philosophical shortcom­ing, he remains the supreme example of what the intuitive mind, whose full and final glory is in the realisations of Yoga, can do when it operates in the purely scientific form and how, while confining itself to physical phenomena, it can suggest an immense background of the Supra sensible and the Superhuman.

Beyond Materialism and Mechanism

How it can do so may briefly be set forth. Materialism and mechanism are often said to be overpassed by relativity theory - but mostly the interpretations are erroneous. Either some sort of personal subjectivism is postulated or else there is the subtlety of the Vienna Circle which says: "Science is a mere systematisation of sense-observations. To posit a material world with mechanistic laws, as the Newtonian scientists did, is to exceed the legitimate boundaries of scienti­fic thought. We have to abstain from materialism and mechanism, because, like all philosophy other than that of correlated sense-observations, they make an extrapolation beyond the latter and give us Meta-physics." Here is actually a refusal to philosophise and the non-materialism and non­mechanism are only apparent. The immense background we have in mind of the Supra sensible and the Superhuman is reached along a different track of thought altogether.

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First, just think of what the time-space fusion implies.

Not that time becomes a space-dimension but it acquires the character, in time-terms, of what a fourth dimension would have in space-terms, exactly as all points of length, breadth and height have to be conceived as coexistent in space, so also by being held in a single though not necessarily sym­metrical formula with these points all moments of time ­past, present and future - have to be conceived as co-existent as if in the totality of an ever-standing Now. There seems to be here a physical suggestion of the mystic's vision of Eternity.

Again, what was understood as causality or determinism, the linkage of events by a power from the past, so to speak, assumes a new complexion. If the past, present and future are co-existent, a power from the present such as we feel in our sense of "freewill" and a power from the future such as we experience in our sense of goals to be realised - these powers can have a scientific rationale in the Einsteinian continuum. That continuum suggests an all-powerful all comprehensive conscious Creativity.

Thirdly, mathematics shows that the geometric properties of the Einsteinian continuum - the properties connected with its "curvature" - lead to expressions which obey precisely the same equations as density, stress, momentum, etc. Now these quantities, density and so forth, form what a physicist means by a piece of matter. This suggests that the physical quantities and the geometrical properties are the same thing. In other words, all matter is a manifestation of the conti­nuum's ever-standing Now of creative conscious Power. And, if Einstein's formulation, in his last years, of a unified field-theory taking into its sweep electromagnetism no less than gravitation and accounting for the particle-nature of matter could be deemed successful, we should have a complete picture of our universe as such a manifestation.

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Probability in Microphysics:

Einstein brought about in 1905 a tremendous revolution in physics when he dethroned Newton's concept of a universal static space and a time flowing uniformly everywhere - an absolute space and an absolute time in terms of which there could be a measurement of absolute motion. The principle on which this revolution was based may be stated as follows: "None but observable factors - that is, factors definable by means of physical processes, factors distinguishable by experimental operations - can be considered to be in causal dependence." Einstein showed that scientific apparatus, even if developed to the utmost perfection and given the most favourable circumstances, could never measure Newton's absolutes and he ruled that these absolutes, there- fore, should never be invoked as the cause of anything in physics.

Twenty-two years later, Heisenberg brought about another revolution which struck scientists as still more tremendous. He declared that the very notion of causal dependence and relation, the very concept of causality was about an "unobservable" which no physical processes, no experimental operations by scientific apparatus could demonstrate! Einstein's revolution was in the realm of macrophysics - the large-scale world. Heisenberg's was the outcome of studying the small-scale sub-atomic world the realm of microphysics. The centre of study was the electron, one of the ultimate constituents of the atom of matter. An early picture of the atom, which solved several problems, Was that of Bohr: it took the atom to be a tiny solar system in which the electrons revolved round a nucleus of heavier particles. In this picture, the electrons were said to be travelling in definite orbits at a definite speed, and definite statements were made concerning their positions and their

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periods of rotation. But soon the solar-system conception broke down. A whole army of physicists, including R i11 himself, worked for more than twelve years and proved that such statements could only be made in macrophysics: subatomatic events were shown to fall outside them. The relation of the electrons to the orbits of rotation within the atom was so strange that the two magnitudes - position and velocity¹ could never be both stated accurately at the same time of any microphysical body.

Heisenberg summed up this fact in what he called the "Uncertainty Principle," known also as the "Principle of Indeterminacy." He said that the more certain is our measurement of the electron's position the more uncertain our measurement of its velocity, and vice versa. When both position and velocity are measured at the same time, there is always an uncertainty or inaccuracy in either and the margin of uncertainty is invariably a function of that small but positive number which is termed Planck's Constant (roughly .000000000000000000000000006624). To illustrate his principle with finality he suggested a simple crucial experiment which would convince us that the electron's position and velocity could not ever be observed at the same time with accuracy.

He declared that to observe anything we must illuminate it. To observe the electron's position or its velocity we must throw on the electron a beam of light. There is the well- known fact that nothing smaller than the shortest wave- length of visible light can be seen by human eyes. Visible light's shortest wave-length is of violet light, but the size of the electron is even smaller. Beyond violet light there is for us darkness. This, however, cannot stop observation, for we can replace our eyes by a photographic plate which is far more sensitive than they and which can record the action of light too short-waved for us to see. But, as the wave-length gets shorter and shorter, the radiation becomes more and more energetic. When we reach the wave-length which is so

' In physics Ac term "velocity" connotes direction as well as speed.

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short that the electron is not smaller than it - the wave-length of the "gamma rays" given off by radium - and we are able to illuminate the electron and observe it with the help of a photographic plate, we reach also such energy that in illuminating the electron we administer to it a big push. Thus, when the radiation can make the electron visible, the electron's velocity is disturbed. On the other hand, if we use light of the longest wave-length - red light - we have very poor energy in the beam and there is no disturbance, but the poor energy leaves the minute electron's position extremely hazy: we are as if trying to measure with a yardstick graduated to inches an object that is millions of times smaller than an inch. So, when the velocity is untouched, the position remains vague, and when the position might be ' clear the velocity is altered. There is no way to arrive at an accurate measurement of both position and velocity at once. The crucial experiment to find whether the two magnitudes can co-exist with definiteness gives a negative result.

And, mind you, this is not the result of any defect in our measuring instruments. It is the result of the very nature of things - the nature of the electron and of light. No matter what kind of instruments we use, the failure is inevitable. The constitution of the universe is such that scientific observation will never reveal to us an electron having a simultaneous definite position and velocity any more than scientific observation will reveal Newton's absolutes. To suppose such an electron is to suppose something that has no connection with any mathematical formula we actually use in physics. If physics is to be physics and not meta- physics, the supposition is fundamentally unacceptable. All that we have simultaneously are indefinite, indeterminate, uncertain position and velocity.

Now, the principle of causality, as the physicist under- stands it, may be formulated, in the words of Ernst Zimmer, as follows: "When the state of a 'system' - that is, the position and velocity of all its parts - is known at a given moment, together with the forces which are operative in it

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and on it, the state at any other moment of time can calculated." But, if our system consists of electrons or other sub-atomic bodies, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle immediately puts it beyond causality, for the initial position and velocity of not one single electron can be known. Heisenberg says: )'If we state the law of causality in the form: 'If we know the present, we can calculate the future,' it is not the conclusion but the premise which is false, for we can never know the present completely in full detail." And he adds that, since all experiments are subject to the laws of micro­physics, which is the science dealing with the world's final constituents, the universal invalidity of the causal law is proved as undeniably as the universal invalidity of Newton's absolute space, time and motion.

Lest it be thought that Heisenberg brings in complete irregularity in the physical world, we should point out that such irregularity would make physics quite impossible and that what he has done is only to replace, as Zimmer puts it, the causal law by a law of a more general character which allows us to predict from a state known to us with a specific degree of uncertainty what will happen within specific limits in the future. Instead of a strict calculus of certainty we have a strict calculus of probability.

If we like we may declare that the causal law does not consist merely in our being able to predict correctly from given data but in everything having an antecedent sufficient­ly accounting for its being such and such and that the substitution of probability for certainty does not do away with causal antecedents. Well, such causality is nothing else than the demand of the reason that a conclusion must have a premise. The calculus of probability is itself a system of causal antecedents: given a particular mathematical premise, a particular mathematical conclusion must follow. Similarly, a physical event cannot happen ex nihilo: it must have a sufficient reason in the form of a particular antecedent which provides the logical ground for it. Here is logical causality. Logical causality cannot be gainsaid and Heisenberg's principle

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does not negate it. But logical causality does not require that the world should be such as to enable us to make certain or accurate predictions. It leaves room not only for the probability calculus but also for the actual existence of factors in the world which would make certain or accurate predic­tion by us of physical events impossible. To take extreme examples, the factor of human freewill or the factor of God's secret presence. Given these factors, complete accuracy of prediction by us is out of the question: inaccuracy logically follows and it reflects an element of the unpredictable in physical events. Logical causality is complete here. And if we ask what logical causality there is for God's secret presence we can answer that it is the omnipotence of an infinite self-dependent Being. Similarly we can name the logical causality of freewill by saying that it is the human soul, a spark of the Divine Being. Philosophers may argue whether human freewill and God's infinite existence are facts or else whether they are compatible with each other, but we are not now concerned with this problem. What we are concerned with is that Heisenberg's Principle leaves the concept of causal antecedents in the logical sense untouched. That is precisely his meaning when he says that the premise and not the conclusion is at fault in the statement: "If we know the present, we can calculate the future." The conclusion follows by logical causality and, provided the premise is accepted, it Cannot be denied. To deny the premise is not to negate logical causality. It is simply to deny the confident deter­minism of classical physics which held that all the factors of the physical world are knowable, in principle if not in practice, by physicists and that ultimately these factors are particles with simultaneous definite position and velocity and that therefore on the basis of the combined knowledge of these two magnitudes accurate prediction can in principle be made, prediction which would lay down the future with a cast-iron physical fixity.

Science cannot do without logical causality, but the other kind - the deterministic - is a matter of taste, of predisposition.

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It is not a necessity for scientific thinking. Nor, we may add, has it any clear basis in macrophysics as distinguished from microphysics. There is a common error that macrophysics has nothing in it to throw doubt on determinism and that all macrophysical experiments confirm determinism. But Hans Reichenbach has a very pertinent passage on this point. "It is not at all true," he says, "that we ever find strict laws in nature. For all that we observe, each time, is that a law has been approximately fulfilled; a hurled stone, a flowing electrical current, a deflected ray of light, when exactly measured, will never show the course prescribed by the mathematical formula, but there will always be little deviations, so-called errors of observation, which may be decreased by better experimental devices but can never be fully eliminated. How far, however, such errors influence the result of advance calculations can never be told with certainty. It can only be said that the errors will very probably occasion but a slight disturbance - but that is already a statement containing the concept of probability. Thus the idea of probability unavoidably enters the formulation of all laws of nature, if these laws are to be stated with complete conceptual rigour."

Science tried to raise probability to certainty by two means. If we pass to a large number of cases we change the low probability of the single case into the high probability of average occurrence. Thus the physicist, unable to say almost anything about the motion of one molecule in a quantity of gas, could make pretty confident statements about the average motion of millions of molecules. Another way of bettering probability is to look for as many factors of influence as we can and take them into account in our forecast. Thus the astronomer, in order to foretell a planet's position, considers not only the planet's own velocity and the diameter of its own orbit round the sun but also the perturbations from the gravitational force exerted by neighbouring planets. But science never succeeded in changing probability into certainty. All it could achieve was practical certainty. An

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irreducible element of probability always remained and, philosophically, there was no ground for belief that an unbounded improvement of precision could always be possible. To quote Reichenbach again: "At bottom we have here a question of a property of nature; it might well be that there is an absolute limit, short of certainty, to the increase of accuracy. In that case it would be impossible, eventually, to arrive at the making of certain predictions (or even predictions of approximate certainty)."

So, we may dismiss the claim, anywhere or at any time in science, for an actually observed or observable operation of anything beyond very high probability. Causality, as scientifically understood, has been nothing more than a fond hope: no consideration on even macrophysical grounds can scientifically be adduced against Heisenberg's conclusion. As a matter of fact, what Heisenberg asserts is just what on the ground of available scientific evidence philosophical investigation - in contrast to dogmatic scientific thought - feared light be the case.

2

We have now to inquire what sort of entity is the electron or any other sub-atomic unit which lacks simultaneous position and velocity and behaves according to probability instead of causality. The calculus of probability employed by physics today is in terms of a wave-function found by Schrodinger in 1926. At one time it was thought that the electron is both a particle and a wave. Even experimental evidence appeared to confirm this view. Prof. G.P. Thomson prepared a sheet of metal, crystalline in structure and one- millionth of an inch thick, and sent a stream of electrons through it upon a photographic plate on the other side: the pattern traced on the plate was of alternate bright and dark rings - a result which only wave-motion had been credited with producing, for the dark bands would be made by the crest of one wave coinciding with the trough of another,

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thereby cancelling each other, while the bright bands would be due to the crests of two waves coinciding. Here was evidence as reliable as that obtained by photographing tracks, which could only be of particles, in the device known as Wilson's Cloud Chamber or by bombarding with electrons a sheet of glass lightly powdered with zinc sulphide crystals and proving, by the sparks produced, the electrons to be like small bullets, like tiny particles.

Physics was in a quandary. How could an electron be a particle in some experiments and a wave or a "packet" of waves in others? It was pointed out that a universal property of waves is to scatter through space. Ehrenfest calculated that a packet of waves occupying the dimensions of a proton would double its linear dimensions in a ten-million-millionth part of a second, so that obviously such a system of waves would soon grow too big to show the spatial properties of an elementary particle. Even if a pattern of waves could be formulated which would not rapidly scatter while a single electron or proton was pursuing an undisturbed path, the waves would scatter as soon as the particle interacted with other matter: we have direct experimental evidence of this in the photographed patterns produced as if by wave-motion. Thus, if the waves represented, as Schrodinger had originally conjectured, the electric charge of a proton or electron, how would we account for the observational fact that this charge preserves itself intact and the proton and electron maintain their identity and there is not the least scattering?

Could it be that the wave-equation was merely a mathematical construction to correlate certain empirical observations in which particles somehow seemed to act like waves? The doubt was strengthened when it was dear that according to Schrodinger's wave-equation the wave of every single electron needed the whole of three-dimensional space! So two electrons need a space of six dimensions, three a space of nine dimensions and a small crowd of electrons a space of thousands of dimensions! Such waves can best be regarded as not existing anywhere except in a mathematician's conceptual

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space which can be allowed any number of dimensions. All considerations prompted a purely mathematical view of the waves.

Here two physicists. Born and Jordan, stepped forth and worked out the wave-equation on a statistical basis. Today no physicist ascribes to any action of actual physical vibrations the bright and dark rings photographically produced as if by wave-motion. Thus de Broglie, himself the first scientist to speak of matter-waves and start the train of thought which ended in Schrodinger's equation, remarks at the end of his book Matter and Light (page 256) that the waves have nothing except a symbolic character and only appear to be physical reality and that after years of discussion scientists have found it impossible to regard them as physical. Millikan has the same thing to say on pages 267-69 of Electrons (+ and —), Protons, Photons, Neutrons, Positrons and Cosmic Rays. Einstein and Infeld write on pages 305 and 307 of The Evolution of Physics: "The waves provide only the mathematical means of answering questions of a statistical nature.... The only physical significance is that they enable us to answer sensible statistical questions in the case of many particles as well as one." C. Molle and Ebbe Rasmussen in The World and the Atom (page 110) sum up succinctly the attitude of physicists towards the waves: "The waves are only a convenient method for expressing how the electrons behave while passing through a crystal, the different interference maxima (bright rings) being merely the places which in such an experiment are struck by the electrons, while the minima (dark rings) are the places where no electrons occur."

In general terms we may state the statistical view thus:

The concentration or diffusion of the waves is proportional to the greater or lesser probability of a particle being in a certain place. The concentration or diffusion is not of any "density of electric charge but of probability. Similarly, the uniform spreading of the waves is not such a spreading of electric energy but a uniform distribution of the probability that the particle may be anywhere. The waves are probability

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waves, an instrument of calculation, a symbolic representation of our knowledge. The reason why a symbolic wave can appear to behave like a physical entity is that, in all experiments in which it so appears, large numbers of particles are involved, and what we observe is a statistical distribution. To take an elucidatory comparison given by Dingle: we may assess the probability that a single individual will be found at a particular place in a street. Let us suppose the probability is greatest at the centre and falls off steadily away as we approach either end. The probability distribution can then be represented graphically by a wave curve but it will have no physical existence when only one individual is in the street. If 10,000 individuals are there, however, the wave will be visibly displayed by their distribution, and, taken as a whole, may be said to have a physical existence. Our knowledge by probability concerning the individual becomes by analogy from the crowd a physical characteristic of the man. But we must remember that the physical characteristic by analogy has only a statistical significance and is ultimately a mathematical invention and there is no actual wave 'out there'."

The explanation offered by Born and Jordan not only resolves the contradiction between wave and particle but shows itself to be just what one would expect on account of Heisenberg's Principle. If definite position leaves velocity utterly indefinite and vice versa, then in an experiment like Prof. Thomson's in which there is a crystalline sieve with holes just big enough to let one electron pass through each at a time and thus accurately define its position we can never know anything as to where the electron will strike the photographic plate since the speed and the direction - the two components of velocity - must become quite indefinite. Perforce we have to do with probability derived from studying the pattern formed by aggregates of electrons falling on the plate. The wave-equation describes the pattern, but Heisenberg's Principle is the rationale of the wave-equation and renders intelligible why it is an equation not about actual waves but about probabilities of particles.

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So what is "out there" is only the particle. However, let us not take this statement too simply. Since the laws of wave- mechanics relate fundamentally to crowds and not individuals and since the elementary laws about the particle cannot be formulated by specifying positions and velocities at any instant in the simple manner of classical physics, we are left eternally unable to describe as a precise happening in space and time what a particle does. The single particle, therefore, is not like the particle of classical physics. Some scientists hold that there is no real difference so far as position and velocity are concerned and that the particle of modem physics is always in a certain position and is moving at a certain velocity but only our knowledge of that position and velocity is not precise because any attempt we make to measure them necessarily interferes with them. These scientists would say that causality is really operative although we are confined to the probability calculus. But the bulk of opinion is against them: the whole methodology of physics runs counter to their assumption. The basis of modem physics - the rejection of what is "unobservable" in very principle - will give them no standing ground.

What the basis of modem physics permits is best indicated by an analogy employed by Whittaker on page 145 of From Euclid to Eddington. "Suppose," writes Whittaker, "that a child with a penny comes to an automatic machine which supplies chocolate when the penny is put in one slot, and sweets when the penny is put in the other slot. Since he has only one penny, he can get either chocolate or sweets, but not both; from the fact that he can get either at will, is he justified in concluding that they are both present in the machine? Not necessarily; for it is possible to imagine that there is a kind of paste in the machine which is converted into chocolate by his inserting the penny into one slot and into sweets by his inserting the penny into the other. If this latter explanation is correct, then it is possible to imagine the machine fitted with a number of other slots, such that by inserting the penny into any one of them a confection is

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obtained which is intermediate in some proportion between chocolate and sweets. This is analogous to the situation which exists in atomic physics. If we consider one of the elementary entities we can have an accurate knowledge of its position, combined with complete ignorance as to its velocity, or we can have an accurate knowledge of its velocity, combined with complete ignorance as to its position, or we can have a simultaneous partial knowledge of both, but there is no justification for assuming that the entity is a particle in the old sense, possessing simultaneously an exact position and an exact velocity. We have no right to postulate the existence of entities which lie beyond the knowledge actually obtainable by observation, and which have no part in the prediction of future events. Thus the classical concept of a particle must be discarded: in its stead there has been introduced a new fundamental element in the description of the external world, which is called a state."

On page 146 Whittaker has some further illuminating remarks to make: "The method of theoretical physics is essentially to analyse a complicated situation into an aggregate of elementary situations, each of which is governed by some simple law. Thus in the ordinary Newtonian mechanics of a system of bodies the interactions of the bodies are analysed into forces between pairs of particles; and indeed throughout classical theory the ultimate elementary bodies are generally conceived as particles, each occupying a particular point of space at a particular moment, so that the concepts by aid of which the resolution is effected are the concepts of space and time. The great discovery of the present century has been that in atomic physics this method of analysis is wrong: the blurring or imperfect definition, which has been described, simply expresses the fact that the true elementary constituents of nature have not the proper- ties characteristic of Newtonian particles. There are events which extend over more than one point of space and more than one instant of time and which yet are ultimate events: that is, they cannot be analysed into anything simpler than

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themselves. These are precisely the 'states' of quantum mechanics."

To distinguish the modem particle from the classical and invest it with the meaning of the term "state", we may coin the portmanteau word "staticle." This particle is inherently devoid of factors which would allow us to apply the law of causality to physical phenomena, and there is, within specified limits, an inherent indefiniteness in nature. The probability law must be accepted as primary: it cannot be superseded by a more fundamental law of a deterministic kind. To quote Whittaker again: "Kant said, quite justly, that regularity in occurrence is a necessary presumption of the science of physics. He supposed (erroneously) that these regularities must always be of the kind that we meet with in molar (macroscopic) physics, namely, that they must be deterministic as regards individual events; but this is not so. The regularities on which the science of physics is based are statistical regularities, and do not involve complete determinism."

3

Now the question is: How are we to understand statistical regularities, how are we to conceive the probability calculus functioning? According to this calculus, when we are concerned with a large number of "staticles" the indefinitenesses or unpredictable variations of individual "staticles" reduce themselves to an average of uniformity so that what is a marked probability for one "staticle" becomes nearly a certainty for millions and the general indefiniteness becomes "imperceptible to the point nearly of non-existence. The Practical certainty that is the result is sought to be explained °n the analogy of the mathematics of coin-tossing. Provided the conditions of the toss remain the same throughout, if we toss a coin twice the odds are three to one against it coming "heads down both times; seven to one, if we toss it three times; fifteen to one, if four times; until, if we toss it a million time, the odds against it being always heads becomes

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almost inconceivably great and we shall have as good as equal chances of heads and tails. An average of uniformity will be attained - the uncertain variations will practically disappear by cancelling one another and also accurate prediction will be possible. Similarly, predictions such as of eclipses are said to be correctly made because, although the individual "staticles" composing the physical bodies taking part in an eclipse have an unpredictable nature, a huge crowd of these "staticles" are involved. In other words, large-scale phenomena seem to be governed practically by causal laws simply on account of an enormous quantity in them of indefinite "staticles".

This description of uncertainty getting metamorphosed into what seems its very opposite is open to serious criticism. But before we criticise, it may be mentioned that we are not talking of "subjective" probability. The abandonment of the causal law and the acceptance of indefiniteness in nature itself signify that the merely probable correctness of prophesies as to nature is here not due just to human ignorance failing to measure with accuracy a causal operation. Probability is "objective," and statistical regularities such as those of aggregates of electrons are a fundamental trend in natural events. But the fact that a statistical regularity, for all its apparent certainty, remains nothing else than a matter of extremely high probability means that at any moment what is assuredly predicted may not come to pass. Actually the million tosses of a coin might all in succession give us heads! This is always on the cards in a probability calculation. And it is so not because any outside forces might work on the situation. No matter if the conditions of the toss are the same throughout, the unexpected can happen. Probability never rules out the unexpected. Nor is there the least force in it to relegate the unexpected to some remote future and prevent it from occurring the very next minute. If probability by itself were the law of the universe, there would be no explanation of the large uniformities we observe in macrophysics. Automatically and without needing extraneous influence the

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predicted eclipses should on occasion show sudden non- occurrences and even the sun should be seen as not rising one time or another during the long procession of the ages. Why is there such marked regularity in nature? The probability calculus, as illustrated by coin-tossing, has no satisfying answer.

To explain the marked regularity in nature a comparison is also often drawn between it and the data on which life- insurance companies proceed. The actuary is able to predict that so many people of a given age will die each year, though the death of any individual is unpredictable. From a host of accidents a statistical law of probability emerges, by means of which prediction is possible. But would the actuary's generalisations hold good unless the individual deaths from road accidents, diseases and suicides, however unpredictable, were as a matter of fact somehow systematic? Is it logical to expect regularity in the mass without postulating regularity in detail? If we argue that human beings have freewill and that therefore the unpredictable of individual deaths is, in part at least, undeniable even though the actuary's general prediction is correct, we do not yet show how the partially unpredictable events get systematised on the whole. In forming a mass, individual events with some degree of unpredictable ness owing to freewill can only go on aggregating their degrees: there is no reason for practical certainty of forecast to result. The overall regularity must involve a process controlling the individuals. This logic is irrefragable - from human beings down to electrons. Of course, the phrase 'process controlling the individuals" or the phrase "regularity in detail" does not mean that every electron behaves altogether in the same manner, but it does mean that the electron has a behaviour not independent of a systematising and integrating factor, for which the concept of probability, as commonly advanced, has no place.

By analogy with neither coin-tossing nor insurance company procedure can the probability calculus serve to Provide a rationale for the marked regularity in nature. Must,

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then, the old causality come back - operating secretly? Must we endorse the opinion of D.J. Struik: "Statistical regularity is a result of causal relationships. No probability without causality"? Well, the old causal law cannot be accepted ~ unless we wish to negate the very principle on which modem physics is based. The negation would not only bring back the causal law but at the same time shut out both the confirmed contents of relativity theory and the proved findings of quantum study. A return to classical physics is impossible: a specific indefiniteness at the bottom of things has to be retained and also made to cope with the practical definiteness we meet with in the case of large aggregates of nature's fundamental constituents. But if the probability- concept in its usual form will not do and the causal law is taboo, what is to be postulated?

The only answer is that the probability-concept has to be infused with a new meaning. Into the initial indefiniteness as well as into the ultimate regularity a common factor is to be read by which they get connected - a strange factor X working both in the details and in the ensemble and some- how controlling the variations of the details so as to produce regularities in the ensemble although in the details there seems nothing to bring into being any limitation. Since probability is the law of the entire universe, X must be in operation everywhere with its dual function - it must be the single activity which by that dual function is responsible for our universe proceeding as it does. In the absence of determinism no less than of other logical alternatives on the purely physical level, X must be a free self-governing factor - an apparent randomness within a self-specified range, which is yet systematic and integrative by its own uncompelled nature. And this freedom implies that the regularities we observe are not themselves something we can always count upon: at any time X may cease to make predictability possible: the probability calculus is only our mathematical reading of its general process - this calculus cannot be a binding law.

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These are the terms to which modern physics will have to be reduced in the problem of probability. Without them the old deterministic causal law cannot be convincingly abandoned. Curious indeed are the terms and there may be a feeling that it would be better for science if the freely self- governing factor X could be avoided, for X unmistakably suggests some basic World-Will secretly deployed according to its own conscious plan. But, really, to accept this factor is nothing contrary to the temper of modem physics. All that we have to ensure is that the principle of rejecting the unobservable is not broken. That principle is upheld so long as no observable is denied. The law of causality can be brought in only by denying the essential unpredictable ness of observable primary phenomena. What we have done is just to supply the ground, the sufficient reason, for the observables concerned being what they are. They are correlated without being denied. Physics illegitimately becomes metaphysics when observables, instead of being explained, are explained away. If, without denying or quibbling over them, we correlate them by a concept whose full significance may not be compassed by scientific apparatus and may even involve a sort of mystical content, we do not act the meta- physician in a manner which the guiding principle of physics rules out - provided, of course, this concept can exclusively hold the field.

There seems to be no sign of any other concept adequately solving the difficulties we have raised. Thus quite legitimately we may say that modem physics suggests a universal Intelligence hidden at the very heart of things, acting elusively through all entities - obscurely in material forms and more overtly in organic nature and with a semi- 'revelation of itself in humanity.

The tracing of that universal Intelligence's elusive power through the probability calculus illuminates also the hints found of a mysterious presence through the postulate of the staticle". At once we realise the significance of the postulate. For, the elementary and primal body or event which

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bafflingly extends over more than one point of space and over more than one instant of time and thus escapes all final analysis by physical concepts of space-unit and time-unit - what else can this "staticle" with its inherent indefiniteness and natural indeterminacy be except a free transcendent Being's self-manifestation in the terms of microphysics -

A magic's process in a magical space,

An unintelligible miracle's depths

Whose source is lost in the Ineffable?

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Heisenberg's Principle of Indeterminacy

Q: Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty or indeterminacy has it that we can never measure with accuracy both the position and the velocity of an elementary particle. Why is this principle regarded as most revolutionary?

Not all scientists regard this principle as effecting a fundamental revolution. All agree that it marks an absolute physical limit to the measurement of two basic quantities together and that, since correct predictions demand the knowledge of both of them at the same time, we can never have anything except a play of probability at the core of our knowledge in microphysics. From these admissions it can further be said that the law of causality which in physics would make for correct predictions from an accurate calculation of the "state" of a system - that is, the position and velocity of all its parts - has no role in the description of elementary particles.

Having agreed so far, scientists start differing. Some hold the law of causality to be still in operation although we cannot make any use of it in our ultimate description. They declare: "No probability without causality." Others take probability to be an ultimate condition. The former believe that position and velocity are associated quantities which are definitely there but we cannot measure them together with definiteness. The latter say that such belief is quite arbitrary, "e basic particle being not at all one to which these associated quantities can be ascribed as in the old physics.

Several scientists argue: "If with our instruments we fail measure two quantities accurately, how does it prove them to be non-existent together in a definite form? The answer is "No refinement in our instruments will ever take ., us nearer accuracy. For the inaccuracy depends on the size of the elementary particle and on the nature of light. The universe is so made that When the light is powerful the c e s velocity is disturbed by the radiant energy and

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when it is weak we cannot observe the particle sufficiently to note its position. So, when the velocity is untouched, the position remains vague, and when the position may be clear the velocity is altered. There is no way, because of the very constitution of matter and light, to get past this dilemma. So far as observation in physics is concerned, the dilemma is irremediable. The very constitution of matter and light debars us from asserting that beyond a certain point definite position and velocity co-exist. To speak of failing with our instruments to measure them is irrelevant."

The next stage in the argument is: "The co-existence of definite position and velocity is necessary for our thought." To this the answer is: "At one time it was considered necessary for our thought to believe in a space and a time uniform throughout the universe and in a rate of motion which can be called absolute in relation to a perfectly static frame. Einstein showed that in very principle and not only in practice such concepts were for ever removed from observational verification. The constitution of the world put them beyond observation and, since physics has finally to be tested by observation or by observability in principle if not in practice, such concepts are superfluous and have no place in physical formulas. Similarly the co-existence of definite position and velocity is a concept useless in physics: it can have no function in any of our physical formulas."

At this juncture the line of argument runs as follows: "Einstein's relativity theory never did away with causality. Causality is at the bottom of all physics. Even when Heisenberg concludes from his hypothetical experiment with a particle like the electron that position and velocity cannot with definiteness be measured together he is doing it causally, for he is proceeding from premises to a conclusion. So even where causality is unobservable on account of the constitution of things, it must be posited."

Here there is a mix-up between logical causality and physical causality. Logical causality insists that there must be a sufficient reason for every statement and that certain

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antecedents being given certain inferences must be drawn. All discourse, scientific or philosophic, is based on it. But there is nothing in it to weigh the scales either for or against simultaneous definite position and velocity. What it rules is simply this: "If such position and velocity are there, then calculations of physical causality can be made; but if they are not there, then only the calculus of probability can be employed in physics." Logical causality insists that both accurate calculation and probable calculation should be thought of as resulting from a state of affairs which is sufficient ground for them. In the one case, co-existent definite velocity and position; in the other, definite velocity and indefinite position or vice versa. What actually is in nature cannot be decided by merely logical causality: where physics is concerned physical observation is the deciding factor. Logical causality is neutral as between the statements of the two conflicting schools vis-a-vis Heisenberg's principle. It is not violated by the dropping of physical causality - and by jettisoning physical causality we do not cease to be scientific, for what is at the bottom of all thought in physics is only the causality that is logical."

Heisenberg's principle is really most revolutionary. The reason why its true character is not at once understood is that its organic connection with the physical research that went before it is not properly seized. Most books start with it the topic whether definite position and velocity co-exist. But this topic did not actually arise from it. We should be mistaken in holding that prior to Heisenberg's hypothetical experiment nobody had wondered whether those two quantities could co-exist in a definite form. In fact, as soon as the inadequacy was seen of the early picture of the atom which took the atom 0 be a tiny solar system with electrons travelling in definite orbits at a definite speed around a nucleus of heavier Particles, the question came up: "Can definite statements be made concerning the position of the electrons and their velocity around the nucleus?" A whole army of physicists, "including Bohr himself who had proposed the first solar-

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system model, worked for more than twelve years and proved that such statements could only be made in macro physics: sub-atomic events were shown to fall outside them The relation of the electrons to the orbits of rotation within the atom was so strange that the two quantities - position and velocity - could never be both stated accurately at the same time of any microphysical body. All that Heisenberg did was to sum up this discovery with mathematical precision: he said that the margin of the inaccuracy or uncertainty which is always present is invariably a function of that small but positive number which is termed Planck's Constant (roughly .000000000000000000000000006624). It is this summing up that is really his principle of uncertainty or indeterminacy.

And the experiment which he imagined with gamma rays to observe velocity and with red light to observe position is not the foundation of his principle. When people look on it as the foundation they begin asking why the mere failure of an experiment should lead to a basic revolution. Their line of argument, even so, is erroneous: we have already pointed out the error. But the error would not be committed at all if one realised that the experiment was suggested by Heisenberg to satisfy the plea that lack of observational apparatus made us conclude from those twelve years of atomic study the incompatibility of simultaneous exact position and velocity. Heisenberg defined the needed apparatus and with his experiment illustrated with finality the principle he had enunciated. The very conditions required for an appeal to observation were proved to be unobtainable in the nature of things. Resort to observation was convincingly shown to be fruitless and meaningless.

Thus, if the experiment is considered in its organic connection with physical research before it, it comes as the last and clinching step of that research and not as the firs1 and opening theme of a possible controversy. It is not a subject for fresh discussion: it resolves an old problem.

The extreme revolution which the resolution of that

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problem by Heisenberg's principle represents is our complete inability to formulate about the elementary particles the basic laws by specifying positions and velocities at any instant in the manner of classical physics: we are left eternal- , unable to describe as a precise happening in space and time what a particle does. The particle of modern physics does not occupy a particular point of space at a particular moment; it has an inherent indefiniteness which makes it escape to a small degree from the spatio-temporal scheme of our universe. Physics can still deal with it but by a new under- standing of the term "state": a "state" in the realm of quanta is an ultimate event which concerns a particle yet extends over more than one point of space and more than one instant of time and can be measured only by probabilities. The introduction of a fundamental probability amounts to an admission that in regard to the elementary particles the spatio-temporal scheme of our universe with its implication of physical causality is exceeded to a small degree.

Could we interpret this admission to mean that the physical universe is no longer a closed and self-contained system and that there is a minute yet highly significant pointer - highly significant because at the sheer basis of things - to a beyond with which physics cannot deal? Most physicists would be disposed to say No - and yet...1

POSTSCRIPT

Cosmological Uncertainty

(From "Scientific American", September 1960)

On the very largest scale, as on the smallest, man's effort to "Discover the detailed workings of nature may be frustrated

Recently Bohm has made out a plausible case for a sub-electronic world which would hold the cause of the sub-atomic, even though the indeterminacy "principle would be valid on the level of the latter. But no experimental grounds e been offered and scientists have been impressed but not convinced. Action, in science, cannot come independently of experiment - and, in the domain of theory itself, Bohm is not so cogent yet as to impress all scientists.

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by an essential principle of uncertainty. So argues the British mathematician and cosmologist William H. McCrea n recent issue of Nature.

He begins by assuming that every part of the universe interacts with every other part, and that all interacts propagate at the speed of light. If so, the form in which see distant parts of the universe is the form in which they now exerting all their influence on our local region. "Therefore we can, in principle, predict the immediate future behaviour of our own part of the universe."

The situation is quite different for regions remote from us and from each other. McCrea considers two regions, P and Q, each a billion light years from the earth and in opposite directions. We see both P and Q as they were a billion years ago. But the influence that each was exerting on the other at that time depends on their respective states two billion years earlier, about which we have no information whatever. If the universe were finite, the difficulty could eventually be overcome by continuing observations for a sufficiently long time and then making predictions for still later times. How- ever, "we almost certainly have to regard the universe as unbounded....It thus appears that there is an uncertainty in cosmology... occasioned by the fact that the speed of light is not infinite, that is complementary to the uncertainty in c atomic physics... occasioned by the fact that the quantum of action is not zero."

McCrea has calculated that the differences between the predictions of "evolutionary" and "steady-state" cosmologies lie within the limits of this uncertainty. Therefore, h suggests, the question of which cosmology is correct is inherently unanswerable. In general, we can assert almost nothing about what the universe is like at great distances ( space or time). This view "seems more satisfactory than the recent trend toward a belief that the nature of the 'whole universe has already been discovered."

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Materialism and Sense-Perception

The scientific account of the complex of agencies involved in sense- perception is worth viewing in its correct bearings on the question whether materialism is a valid doctrine.

There is a tendency today in certain scientific quarters to , . "Matter is only the version which sense-perception gives of an unknown reality. An impact comes upon the sense-organs; the nerve-terminals are stimulated; nerve- currents start moving; they reach the brain-cells and there is sense-perception as of actual objective matter existing. Now, evidently, the perception is an image. What proof have we that this image is true? Verification, in science, is always by seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling or touching. Yet, whether we see, hear, taste, smell or touch, we have nothing except sense-perception: that is, an image, in the broad connotation of the term. So there is no means of verifying sense- perception. At most we may aim at correlating the various sides of it. We cannot get beyond it. Hence we have on the one hand an image of the world and on the other the unknown world itself. Scientifically, we can be said to work not on the world itself but on an image of it produced by sense-organs, nerve-terminals, nerve-currents and brain- cells, and therefore there is no proof of the world being matter rather than a non-material reality which is imaged by us as material."

What shall be our comment on this declaration? Only one thing: it is capital balderdash. We cannot with logical consistency talk of an unknown world acting on the sense-organs Meeting the nerve-terminals and sending messages in e form of nerve-currents to the brain-cells, when clearly those very organs and terminals and currents and cells involve actual objective material existence of the precise sort which is said to be in doubt! We as good as say: "The material world as a real entity comes to be in doubt only if sense-organs' nerve-terminals, nerve-currents and brain-cells ^h are part of the same world really exist to receive the

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Materialism and sense-perception

The scientific account of the complex of agencies involved in sense-perception is worth viewing in its correct bearings on the question whether materialism is a valid doctrine.

There is a tendency today in certain scientific quarters to declare: "Matter is only the version which sense-perception gives of an unknown reality. An impact comes upon the sense- organs; the nerve-terminals are stimulated; nerve- currents start moving; they reach the brain-cells and there is sense-perception as of actual objective matter existing. Now, evidently, the perception is an image. What proof have we that this image is true? Verification, in science, is always by seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling or touching. Yet, whether we see, hear, taste, smell or touch, we have nothing except sense-perception: that is, an image, in the broad connotation of the term. So there is no means of verifying sense- perception. At most we may aim at correlating the various sides of it. We cannot get beyond it. Hence we have on the one hand an image of the world and on the other the unknown world itself. Scientifically, we can be said to work not on the world itself but on an image of it produced by sense-organs, nerve-terminals, nerve-currents and brain- cells, and therefore there is no proof of the world being matter rather than a non-material reality which is imaged by us as material."

What shall be our comment on this declaration? Only one thing: it is capital balderdash. We cannot with logical consistency talk of an unknown world acting on the sense-organs and affecting the nerve-terminals and sending messages in the form of nerve-currents to the brain-cells, when clearly those very organs and terminals and currents and cells involve actual objective material existence of the precise sort which is said to be in doubt! We as good as say: "The material world as a real entity comes to be in doubt only if sense- organs, nerve-terminals, nerve-currents and brain-cells which are part of the same world really exist to receive the

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impact of the unknown reality which alone is their actual objective cause as it is also the sole objective cause of everything else in that world." Utter self-contrad8"86 of here. Is it not plain that the whole complex of agencies said to be responding to the unknown reality's impact should to fall under the category of image? How can we assume that these agencies are what we take them to be? Are they not as much part of the image-world as anything else we call by that name? Eyes are as much an image as floating clouds- ears breaking waves; noses, as violets and dew-drenched dust tongues, as bits of sugar and pieces of salt; hands, as stiff o soft clothes, rough or smooth wood-work, hot or cold steel regular or irregular stones; nerve-terminals, as blades of grass and strings of thread; nerve-currents, as running streams and drifts of air; brain-cells, as diamond-beads and flower-seeds. So we should be driven to declare that our image of the world is itself produced by means of images, or that images interact with the world and give us our image of it! This is unmitigated meaninglessness, a vicious circle, if our conclusion is intended to be that the world's nature is not material as our sense-perceptions incline us to believe.

To account for the image of the world, a particular set of images seems to be already granted, and we cannot use this particular set to account for itself. In other words, we cannot hold that the images of sense-organs, nerve-terminals, nerve- currents and brain-cells are due to sense-organs, nerve- terminals, nerve-currents and brain-cells. Either these things really exist as matter or they are a mere image. Call them mere image and we have no means of accounting for world-image of matter. Call them real material existences, and we have no ground for refusing real material existence the rest of the world, for we have already conceded materiality which was at debate!

If sense-organs, nerve-terminals, nerve-currents brain-cells do not exist actually and objectively as ma there can be for science no sense-perception and not even the image of any world. The scientific image-theory can make

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meaning only after we have granted that the image we have of essentially a true reflection of what exists. Then there will be real sense-organs, real nerve-terminals, real nerve-currents, real brain-cells - all essentially what they seem to us material existences receiving an impact from the world and getting the world truly imaged. This, of course, w not preclude incomplete imaging or a variation of p-structure depending on position and state of the receiving entity. Nor does it preclude error or illusion: in fact, there is no point in even speaking of error or illusion unless ,we can say we know what it is not to be committing an error or to be suffering from an illusion. But the granting of essential truth of image does preclude in science the possibility of the world being not the material existence we believe it to be on the evidence of the image we have of it. We must either accept the image as essentially true or repudiate the whole image-theory in its scientific garb. Scientifically, we can have only a fact of interaction between different parts of the world, resulting in the production of a true image which tells us that the world is material.

This conclusion does not prejudice the issue whether the ultimate constituent of matter is material or no. One point, however, needs to be stressed. Even if the ultimate constituent be non-material, we do not negate the existence of matter. For, we arrive at it by studying and analysing matter and as soon as matter is refused actual objective existence its constituent cannot remain in existence actually and objectively. Matter can never be cavalierly brushed away.

If we wish to assert that our image of the world gives us genuine indication of what the world is like, we must stop arguing on the lines of sense-organs, nerve-terminals, nerve-currents and brain-cells and begin with pure consciousness say that in perception we have only a certain kind of contents of consciousness and that we have no notion of outside our consciousness makes the contents such and land such. Here we go clean beyond scientific imagism and land in sheer philosophy, with three further steps to consider.

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These steps are: (1) solipsism, the belief in the existence nothing except oneself, because everything and everyone figuring in perception are just the contents of one'61701^ consciousness; (2) pluralism of consciousness, the belief the existence of many conscious beings who carry their own contents of consciousness and who interact among them - selves; (3) objectivism, the belief in an outer world other than one's own consciousness and composed of other conscious n beings and of an unknown reality whose impact makes the perception-contents of each consciousness such and such

Naturally the philosopher has to start with his own consciousness - in this case, the perception-contents of it But surely they have a certain involuntary character, we seem to suffer perception and not to will it, there is a given- ness about it which appears to go beyond the "1" 's wishful activity. Every time we stumble against a stone, are dazzled by a flash or hear a disagreeable bang, we realise that perception is not always according to our wishes. A strict solipsism centering in the "I" which one knows from day to day is, therefore, unconvincing. There must be a world outside this "I". But is that world composed only of other 'T" s who interact with one's own? To multiply the "I"s is not to solve the difficulty raised by the involuntariness, sufferance and given-ness noticeable in perception by each "I • Besides, if one goes beyond one's own "I" to acknowledge other 'T's there is no reason to deny outside existence to many other entities. Thus the whole familiar universe comes back. But because of our special starting-point in pure consciousness, a starting-point which does not presuppo5 the actual material existence of sense-organs, nerve-terminals, nerve-currents and brain-cells, we are under no logical obligation to consider the universe material. An alternative left us of conceiving it in non-material terms. ,

Strong reasons can be put forth either way. The decision must be given according as the materialistic or non-materialistic view explains and correlates the la e range of facts. But it may be mentioned that even the non

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materialistic view can be of several kinds, as is obvious from the host of idealist, religious and spiritual philosophies. The A which is perhaps most in tune with- the starting-point in one's own consciousness is that which Molds the involuntariness sufferance and given-ness noticeable in perception to due to reception's coming to the "I" from some wider range of one's own being, some range normally hidden. We nave actual awareness of memories, desires, thoughts, visualisations getting into focus out of concealed regions of our own being. Those regions could very well be the cause and creator of our perception. And when we weigh the sense of vastness in that aspect of perception which we call the universe, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that the wider hidden regions are ultimately an infinite Consciousness, sole and supreme. But there is nothing inconsistent if the infinite Consciousness has many finite consciousnesses as its self- formulations and has also a world-order as another self- formulation for presentation to those finite consciousnesses through a particular perceiving arrangement, namely, sense- experience, which produces the impression of materiality. In fact, to regard the sole and supreme Consciousness in such a light harmonises best with the picture our perception gives us - the picture of many finite beings and a world-order. Then we shall have an outer world other than each consciousness and in that -world other conscious beings and a Sudden reality to be perceived as material. At the same time we shall have an explanation of why the hidden reality monies in an essentially common form to the various conscious beings: it comes so because, on the one hand, the same hidden reality is presented to them and, on the other, ^e same supreme Consciousness is their secret self of selves.

Commencing with consciousness we can arrive at a non- materialistic philosophy in which the living core of solipsism is combined both with pluralism of beings and with objectivism This way of thinking, however, simply ignores science as a starting-point, though by granting objectivism it leaves room for all the materiality of the world which we have seen

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to be inevitable in the scientific account of sense-n And here the image we have of the world is taken to be essentially-true and still spiritual: a material world is accepted as producing a true image of its materiality, but the materiality is seen to be the self-formulation of a s Consciousness. In the case of scientific as distinguished from philosophic imagism, we cannot go beyond materiality .So it is of no use as a weapon against materialists and does not per se, provide any possibility of a non-materialistic interpretation of the world or of affirming that science is based only o images and therefore true knowledge lies beyond science

All the same, we must not forget in what context scientific imagism stultifies itself. If the world-image is taken to be possibly different from what the world really is like, we end in swallowing our own tails. But if the world-image is taken to give a correct notion of the world, then while the immediate conclusion is the world's materiality a new problem arises whose solution cannot help being non-materialistic. The problem is: how is it that the stimulation of nerve- terminals produces a true image of the world? Our mode of perceiving carries no guarantee of the image corresponding with the object: on the contrary, the odds are that the image has a correspondence with the object in the same sort of way in which a catalogue has a correspondence with the thing catalogued. Take the fact of vision. Supposing that a coloured tree actually exists, how can we acquire a true image of it? Light is reflected from the coloured tree, conveying signs of its colour and its boundaries in the form of vibrations that have a certain frequency and pattern. These vibrations impinge on the nerve-terminals in our eyes, but how do brain-cells, to which the nerve-currents go, translate currents into the sensation of seeing a coloured tree. Neither the vibrations nor the nerve-currents were treelike either in colour or shape. How do the colour and shape of t manage to be transported by them? Code-message5 a we get: how are they correctly decoded by us? What ^ mates a genuine perception? The nature of the means of

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perception seems likely to leave us completely in the dark as to the true character of the world of so-called matter. And yet, as we have reasoned, it is impossible at the same time to hold the scientific view of perception and deny an essential correspondence between image and object. Common sense has' always accepted an essential correspondence, and logic confirms common sense in the teeth of a seeming to the contrary. But when we try to understand how the image world and the real world could tally, science has no illumi­nating word for us.

The sole means by which here the impossible can happen is some sort of intuitive activity on our part. It is as though our consciousness had a direct touch on the world, bringing a knowledge of what is outside our consciousness by a going forth and getting intimate with it and then interpreting the nerve-messages in the light of that intimacy! Otherwise there can never be any definite ground for the truth of our perception. But this manner of attaining essential correspon­dence is nothing that materialism can explain or allow. A secret extra-sensory perception, an occult super-normal knowledge, a direct intuitive comprehension, a cognition by some degree of identity - this is at work behind the condi­tions imposed by an arrangement of external stimulus and sense-response. In the very act of perceiving matter to be matter we have a non-materialistic phenomenon without which there would be utter ignorance of the world's nature. Hence, while refusing to be drawn towards a non-material­istic conclusion by way of a supposed ignorance of the world's nature, we are pushed inevitably into a view of perception which breaks sheer through the formula of materialism. But there is, of course, all the difference be­tween the right m0de and the wrong of getting to the nonmaterialistic discovery.

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Matter and Mind

"advance" hits were scored in stringently conditioned experiments so greatly in excess of chance expectations that the odds against their being in fact due to chance were, on the most conservative estimate, of the order of 1032 (i.e. 1 followed by 32 zeros) to 1.

She takes it upon herself to return a clear answer to the four most important criticisms about such astonishing results. She writes: "First, the successes could not have been due to inadequate shuffling of the cards. No use was made of such relatively crude methods as hand shuffling: the order of presentation of the cards was systematically 'randomized', by methods which are familiar to statisticians, and which are fully described in the original articles.

"Secondly, the critic may point out that it is notoriously easy (as witness the case of the horse Clever Hans described in New Biology No. 5') for the agent (the alleged 'transmitter') to convey information to the subject quite unwittingly by the tone of his voice or by small unconscious movements. In Seal's experiments, however, agent and subject were unable to see each other, and the agent never spoke. The signal 'next guess' was given by a third person (referred to as 'the experimenter'), who sat close to the agent, but who, at the time of giving the signal, had not seen the upturned card.

"Thirdly, it may be said that the methods of statistical analysis employed must have been either (a) intrinsically unsound, or (b) unsuited to the particular type of material. The answer to (a) is that the methods employed were the normal techniques for the assessment of odds against chance, that to reject them would involve rejecting the whole mathematical theory of probability which forms the theoretical basis of statistics. As regards (b), the application of these methods to the experimental data was carried out under the supervision of some of the leading authorities in the country

' This horse was for a time believed by many people (including his owner) to be tapping out answers to sums held up before him on a slate. It was finally discovered that he was in fact responding to tiny unconscious signs of tension and relaxation made by the person holding the slate.

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including Professor R.A. Fisher, and none of the many statisticians who have since scrutinized the procedure have able to make any but minor criticisms which do not affect the statistical significance of the results.

"Fourthly, the critic may point out that the most perfect statistical techniques will give misleading results if they are applied to data that have been selected to prove a case. Can we be sure that nothing of the sort has happened here? Can we be sure, in other words, that the results statistically analysed are in fact all the results? - that the experimenters have never succumbed to the temptation (so familiar to those who have ever tried a promising hypothesis statistically) of saying, after an unsuccessful result, 'we won't count this one'? The answer can be given categorically. No result was ever ruled out after the event. The only results that were not included in the final calculations were the results of certain runs of guesses (such as the clairvoyant runs shortly to be described*), which it had been decided in advance should not form part of the main experiment."

After this sharp though brief scrutiny of the objections, Mrs. Knight elucidates the immensity of the odds involved and gives her general conclusions. "As already stated, the odds against chance in the second experiment with Shackle- on were of the order of 1032 to 1. What this implies may be made clearer by a parallel. The chance of guessing the day and month of a person's birthday correctly at the first attempt is, of course, 1 in 365 (if we disregard leap years). Now, as we can discover by the use of Logarithmic tables, 1032 equals approximately 36512; so that the odds against Shackleton's results being due to chance are equivalent to the odds against correctly guessing the birthdays of twelve people in succession. In short, though we can never completely eliminate the possibility that the results may be no "ore than a gigantic coincidence, the probability is so small

' The description is: "runs in which the agent merely touched the back of • card without looking at it."

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that it may in practice be disregarded: whether we like it o,. not, we must accept the conclusion that there is some cause- factor involved that we do not yet understand."

Then, facing "the most disturbing feature of the experiments... precognition," she searches for the most "plausible" explanation of the undeniable "cause-factor" - the explanation that would least demand the abandonment of theoretical presuppositions favourable to a materialistically inclined science. "The only remotely plausible explanation that has been so far offered," she writes, "is that put forward by the late H.F. Saltmarsh. Saltmarsh pointed out that (as has long been recognised) what we experience as 'now' has always some extension in time. Experiences, one might say, do not drop into the past, but fade into the past; a moment of time with no duration, like a point in space with no magnitude, is a mere conceptual artefact. Furthermore, the duration of the 'specious present', as it is technically called, varies with the individual's mental attitude; it is less when he is concentrating intensely, greater when he is relaxed. These facts are generally accepted, but the specious present has usually been regarded as extending only into the past. Saltmarsh, however, suggested that it may also extend a short distance into the future; and he further suggested that the duration of the specious present may be greater at the subconscious than at the conscious level, so that an event that is already past or still to come, for the conscious mind, may be 'now' for the subconscious. Telepathic communication is generally held to take place at the subconscious level, so that Saltmarsh's hypothesis would, if it were credible, provide a possible explanation of precognition. The hypothesis receives some support from the fact that when, in the experiment with Shackleton, the interval between guesses was increased from 3 seconds to 5, the subject became restless and irritable and ceased to score above chance expectations."

As Mrs. Knight notes, the extension of awareness into the future - which is the essence of the specific mystery of precognition - is not avoided by Saltmarsh's theory. Even to

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touch the future 3 seconds ahead is to revolutionise the whole meaning of time and causality and to raise the query whether the new meaning is compatible with materialism. Mrs. Knight records that most workers in the field of ESP argue that no physical cause can account for a subject's cognisance of future events. But to her the argument does not seem entirely conclusive. She states: "If we can swallow the colossal prima facie improbability that an event E2 can cause an event El which precedes it in time, it is surely straining at a gnat to suggest that the improbability is greater if E2 and El are physical than if they are mental events."

Some confusion is at work in this statement. Precognition implies not only that two periods of time - the present and the future - are as if at the same moment but also that two locations in space are as if at the same point, for event E2 and event El occur in different places as well as in different times, the former where the agent sits and the latter where the subject does. In other words, precognition implies telepathy into the bargain. Now, if we talk of precognition in physical terms instead of mental, E2 which is to occur in the brain of a person 3 seconds from now causes El which occurs just now in the brain of another person: the second person's brain knows at the moment what the first one's brain which will know the same thing 3 seconds afterwards makes it know. But brains are definitely separate entities located in space. To suggest that precognition occurs between brains is to put them not only outside the time observed in the physical universe but also outside that universe's space, for the two brains have had communication as if they had been existent at the same point. This is to contradict all that we know of brains, whereas of minds we may argue, as does Professor Price whom Dingwall and Parsons as well as Mrs. Knight quote, that they cannot be considered entirely separate entities: they cannot be reduced completely to spatial system such as brains are and, at least at the subconscious or subliminal level they have every appearance of being encapsulated", a joint entity. Mrs. Knight herself refers

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towards the end of her article to psychologists being familiar with the hypothesis of a "common unconscious" put for- ward by Jung who, according to her, "based his view mainly on the fact that certain symbols and images, which he called 'archetypes', and which bear very little resemblance to the experiences of normal life, occur with striking consistency in folk-lore, fairy-tales, dreams and the delusions of the in- sane." Hence, on her own admissions, the "colossal prima facie improbability" involved in precognition must be far smaller-if E2 and El are mental than if they are physical events. To refuse to believe they are physical events is not to strain at a gnat but to avoid swallowing a second camel on top of the first.

How big this camel may be can be gauged still more if in addition to looking at the common or collective unconscious m relation to space we look at it in relation to time. Jung has an eloquent passage: "If it were permissible to personify the unconscious, we might call it a collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death, and, from having at his command a human experience of one or two million years, almost immortal. If such a being existed, he would be exalted above all temporal change; the present would mean neither more nor less to him than any year in the one hundredth century before Christ; he would be a dreamer of age-old dreams and, owing to his immeasureable experience, he would be an incomparable prognosticator. He would have lived countless times over the life of the individual, of the family, tribe, and people, and he would possess the living sense of the rhythm of growth, flowering, and decay." Something that could be "an incomparable prognosticator" may promise to be extended in the future no less than in the past and to supply a ground for the phenomena of precognition as well as of what parapsychologists call retrocognition or clairvoyant awareness of concealed past events. A sort of "altogetherness" seems a feature of the collective subliminal and it is hardly illogical to think of this feature as covering

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not space alone but time also. At least Dr. Jacobi, with Jung's authority behind her, has written: "The unconscious manifests itself in such a way that it seems to stand outside of space and time: it is spaceless and timeless." We have, on the other hand, no reason to think of brains as being free of time- limitations any more than of space-limitations.

A physical explanation of the precognitive experience is really ar1 impossibility. It would be an impossibility even if the telepathic experience were physically explicable. But that experience, too, defies physical explanation. Mrs. Knight is honest enough to concede about telepathy: "The upholders of mental causation must be granted their point, that belief in a physical cause of telepathy is at present little more than an act of faith." However, she enters a caveat. She asks us not to regard as entirely conclusive the argument that since telepathic communication, unlike all known forms of physical radiation, seems to be unaffected by distance, a physical explanation is untenable. She counter-argues: "The longest distance over which results of undoubted significance have been obtained is some 200 miles - between London and Merkses, in Belgium. The alleged evidence for telepathy over longer distances - as between New York and London - is quite unconvincing. To conclude from this data alone that telepathic communication is unaffected by distance may be as fallacious as it would be to conclude that wireless reception is unaffected by distance because we can tune in to Luxembourg as easily as to the Third Programme."

That "may", of course, is welcome as indicating that merely a possibility is being pointed out. And how poor the possibility is has been shown in the very next paragraph by Mrs. Knight herself: "The wireless analogy must not be pressed too far. It is true that electrical activity is continually going on in the brain, and that certain characteristic rhythms of brain activity can be picked up and recorded by appropriate instruments. These and similar facts have made the ""'an-in-the-street very receptive to the suggestion that-ESP lay be due to 'some kind of wireless effect'. But it must be

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emphasised that there is no evidence whatever that a hum brain is capable of picking up radiations from another brain or that the effect of such 'reception', even if it could occur would be to cause the recipient to have conscious experiences which were similar to those of the transmitter."

Yes, the possibility of "mental radio" is extremely poor Equally meagre is the chance of reducing telepathy to the action of "other sensory modalities besides those we already know" - modalities which, as Mrs. Knight says, must differ from the known ones not only in degree but in kind. Still, she is inclined to clutch at straws as when she writes that "if dowsing or water-divining can be shown to be a genuine physical phenomenon - say, a reaction to some kind of electromagnetic influence - there should be in the case of telepathy no premature closing of our account with physical reality." This is clutching at straws because she also writes:

"Admittedly, there is only a remote analogy between dowsing and ESP." A similar desperate concession to the supposed scientific temper of scepticism about the extra- sensory appears to be in the caveat to which we have referred.

Moreover, the caveat, taken even in isolation, is based on a mistake. Within a range of 200 miles it may be as easy for a Londoner to tune in to a place in Belgium as to the BBC in his own city and then the law of inverse square connecting distance with intensity in physical radiation may have no perceptibly crucial bearing. But examine the situation a little differently. Do not try to show that within such a range the intensity can hardly be proved to be always uniform or that, judging from short-distance experience, we should refrain from generalising that the intensity never weakens over any stretch of space. Try rather to answer the question: If telepathy obeys the inverse square law, would not a person who could send a telepathic message from Luxembourg to London produce with the same effort an enormously powerful effect from one room to another in the same house? There is no record of any such overwhelming impact at close quarters. This completely demonstrates that, unlike physical

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radiation, telepathy is unaffected by distance.

With the establishment of telepathy as being not due to physical causes, precognition, which is the greater marvel and which Mrs. Knight considers a fact as indisputable as telepathy, becomes a fortiori non-physical. All the small hesitations she feels bound to register have no value and impede not in the slightest the clear doom rung spectacularly of epiphenomenalism by ESP.

4

By studying Mrs. Knight's significant acceptances and clearing up the little doubts she entertains, we have shown that in ESP there is spectacularly irrefutable evidence of mind being not only a vera causa but also an independent existent in its own right with an extension beyond the individual organism and with operations that are outside the body and brain, outside even physical space and time, though capable of contact with them all. For this extension we have allowed the label introduced and discussed by Mrs. Knight herself - Jung's "common (or collective) unconscious".

Now we have to make some corrections about this extra- individual extension of mind. The first concerns what Mrs. Knight says of it at almost the close of her article. Her passage runs: "The hypothesis is consistent with the view which is now widely held on other grounds, that ESP does not, as was originally supposed, mark the beginning of a new stage of evolution, but that it is a relic of a more primitive function. In his address to the Zoological Section of the British Association in 1949, Professor A.C. Hardy suggested that telepathic communication may be most evident among gregarious animals and social insects; and if this were so, it would certainly help to solve some of the main theoretical problems of animal instinct. Observations made by Soal in his experiments confirm, up to a point, the view that telepathy is a primitive function since he finds that the majority of successful subjects are of the emotional, illogical,

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'intuitive' type, and that rigorous intellectual training on the whole, inimical to success. Women, on the whole, make better percipients than men, and children than ^

University students (from whom the majority of mental subjects have so far been drawn) are possibly the most unsuitable types of all, and it would seem n^ worth while to experiment with psychopathic and mentally defective subjects, or with patients who have undergone prefrontal lobotomy.'"

This passage has the appearance of a queer Parthian shot It seems to sink the status of ESP when ESP is found scientifically undeniable and when the odds against its being compatible with a materialistic philosophy are astronomical. Does Mrs. Knight forget that in her book of selections from William James she has stated that ESP very strongly recommends to us James's theory of a cosmic consciousness of varying kinds or a collection of several cosmic consciousnesses? Does she seriously mean to urge that such a consciousness or such a collection of consciousnesses is something altogether inferior to the human stage in evolution? To be able to work without the limited and fallible senses, to triumph mentally over physical space and have the possibility of exceeding the prison-house of the ego- mentality - do these implications of telepathy look like implications of "a relic of a more primitive function" than the human mind? And, remember, ESP is not confined to telepathy: there is precognition which mentally triumphs over physical time over and above including telepathic transcendence of matter and the space-relations of the material world. If possibilities are opened to us of being Plato's "spectator of all time and all existence", are we confronting a sub-human relic or the promise of a super- human development?

No doubt, the facts themselves of ESP are very primitive - reading of Zenner cards and the like trivialities; but they are

' A brain operation which puts some of the higher centres out of action.

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chinks in a wall beyond which lie gigantic vistas that are, in Mrs. knight's own words, "most disturbing" and "incredible" . Even "straight" telepathy, particularly if it be not due to physical causes, has, in her view, theoretical implications "far-reaching indeed". Precognition she regards as a more colossal wonder, whether it be physically or mentally caused , since "with its apparent implication that causation can work backward in time it seems

to violate one of the essential presuppositions of science." And yet phenomena magnificently revolutionary in significance are sought to he made typical of emotional, illogical, femininely "intuitive", infantile, psychopathic and cretinish subjects or of animal herds and insect communities!

We may grant that in a "common unconscious" there could be primitive or else chaotic or even demonic elements, since many layers of the subliminal are covered by that phrase. But surely this does not primitivise the whole of the subliminal. Surely, too, we may note in sub-human or non- intellectual stages an easier operation of telepathy and still avoid the howler of refusing to see in it and all the more in precognition a sign of the next stage in evolution. If rigorous intellectual training is, on the whole, inimical to success in ESP, then there is something wrong with intellectuality - a defect which, for all the glorious things intellect can do, is an obstacle in evolutionary progress. It is a commonplace that intellectual activity of the abstract kind is not the whole of human culture - the romantic temperament, the artistic "imagination, the social sense, the ethical emotion, the religious aspiration are some of the things that have to fill the gaps left by abstract thinking. The abstract thinker himself carries, implicit in his specific role, artistic and ethical and even religious attitudes: the feel of "form", the devotion to truth", the faith in the "reason" and "harmony" embodied in the universe and the thrill to its vast "comprehensibility". Then there is the part played by what Einstein does not hesitate to characterise as "intuition". Would it be right to say that the master thinkers in physics are being "primitive"

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in a derogatory sense when, by being intuitive and making difficult theoretical leaps sheer beyond any possible inductive suggestion from empirical data/ they light upon mathematical constructions like those of relativity theory? There are levels of intuition - and just because the word "intuitive" has been debased by popular novelists who mostly apply it to feminine "hunches" we should not consider it unfit for distinguishing an evolutionary stage higher than our present one in which the abstract intellect has much to say.

Besides, what is the essence of the "logical necessity" by which the abstract thinker guides himself, determining one step to be correct and another incorrect, choosing his course and arriving at conclusions? It is certainly not something which can itself be argued out. To argue out anything, we already take for granted that there is logical necessity. Arguments are justified by the presence of logical necessity:

the presence of logical necessity cannot be justified by arguments. We cannot use logic to prove logic. Logical necessity is beyond proof. Its basis lies in self-evidence, in intuitive perception by us. The logical operation of the intellect is intuitive through and through, though the intellect in its general functioning is not a directly intuitive agent and has laboriously to construct tentative and uncertain knowledge by various means unlike the authentically intuitive consciousness of an ultra-mental sort which would carry the seal of its own knowledge by an inner identity with its object. Intuitiveness is not necessarily sub-intellectual, and in its authentic form it is something which intellectuality would impede by its lower mode of working. Not that intellectuals cannot be authentically intuitive as much as any other type:

they can, but by quieting the usual activity of the intellect, going within themselves, becoming receptive to some sort of inspiration or revelation, most often by surrendering their problems to the subliminal and suddenly finding them solved or at least greatly simplified and elucidated.

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As with intuition, so with telepathy and precognition: acute intellectuality would interfere with the working of a higher mode of mentality which acts without both sense- observation and logical inference. Non-intellectuals may more easily prove transmitters of a cosmic consciousness's hidden powers. This does not mean that these powers are sub-intellectual: it only means that intellectuality is to be surpassed and not clung to as the grand finale of psychological evolution. The intellect may be a fine instrument for formulating and expressing truth: it may not be the best instrument for discovering truth. An intellectual who is not too proud of his own activity nor too attached to its analytic operations but can open himself to deeper and higher ranges of awareness by a certain in-drawn passivity would undoubtedly be as telepathic and precognitive as one who is less "cerebrotonic". ESP tests show that a relatively passive state is what is most helpful. To quote Mrs. Knight: "Thouless found that the best results were obtained when the subject was not greatly concerned about the results of the experiment, and was not consciously trying to make a high score." Besides, ESP is acknowledged to be a subliminal affair signalled to the surface mind. Mrs. Knight says that telepathic communication is generally held to take place at the subconscious level, and the subconscious character of precognition is indicated by her comment: "Though the term 'extra-sensory perception' is convenient and widely used, it must be realised that the subject's experience differed in many ways from what is ordinarily called perception. Usually, he had no idea whether or not he was guessing right - a right guess 'felt' no different from a wrong one: and furthermore, and more surprisingly, the recording of the guess, whether in speech or writing, seemed to be accompanied by a minimum of conscious ideation." Now, intellectuality is the most sharply

I awake of the psychological workings that take place this side of the threshold of consciousness; so, naturally, it would tend to render openness to the other side rather difficult.

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This difficulty is no sign that what is on the other side is inferior to intellectuality. Just because receptiveness to that side is easier to the non-intellectual we do not prove the "primitiveness" of what happens there or comes from there And just because anthropology brings evidence of ESP as a far more frequent occurrence among primitives the source that is tapped does not grow aboriginal. And just because gregarious animals and social insects may be communicating on a larger scale by telepathy the power employed does not get stamped as a sub-human function surviving in us like the operation of a not quite atrophied vestigial organ. The same more-than-intellectual power can be contacted on a low level and a high one: its manifestation in civilised man can have results quite different from those obtained among cattle and ants or among savages.

The mentally developed state may be somewhat of a stumbling-block to its manifestation, but this state has come about from an evolutionary necessity and represents a transcendence of the animal level, a new perceptive and conceptive orientation in the surface consciousness, without which whatever more-than-intellectual power exists cannot operate in its largest or profoundest or most luminous mode as a surface presence. The obstruction this state may offer to that power has been accepted as a price for keener surface evolution: this state is not meant to be discarded, it has to be made compatible with that power. A problem of accordance and adjustment is here because both the elements are desirable, and the fact that sub-human creatures may have more facile ESP than humans, and primitives than civilised men, and non-intellectuals than those with "rigorous intellectual training", merely underlines the toughness of the problem to be solved and does not indicate that ESP fails mark the beginnings of a new stage of evolution. Perhaps Mrs. Knight and others who share her view are under wrong impression that the development of ESP must involve the loss of mind in general and intellect in particular, the of man's proper differentia as the highest evolute so far, and

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therefore conclude that it would signify a regression rather than a progression.

In any case, one good service our author's mistake does to the thesis we have been unfolding. By drawing attention to the biological antiquity, so to speak, of ESP and to the likelihood suggested by Dr. Hardy of ESP's prevalence among animals and insects she helps the whole evolutionary process to stand out in a more than materialistic light and the once-fashionable theory of chance and of blind forces to look far less plausible than the hypothesis of a universal subliminal which transcends material structure, is independent of it and possesses diverse ranges ("several cosmic conscious- nesses", in James's phraseology) pushing through matter, overcoming difficulties of function across millennia and slowly moulding forms for its manifestation in a scale of higher and higher organisation corresponding to its own order of levels. The interaction between it and matter would explain the most striking phenomenon in evolutionary history - the paradox of, at the same time, "crass casualty" and subtle purpose.

But to get our thesis into proper focus we must go behind the Jungian choice of the word "unconscious" which we have allowed so far. It is clear that a universal subliminal such as we have been led inexorably to assume on the available scientific evidence cannot be any real unconscious- ness through and through. The Jungian designation is a misnomer and has arisen from an inaccuracy in the logic of psycho-analytic observation. The only direct observation the psycho-analyst makes of the subliminal is via dreams. And -lung's comment apropos this observation is: "It seems to us as if the collective unconscious, which appears to us in reams, had no consciousness of its contents - though, of course, we cannot be sure of this." Indeed all the less sure can we be in face of what Jung, like all other psycho-analysts "o treat of the subliminal, admits: "The unconscious Perceives, has purposes and intuitions, feels and thinks, as does the conscious mind.... It is a fact that the unconscious

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contains subliminal perceptions whose scope is nothing less than astounding.... Today we know for certain that the unconscious contains contents which would mean an immeasurable increase of knowledge if they could only be made conscious." What actually happens in dreams is that the "capsulated ego" is not able to retain its usual consciousness and begins to drift on some unplumbed tide of being info which it frequently sinks or which often washes away its clear lines of self-existence. It is from the capsulated ego's experience that we transfer unconsciousness to the subliminal. The unconscious should be defined as a consciousness of which we are not the possessors rather than as something which is itself inherently unconscious.

But what then becomes of Jung's characterisation in one place: "Exclusiveness, selection and discrimination are the root and essence of all that claim the name of consciousness"? According to him, the deeper we go into the subliminal the less of individual insularity and of exclusiveness, selection and discrimination do we come across and at last we touch a level where exist a number of patterns, called "archetypes" by him, which are common to the whole of humanity, and then we have the collective unconscious which, says he in vivid evocative phrases, "is anything but a capsulated personal system; it is the wide world, and objectively as open as the world... a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside/ no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine arid no thine, no good and no bad. It is the world of water, where everything living floats in suspension; where everything living begins, where I am inseparably this and that, and this and that are I; where I experience the other person as myself, and the other, as myself, experiences me. No doubt, the subliminal impresses the psycho-analyst as being very unlike the tight and bounded and differentiate field of our awareness. But Jung's characterisation, in one place, of what is and what is not conscious is rather arbitral it generalises too much from a certain organisation of consciousness.

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And it seems to overlook two important points. surely the subliminal is not all an amorphous mass - there are persistent rhythms and recurrent patterns in it, without which no sense would attach to a term like "archetypes" and Jung would not be able to speak, as he does, of a structure or morphology of the unconscious. Surely, again, even within the particular psychological organisation to which alone he concedes the description "conscious" we have signs of an expansive, comprehensive and interfusing mode in the poet's "esemplastic" imagination and the synthesising and unifying sweep within the philosopher's progressive abstraction towards a "world-view", not to mention the mystic's rapturous vision and experience of oneness-in-manyness and diversity-in-identity. To call such states of consciousness a welling up of the unconscious is merely to quibble over terms. "Consciousness" need not be confined to our ordinary state: it can be various in organisation and pitch, it can be sub-mental and it may be supra-mental. To avoid un- necessary confusion and puzzlement we should mean by the established current word "unconscious" simply conscious- ness other than the surface kind which is usually ours or which we can recognise outside ourselves as in some way resembling it. And the common or collective unconscious is this consciousness at its deepest and widest - an ultra- individual cosmicity of multi-dimensional experience.

Yes, a veritable cosmicity and not only a commonalty behind the human or at most the whole of the organic. Particularly if we accept the principle of developmental and evolutionary continuity it has every mark of being a universal subliminal some of whose activities in the form of energy- releasing archaic symbolisms and mysterious personality- healing processes have been studied by Jung. In that case, it would be at work even through inorganic nature - but not Merely as what Julian Huxley chooses to name "psychoid activities of low intensity" undetectable by us though present .It would be confined to these activities if the psychological were nothing more than a concomitant of the physical,

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utterly dependent on the latter and corresponding to it complexity of organisation and, in fact, arising as a peculiar subjective aspect of the objective system. When the psycho- logical is seen as being far greater than epiphenomenalism allows, then what this enlarged or extended epiphenornenalism view grants can signify solely that the "psychoid activities of low intensity" a la Huxley are just the infinitesimal surface manifestations, the meagre and shadowy out-filtrations of the universal subliminal through matter: the universal subliminal" has magnitudes hidden behind its superficial potencies or impotencies in metal and stone, even as behind those in insect and animal and man.

We may suggest that on Jung's own notion of the collective unconscious a universal subliminal may be posited. According to him, the collective unconscious holds the precipitate of all meaningful experience from the beginning of life's and mind's appearance. But in his eyes the appearance of life and mind is itself out of a vast ground of the unconscious which he variously calls "libido", "psychic energy", "total force pulsing through and combining one with another all the forms and activities of the psychic system". The unconscious ground of psychic energy, there- fore, is pre-existent to the appearance of life and mind. What then is the relation between this pre-existent unconscious ground and the patterned contents which are regarded as the collective sediment of all human and animal experience - the sediment which keeps dynamically rising into the personal consciousness in diverse significant forms that are Jung s special study? Are they merely the precipitated result of life s and mind's experience during human and pre-human history? The fact that they keep dynamically rising suggests that they may not be just the product of life's and mind s experience but what was originally hidden in the unconscious and rose into that experience from a pre-existent store and sank back as sediment with whatever novelty was realised by the rise into consciousness. The suggestion 01 pre-existent store is reinforced by Jung's view that the chic

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dynamisms of the collective unconscious represent typical fundamental experiences of all human and even animal energy — the fl P"0" modes of activity, as it were, within life and mind, whose effect on the consciousness is determined on the one hand by the psychological history through which life and mind have passed and on the other by potentialities immanent in the unconscious. Jung compares these potentialities to the "axial system of a crystal, which predetermines the crystalline formation in the saturated solution" without itself having a particular form: the axial system controls merely the stereometric structure, not the concrete shape of the individual crystal: the concrete shape comes from the solution in which the precipitate occurs, the experience of all life and mind: the solution creates the images that crystallise on the potential axial system. Jung thus grants something immanent and potential which pre-exists as a determining principle in the unconscious before life and mind started their history as manifest forces on earth. The collective unconscious is not only the "womb" and the "unfathomable ground" from which life and mind appeared but also an existent which is far from being a mere void. So it could very well be a universal subliminal such as we have supposed on the score of evidence outside the psycho-analyst's clinic.

Here we are likely to be pulled up and told: "Whatever the evidence on which you have proceeded to your supposition, you cannot drag Jung in to add any plausibility to it. Has he not in an important context talked of the collective unconscious in association with terms of 'inherited brain structure', thus fitting it to individual physiology and bind- "^g it down to a particular material organisation?" Our reply . can be easily formulated. Dr. Jacobi whose authorised book ^ have already quoted in an earlier article explains: "The term brain structure, which is used by Jung where one would Perhaps expect psychic structure, must be properly under- stood. It is meant to point to the biological connection. For We psyche as it presents itself to us - i.e. as it is understood y Us — is connected with our bodily being. That does not by

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any means, however, imply biological 'dependence'." And Dr. Jacobi cites Jung's own statements: "The psychic deserves to be taken as a phenomenon in itself, for there are no grounds for regarding it as a mere epiphenomenon, even though it is associated with the function of the brain; just as little as one can conceive of life as an epiphenomenon of the chemistry of carbon." - "We can very well determine with sufficient certainty that an individual consciousness with reference to ourselves has come to an end in death. Whether, however, the continuity of the psychic processes is thereby broken remains doubtful, for we can today assert with much less assurance than fifty years ago that the psychic is chained to the brain." Jung will not support the epiphenomenalist. There is not scientific evidence for saying that the collective unconscious has any corresponding neural events in the individual body. Even the individual unconscious on its intuitive and inspirational side has not been shown by anything to be bound up with brain-tracks: its continuity with the collective goes all against such a bondage. The fact that even that part of the individual which is not subliminal has no real discontinuity with it but is in some way its surface manifestation goes in favour of its having also some transcendence of neural events. Jungian psychology, understood in its true position and attitude, does not contradict at all our thesis but contributes to it and rounds off the non-materialistic and pro-interactionist conclusions, applicable on even a cosmic scale, to which we have arrived by our manifold scrutiny of scientific opinions on consciousness and the brain.

Several lines of enquiry spring from these conclusions, directed towards the trends of organic evolution, the issue between dualism and monism, the problem of the individual's destiny, the method of conscious development in relation to the paranormal powers proved by ESP. The question we proposed at the beginning of the present series can be regarded as settled now. The one immediately relevant matter remaining to be dealt with is the short reply Mrs

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Knight has given to a brief criticism of ours, published in Science News 30, of her essay on this question. We shall, by way of a supplementary note, consider in a final instalment the merits of her reply.

Supplementary Note

In Science News 30, a reply based on part of the very first essay in this series was given by the author to Mrs. Knight's article in Science News 25 which had sought to prove invalid the famous argument of the interactionists against the epiphenomenalists or what Mrs. Knight called "the brain-dependence school", that the position of the latter is self-contradictory. Mrs. Knight had quoted and criticised McTaggart's brief formulation of the argument: "If materialism is true, all our thoughts are produced by purely material antecedents. These are quite blind, and are just as likely to produce falsehood as truth. We have thus no reason for believing any of our conclusions - including the truth of materialism, which is therefore a self-contradictory hypothesis." Mrs. Knight's contentions have been exhaustively examined by us and attacked from various angles and found to be untenable. In Science News 30, they were touched upon from only one angle which concerned itself with her analogy between the thinking brain and the electronic calculating machine. The editor of that periodical invited Mrs. Knight to defend her position. She wrote the following:

"In my article in Science News 25 I made two main points, viz (1) we accept results worked out by electronic calculators, though the functioning of the calculators is unaccompanied by consciousness, and (2) the laws of logic may have their counterparts in the functioning of the human brain, just s mathematical laws have their counterparts in the function- "8 of the calculator. Mr. Sethna takes exception to both Points. He says that I have 'overlooked the precise reason y electronic machines can calculate correctly and give us truth' - viz. that they 'work according to a man-made plan';

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and that I have failed to see that, if I draw an analogy between the calculator and the human brain, I must logically conclude that the brain, like a calculator was designed by a conscious being.

"To this I can only reply that (1) I did not 'overlook' the first point -1 took it for granted; and (2) no analogy is perfect, and I do not want to press this particular analogy nearly as far as Mr. Sethna supposes. He says that I 'equate' the brain and the calculator, but this was certainly not my intention. To take a parallel case - in lecturing on the sense of sight, I sometimes find it helpful to draw analogies between the eye and the camera, but this does not mean that I 'equate' the two.

"I agree that if I regarded the brain/calculator analogy as perfect I should have to infer that the brain was designed by a conscious being. But I do not regard the analogy as perfect, and I have no need to draw this inference, though most theologians would do so. I am content to say that the machine is a product of design and the brain (so far as we know) of evolution, but that instructive analogies can still be drawn between them.

"Towards the end of his letter Mr. Sethna says that 'truth... is absolutely irrelevant to... a brain-process or any other physical activity by itself.' If Mr. Sethna means by this that a brain-process cannot be true (or false), this statement is indisputable. But if he means that a brain-process cannot give rise to beliefs that are true (or false), he is begging the question."

Well, what shall we say about this reply of Mrs. Knight's? Like the article itself it seems to miss the fundamental issue - a strange thing for a mind like hers which has shown its acuteness and fairness in several articles on psychological themes.

She says that all analogies are imperfect and so there is no invalidity in her analogy just because it is not perfect. But how can she defend her analogy when the central point or contact, which would make it pertinent in spite of its imperfection,

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is not there? The electronic machine, in spite of its difference from the human brain, can be compared to the latter for the purpose of making the brain-dependence hypothesis plausible, if this machine does not positively imply man's mind acting the logician and mathematician independently of it and making "true results" possible to it. Since this machine does positively imply independent mental activity of a logico-mathematical order, we can only compare certain modes of mechanism in the calculator and the human brain, but never argue that the truth-quality of our beliefs can come about independently of mental antecedents. The whole controversy revolves round this truth- quality and that quality's independence of mental antecedents is precisely what the analogy forbids us to assert and what she tries to project from the calculator to the brain.

Here attention must be drawn to Mrs. Knight's peculiar presentation of my thought with regard to her analogy. While my discussion revolved round what I have called truth-quality, she makes it out to have been about design by a conscious being. She puts me in the same box as "most theologians" and thus subtly discredits my position. My letter was not couched in the somewhat naive and crude terms in which "most theologians" might state their case. I never implied that just as man directly designs and constructs the electronic calculator God directly designs and constructs the brain. The question of the brain having been the work of a conscious being was not brought in at all: what ^s asserted was the necessary presence of a mental determinant independent of the brain and acting upon and surfeiting cerebral processes. Of course, ultimately the other question cannot be shirked and the answer to it is definitely in the affirmative, but it can be tackled and decided on a more philosophical as well as more scientific plane than that of common theology.

I do not deny that the brain is a product of evolution and not exactly of design in the sense in which the electronic machine is. But I do not see that the sole alternative to calling

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it an evolutionary product is to follow "most theologians" All depends on our view of evolution. This is not the place to enter into an examination of evolution-concepts. But a brief comment must be made on the suggestion emanating from Mrs. Knight's remarks: "I am content to say that the machine is the product of design and the brain (so far as we know) of evolution." The suggestion appears to be, in the present context, that the activity, which happens in conjunction with brain-events, of seeing logical implications and arriving at a logically true conclusion, is a product of wholly blind forces at work during the long stretches of evolutionary history. The suggestion is but the epiphenomenalist theory applied to the process of evolution and blandly ignores the self- contradictoriness inherent in that theory and extending to this application. To conceive of the brain as a product of utterly blind forces is to overlook the very essence of "truth" in the logical sense. There may be some point in asking whether, for instance, the stomach which appears to do purposive action is not really the outcome of blind evolutionary forces: the entire Darwinian hypothesis was possible because the theory of natural selection showed that such a question could be asked without immediate self-stultification. But, with logical truth, there is always an "ought" involved: what conclusion ought to be drawn from certain premises? This "ought" calls for a real and not merely apparent weighing of alternatives and choice of direction - a process sui generis because of a sense of obligation to the ideal of correct inference. If a conclusion is reached simply because we must reach it according to predisposing physical factors, logical truth has no meaning. Here is not only mind but also something beyond sheer determinism whether physical or mental. If wholly blind forces have gone to the making of this process in evolutionary history and are still at work behind it we must stop discussing whether anything is logically true o false, whether the brain-dependence hypothesis is logically truth or a falsehood.

It is by its forgetting the distinction I made, in my reply,

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between a "must" and an "ought" that the closing para of Mrs. Knight's defence is as unsatisfactory as her plea for her analogy. She is thinking of truth and falsehood in some other sense than the logical which is here being discussed. Let me, at the risk of a little tediousness, dwell on this point. In the logical sense beliefs are true if they have been reached by seeing the logical implications of premises and coming to a reasoned conclusion. If only a brain-process gives rise to any beliefs, there is no real seeing of logical implications. What appears to be such seeing is nothing save an illusion, for the beliefs in question are dictated by the inexorable "must" of physical effects from physical causes without the intervention of any "ought". There need have been no reasoning at all: the conclusions had to be what they are by a blind physical necessity, not a seeing logical obligation. So it is meaningless to speak of beliefs logically true arising from a brain-process or any material activity by itself.

Mrs. Knight does not seem to grasp this and so she thinks I am begging the question. If I say that even a seemingly reasoned belief cannot arise from a brain-process I may be begging the question whether mental phenomena can be caused by physical phenomena. But if a reasoned belief is only seemingly reasoned, we knock all significance out of logical truth. That is what McTaggart bases his argument on, for in that case materialism which itself purports to be a reasoned belief can be logically neither true nor false or is just as likely to be false as true, being merely an effect inexorably determined by physical necessity. Where is any begging of the question in my assertion? I am only clarifying the question - and unless one realises what the question is, there can be no talk about beliefs logically true or false.

I am puzzled why Mrs. Knight has quoted me as saying truth...is absolutely irrelevant to...a brain-process or any other physical activity by itself." Quoted thus, I seem to supply the ground for a possible difference between saying that a brain-process cannot be true (or false) and saying that a "rain-process cannot give rise to beliefs that are true (or

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false). If she had quoted my actual words: "Truth or correctness in the logical sense the only sense concerned in the discussion", my point would have been evident, for then belief arising from a brain-process would have been seen immediately as resulting from a mechanical "must" and not a logical "ought" and therefore falling outside the realm of logical truth with which we are concerned. Indication of the specific sense in which "truth" has to be taken here would at once rule out the possibility of thinking that a brain-process can give rise to true (or false) beliefs or else that such a process can lead to beliefs true rather than false. The suggestion is unfairly made that I am indulging in a petitio principii.

The lack of substance and relevance in Mrs. Knight's rejoinder cannot help underlining our thesis against epiphenomenalism, which we have developed through four articles based on both philosophical reasoning and scientific evidence.

POSTSCRIPT (1958)

In Main Currents in Modern Thought, November 1957, pp. 36- 38, Dr. H. Tudo Edmunds, a medical authority, has written an article, "The Electro-encephalograph and the Mind", which is of extreme pertinence to our controversy with Mrs. Knight. This article very pointedly demonstrates how certain scientific findings seem to prompt the epiphenomenalist theory but how an extension of scientific enquiry itself is an aid to the opposite hypothesis. After discussing the common evidences of the Electro-encephalograph (E.E.G.), Dr. Edmunds writes in the concluding portion of his study:

"So far we have been dealing with minute electric cur- rents set up in the brain during what might be called its normal, everyday functioning, and the relation of function to current pattern has tended to confirm the common biological view that the mind is a product of the brain, and that different brains create different characters and personalities.

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However, when investigating less common mental phenomena such as hypnosis, extrasensory perception and telepathy the E.E.G. shows certain discrepancies which cast serious doubt on this belief. It is found that under hypnosis, when a subject's eyes are closed, but he is made to believe they ar0 open, his E.E.G. is still that of closed eyes. Similarly if his eyfi5 are open, and he is made to believe they are shut so that he acts as if he were blind, the brain still records that his eyes are not only open, but seeing. If the hypnotist induces a state of moderate or deep trance, the subject's brain does not register sleep, but shows him to be in a state of full or even heightened awareness of the hypnotist and any suggestions he may make. The inference would seem to be that the hypnotist succeeds in some way in by-passing the brain and establishing direct contact with the subject's mind, while the brain continues to record the actual physiological changes taking place, as if the hypnotist did not exist. In this way it is found that deep sleep produced by a hypnotist causes little or no effect on the E.E.G. rhythms, whereas normal sleep, or that produced by the action of an anaesthetic on the brain cells, causes marked changes in the E.E.G. findings.

"We are thus faced with a rather startling paradox, for if the mind is simply the product of the brain cells, then any change occurring in the one must be exactly related to a change in the other, for the function of an object cannot change unless the object itself changes in some way. Yet the E.E.G. shows that the mind can be deluded while the brain continues to function normally. Similarly, when a person experiences extrasensory perception such as telepathy or clairvoyance, the E.E.G. records a normal functioning of the brain, and not what would be expected if these thoughts and visual pictures had been conveyed to the person's conscious- ness through the usual sensory organs via the brain. We are thus driven to the conclusion that the mind is separate from the brain and uses the latter as an organ of expression.

"To many this may seem a simple truism, but to the

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materialist it is a disturbing discovery, for it breaks down the walls of his citadel and shows him wide vistas of a non- material country of which he has hitherto been completely unaware. Moreover he is faced with the fact that if the mind with all its known potentialities is a separate entity from the brain, he must be prepared to accept the possibility of its having a separate existence at death and perhaps during sleep. If this is so, it would account for many unexplained phenomena such as the ability of some people in trance to describe events in distant continents at the moment they are occurring, and numerous other experiences of a similar nature that are beyond the scope of this article.

"It would also explain why the great religious teachers of the world have always spoken of man as actually being a soul and possessing a temporary body as an instrument of experience, for they were probably not offering a hypothesis, but stating a fact of nature of which, in their greater wisdom, they were fully aware."

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Matter and Life

The question before us is: "What conclusions are to be drawn from the findings of science on what is called organic nature as commonly distinguished from inorganic? In other words, science point towards the validity of the common distinction or does it indicate life to be merely a certain state of complex matter and ultimately reducible to physico chemical terms?" We need not accept science as the final arbiter, but it would be illuminating to see whether a branch of inquiry which has great influence on philosophic thought today and which at one time was almost unanimously taken to "debunk" all non-materialism does actually offer any evidence worth considering against a non-materialistic view 3 nature of life.

Here we shall restrict the word "science" to biology proper and not draw upon either physics or else psychology under test conditions. We shall put on one side both the revolution in physics and the recent statistically measured :evidence for telepathy and precognition. Taking biology as our sole domain, we shall deal exclusively with the living organism and examine the deliverances of science concerning it Such a procedure of independent examination, by set- up more stringent conditions, will not definitively demonstrate materialism in the biological field if the other domains of science contradict whatever materialistic probabilities may be found here but it will enormously strengthen the general case of non-materialism if the balance is tilted in its favour in this domain no less than in those two. At the same time, since there will be no leaning on the latter and not materialism will be affirmed on purely biological grounds, we shall be in a position even to extend it towards the interpretation of physics and experimental psychology wherever the issue may hang undecided in them.

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There is no doubt that an enormous amount of elucidation of the living organism's functions has been made in physico-chemical terms during this century. of course many processes are still without physico-chemical interpretation- yet it will not do just to build on mere gaps in knowledge. Gap after gap has gone on being filled since Wohler and Liebig in 1828 first created in the laboratory what were called "organic compounds" - substances like urea, sugar, etc., which had been produced up to that time in the organism alone. And this is but as it should be; for, even if life transcends the material formula it must be expected to make abundant use of material "mechanisms" since it is operating with a close material companion and its appearance on earth was a late event in the history of matter, an intervention in the midst of considerably advanced physico-chemical complexity. The point is whether all gaps are of the kind that have been filled. If possible, we must try to get beyond what the organism does, to what the organism is: we must catch hold of something central to the vital phenomenon and ask if that too is reducible to physico-chemical activity. That and nothing else would be the crucial test science would have to pass before it could be called upon to declare that the materialistic working-method which is legitimate to it for the extension of analytic and descriptive knowledge has come across a "Thus far and no further".

Could we say that science's failure to synthetise life in the laboratory must give pause to that working-method? Let us cast a glance at the existing situation here. A huge hurdle the way of artificial synthesis of living matter was indicated in 1938 by Professor Horatio Hackett Newman of the United States. He wrote that not even the first step had been taken the step of synthetising the protein molecule which is chemical differentia of living matter. Within a decade Robert B. Woodward and Dr. C.R. Schramm made a rough protein molecule which had all the qualities of hair or fur.

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How far this brings us to the production of living stuff in the laboratory is to be gauged from three discoveries.

All organic development is founded on the living cell which consists of an outer skin with a fluid mass inside and a central section of nucleus: it is the cell that has to be finally synthetised. Now, the possibility of its synthesis has been greatly encouraged by the discovery of a form of matter midway between the organised cell and a protein molecule: the deadly filter-passing viruses which have been examined under the electron microscope. Chemically the virus is an overgrown protein molecule and it can exist in an utterly inanimate condition in a crystalline form resembling salt. But as soon as it is put in living tissue it ceases to be a crystal and begins to eat, grow and multiply. Even when as a crystal it has been cut up by Dr. W.N. Stanley of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, its progeny during its stay in living tissue has been like the original parent, not like the physically mutilated one. Exactly like a normal living cell it acts to perpetuate its original structure. A report from Copenhagen has it that scientists have succeeded in marking also in it the one factor that had distinguished the cell from it, namely, organic behaviour in even a test-tube and not only in a living host. So, with its capacity to be completely crystalline as well as completely organic, it is a definite link between the undeniably living and the apparently non-living. Even with- out the Copenhagen report, it would be a recognisable bridge.

Further, in what precise relation it stands to the cell is shown by the fact revealed by the electron microscope that the part of the cell known as the gene - the physical basis of inheritance - is very similar to the virus and may be described in Professor Newman's words, as a tamed or domesticated virus-like particle incorporated in the cell's complex economy. The cell itself is thus likely to have been in remote times a development of virus-like matter and is as good as demonstrated to be evolutionarily connected with the world of inorganic crystals.

That it is some sort of development has been presumed

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too along another line of research. A Russian woman scientist. Dr. O.B. Lepeshinskaya, whose experiments are said t have been confirmed by scientists in Norway, England and the United States, took materials from the cells, pieces that did not even include the important nucleus which used to be considered the repository of life's secret, and she claimed to find that they not only were composed in the main of protein molecules but could develop by themselves, act to preserve themselves when disturbed and in several other ways also pass" tests which proved them to be alive. Her conclusion was that while the cell is the basic unit of organised life it has come about from an assortment of organic chemicals which are themselves alive: it is a patterned development following somehow upon their combination. This conclusion is suggestively in tune with Dr. Woodward's observation during his synthesis of the protein molecule. The protein molecule is a specific structure of four elements - carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen - which already exist together in smaller units found in a full state, called the amino-acids, and building in combination this molecule. To quote a report on Dr. Woodward by Maurice Hecht: "He merely took some amino-acids, previously made from ordinary chemicals in the laboratory, and put two or more of them together after certain modifications and left them alone. The mixture was allowed to stand for two weeks. The amino-adds carried on the rest of the work on their own." From this it seems most probable that for creating life in the laboratory "we may not have to create a complete cell at all. When we succeed in creating the right chemical combination, we may not need to do any more - the cell may grow out of that on its own." The synthesis of life is thus immeasurably facilitated.

We should not be surprised if in the near future it 1s actually accomplished. And its significance primarily would just be that conditions obtaining at some point in the far pa5 have got duplicated experimentally with the same results a then. The original evolution of the living cell from wa1 would be proved before our very eyes and the chemical

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mode of it broadly exemplified. But that would not prove life to be nothing else than a new form of matter: it would only prove that material conditions came to be such that life could appear in them - unless we were also able to prove that nothing inexplicable in purely physico-chemical terms had appeared. So, once more we return to the problem whether in the phenomenon of life science has struck upon something centrally irreducible to these terms.

To sum up the situation: science's materialistic working- method need not feel stuck against a barrier impossible to cross because life has not been artificially synthetised yet - and the reason is that far from the chances being against such synthesis it is most likely that pretty soon we shall have protein combinations coming alive in our test-tubes - but, on the other hand, even this wonderful success cannot fundamentally dispose of non-materialism from the scientific viewpoint, for everything will hinge on the reducibleness or non-reducibleness of what may be regarded as the central characteristic of organic nature to physics and chemistry.

Our task then is to address ourselves to the scientific isolation of this characteristic and to measure against it the physico-chemical.

POSTSCRIPT (1958)

D.R. Newth, -writing on "Soviet Embryology" in Science News 40 (1956), remarks on Lepeshinskaya's work: "Her claims, if substantiated, would be of enormous consequences for biology, but they have been received with scepticism. Attempts in the USSR to repeat some of her most critical experiments have yielded negative results, and her observations are on material that presents the greatest difficulties for decision. Most of the embryologists with whom I discussed this matter were content to treat her case as unproven and still open, though Prof. Polezhaiev believes that he has found similar processes occurring in regenerating tissues of amphibia."

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About the experiments on the amino-acids, a reviewer of Albert Ducroqc's The Origin of Life in the Times Literary Supplement of January 17, 1958, writes: "It is clear that the ammo-adds play a fundamental part in living processes, and it is relevant that at an early stage in its history our earth had an envelope of water, ammonia, methane and carbon dioxide, each composed of two of the four master elements... It would seem a useful working hypothesis that the first manifestations of life arose on the earth from the interplay of solar radiation on the earth's fluid envelope, and in trying to create life artificially it would be equally reasonable to try to energize, by means of ultra-violet radiation, a mixture of gases in a closed chamber simulating the primitive atmosphere of the earth. This is what the American scientist Miller has done, and in a notable series of experiments he has synthesized a certain amount of organic products, among which amino-acids play an important part. This is still far from the cell, the basic unity of living matter, but it is exciting enough. Furthermore, one of the characteristics of living matter is its ability to reproduce itself, and the physical basis of this ability is now known to be deoxyribonucleic acid, commonly called DNA."

2

The question we have considered crucial in our inquiry 1 whether the central characteristic of organic nature - or, common parlance, life - has yielded to physics and chemistry and whether it is such as they can hope to explain.

Let us begin with the opinion of that master physiologist, Sir Charles Sherrington. Sherrington does not forget the many mysteries of even the simplest protoplasmic cell: he admits "the still unexplained residue of the cell's behaviour. But he goes by the great deal of accounting that chemistry and physics have done for that behaviour and by the explanation they have given of so much to which years ago they could offer no clue: he feels it is logical to suppose that

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the remaining mysteries will prove resoluble by them. In his famous Gifford Lectures, published in book-form in 1941, Man On His Nature, he declares: "Today the very distinction between the living and the non-living is a convention. That deletes 'life' as a scientific category; or, if you will, carries it down to embrace the atom.... An energy-system which we call 'alive' does not radically depart from energy-systems which we do not call 'alive'. Both are chemical... Instead of a specific principle which is life, life is an example of the way in which an energy-system in its give and take with the energy- system around it can continue to maintain itself for a period as a self-centred, so to say, self-balanced unity."

To appreciate Sherrington's position correctly we should state that he is not an out-and-out materialist. He stands helpless before what he differentiates as "mind" from what he defines as "life". Mind, according to him, does not yield to explanation in terms of "energy". But if we understand by "life" broadly whatever carries on and holds together processes like growth, metabolism, adaptation, tissue-regeneration and propagation, then, in Sherrington's view, science, though still far from the goal of explaining every vital process, is entitled by past successes to be materialistic about the living organism.

We may feel philosophically that by conceding the non material nature of mind Sherrington has exposed his case to a subtle attack. But we have strictly limited our discussion to the biological field and we have to meet his materialism on that particular ground: thus, apart from any other advantage, the biological materialism of those that do not concur with him about mind will at the same time be met. Here, adhering to the question we have posed as crucial in our inquiry, we must disengage the central characteristic of life from Sherrington's description and test it by his materialistic canons- Evidently, in his eyes, processes like growth, metabolism, adaptation, tissue-regeneration and propagation are ultimately the give and take of an energy-system with the energy-system around it and are purely physico-

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chemical for all their complexity. But we must not overlook the phrases in which he calls the organic energy-system one that "can continue to maintain itself for a period as a self-centred, so to say, self-balanced unity." In these words we seem to have life's central characteristic. And we do not have to wait long before Sherrington himself, in developing his materialistic thesis, confirms our perception.

This is how his materialistic thesis is developed by him:

"Perhaps the most striking feature of life is that it acts as though it 'desired' to maintain itself. But we do not say of the spinning of a heavy top which resists being upset that it 'desires' to go on spinning. The very constitution of the living-system may compel it to increase; thus a self-fermenting protein-system, granted its conditions, must increase. Broadly taken, however, there is in 'living' nothing fundamentally other than is going forward in all the various grades of energy-systems which we know, though in some less rapidly and less balancedly than in others. Whether atom, molecule, colloidal complex or what not, whether virus or cell or plant or animal compounded of cells, each is a system of motion in commerce with its surround, and there is dynamic reaction between it and the surround.... There is between them all no essential difference. The difference is one not of ultimate nature but of scheme and degree of complexity, nothing more. The elemental parts and elemental patterns are not novel. The atoms and sub atoms are among Earth's commonest."

Is this argument satisfactory? It does not provide any reason for the fact that about life's activity the scientist is led to say that it is as though life "desired" to maintain itself while about the spinning of a heavy top he is led to say nothing of the sort. Surely there is something which makes the difference? Why do we designate one energy-system as life and another as non-life? Sherrington, after saying that the atoms and sub atoms in the living system are among Earth's commonest, observes: " 'Living' becomes a name for certain complexes of them, arrangements of which it may be

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said that they are organized integratively - i.e. to form a solidarity, an individual. Hence we do not speak of 'life' in association with absolute simplicity of organization; never with mere homogeneity of structure. It requires a heterogeneity which permits integration of its complex even if the latter be but a single cell." A little earlier he writes: "The cell is not a polyphasic chemico-physical system merely. Many a mere drop of complex jelly could be that. The cell is a polyphasic chemico-physical system which is integratively organised. Hence there comes about that it can answer to what is described as 'life'." Again: "The processes going forward in it are co-operatively harmonized. The total system is organized.... Many considerations force on us the conception of the cell as 'organization'." Elucidating the nature of life at all stages and levels, Sherrington says: "Each of us at the outset of his or her individual life story is microscopic and one sole cell. By that cell's multiplication, and by its descendents' coherence, each of us attains his or her final form and size. Each at every stage of that astonishing 'becoming' is never any less than a self-centred individual.... The embryo, even when its cells are but two or three, is a self-centred co- operative society which is familial and a unity - an organized family of cells, with corporate individuality. This character of being an individual seems, as we look upon Nature, a feature peculiarly stressed in what is living."

The key-words about life, therefore, are organization, co- operation, integration, unity, individuality. Of course, the term "individuality" is to be understood in each case within its special context. We must not import into it everywhere all the refinements and subtleties it acquires in a discussion of human psychology. But it is valid inasmuch as there is the mark of a dominant and insistent wholeness suggestive of an overall purpose. The solitary cell has this mark and, when many cells combine, the unit-life retains it and yet the collective life at each moment both of development and of maintenance of developed existence is not a bare aggregate any more than the single cell is a bare aggregate: it has itself

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the same mark. An identical quality, characteristic of life, is manifested throughout, and this ubiquitous invariable quality is that life is, to quote Sherrington once more, "not simply additive, but additive by co-organization of an integrative kind. There the harmony of the whole is not merely built out of its parts but is impressed on the parts by the whole. An individuality whose whole, as luminously said by Coleridge, is presupposed by all its parts."

Here we have the heart of the matter. And all serious biologists point towards it. It means in the first place that what distinguishes living things is not some substance or substances of which they are composed. As Edmund W. Sinnott, one of the acutest American biologists, states in Cell and Psyche: "It is not the character of the constituents of a living thing but the relations between them which are most significant. An organism is an organized system." E.B. Wilson, a famous worker in the same field, declares in The Cell in Development and Inheritance: "We cannot hope to comprehend the activities of the living cell by analysis merely of its chemical composition.... Modern investigation has brought ever-increasing recognition of the fact that the cell is an organic system and one in which we must recognize some kind of ordered structure or organization." Herbert Muller, again a distinguished name, writes in Science and Criticism:

"The fundamental fact in biology, the necessary point of departure, is the organism. The cell is a chemical compound but more significantly a type of biological organization; the whole organism is not a mere aggregate but an architecture, the vital function of growth, adaptation, reproduction - the final function of death - are not merely cellular but organic phenomena." Ludwig von Bertalanffy, perhaps the greatest Austrian biologist of our day, avers: "The fact that the processes in an organism are regulated according to the needs of the whole is the most striking characteristic of the phenomena of life." J.B.S. Haldane no less than his father J.S. Haldane - eminent names both - sees in co-ordinated self-preservation the essential of life. Joseph Needham too

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has often expressed his opinion that the central problem in biology is "organizing relation." Julian Huxley is aware of this no less. But when we have put aside the notion of character of constituents and concentrated on organization we have not yet emphasised the entire differentia of the living.

In a general sense organization is to be found in the non- living. Sherrington makes much of this and lumps life and non-life together as "fundamentally balances of give and take of motion with their surround." He speaks of a grey rock and a darting dragon-fly: "We may consider the dragon-fly the more delicately balanced system with the more intensive give and take. Directly and indirectly through the collateral system of the green plant, it has the more acute commerce with the energy-system of the sun. We may judge it a more organized and integrated system than the rock... but these are details when we view energy-systems generally. Then, as pure energy-systems, rock and dragon-fly come together within one category." Sherrington reduces the fact of life's organisation to just a "more" of what already obtains in non- life, to a coming to a head as it were of the organization universally prevalent. Is he right?

At the turn of the century the German philosopher- biologist Hans Driesch conducted a series of experiments in embryology which showed that in many eggs all kinds of interferences could be made without affecting at all the embryo resulting. To explain the eggs' astounding behaviour he posited a non-material agency which he called, reviving a term of Aristotle's, "entelechy" - i.e. a factor which "carries the goal within itself." About these experiments Needham writes: "Large pieces could be removed from the egg, several blastomeres could be taken away, or the blastomeres could be shuffled at will, and yet a normal, though small-sized embryo would result. Any one monad in the original egg-embryo then, was capable of forming any part of the finished embryo. Driesch was quite right in proclaiming that this was "beyond the powers of any machine such as man has ever Instructed, but he soon left the straight and narrow path by

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insinuating his non-material entelechy into the works as the inevitable transcendent mechanic or driver." The straight and narrow path from which Driesch's "vitalism" was deemed a deviation is supposed to be the belief that the surprising organizing relations as demonstrated by him and by many workers after him in many departments of biology do not fall outside physics and chemistry and have to be attacked in the laboratory instead of being left an extra-laboratorial mystery. The resolution thus to attack them is indeed in consonance with the genius of science. But is it scientific to assert that physics and chemistry can be competent to explain organizing relations in toto?

Let us first glance at the actual upshot of the attempt to discover the physics and chemistry of organizing relations. The most thrilling chapter of the attempt was the study of certain chemicals which were christened "organizers". They were found markedly to affect development. The most outstanding name here is the German embryologist H. Spemann. Looking at Spemann's work as well as at that of others, Julian Huxley predicted in 1933 that in a short time the organizing powers of a living thing would be reduced to a chemical formula and stored in a bottle. It seems, however, that the short time has not yet elapsed. Spemann himself has admitted that his "organizer" was only a stimulus, an evocator, and that the real problem of organization lies in the responding system itself, and not in the trigger which sets this off. Analogous chemical substances have also been found to be no more than agents and messengers by which development is affected. Sinnott cites the case of "auxin" whose role in plant-growth is important. "The beautifully co-ordinated results," says he, "must come from the presence of just the right amount of auxin, at just the right place, and at just the right time. Something must control the auxin, must act as the headquarters from which the chemical messengers are dispatched.... Moreover, the secret of the action of such a substance lies not primarily in itself but in the specific organization of the cells upon which it acts. Auxin no more

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makes roots than a nickel makes a tune in a juke box. Not the nickel or the auxin holds the secret, but the structure of the system itself."

What exactly makes the structure such and such and controls the evocators? The simple answer from the point of view of current physics and chemistry is: We have not much of an idea. As Michael Abercrombie remarks in Experimental Embryology Today in Science News 13 (published in 1949), "Though some of the finest experimentalists in embryology, such as Waddington and Needham in this country, were hard on its track, the solution of the problem escaped. The exhilaration of that concerted pursuit is over, and the reaction has been one of some disappointment." About the present state of the science, Abercrombie says: "Embryolegists have at the moment no main objective which can focus the activities of a notable proportion of their effort. They give rather the impression of casting about for new hypotheses to pursue. There is a great deal of apparently sporadic thinking around and trying out." As a result, some interesting ideas are mooted, such as the stickiness of cells: each cell has a stickiness of a most particular kind, so that it will stick firmly only to some types of cells, and will fail to stick to others. But neither this phenomenon of specific adhesion as demonstrated by Holtfreter nor the work of Weiss and Twitty, Medawar and Billingham, plausible though it is with regard to several processes, cuts down to the basic problems - and about one of the most basic, that of regulation, to which Driesch opened our eyes, Abercrombie notes: "We have at the moment only very tentative suggestions, and the problem urgently needs a point of attack." Von Bertalanffy, in his Problems of Life (1952), confesses: In spite of an enormous amount of experimental data, we do not have, at present, a really satisfactory theory of development." George Gaylord Simpson, one of the most able expositors of materialism in his Meaning of Evolution (1951), tabulating the much that still remains in biology to be 'earned, ends with the statement: "How is a genetic system

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translated into completed organic form? Unless this ignorance is personal, even the path to the answer is not yet really evident, as recent experimental embryology seems rather to skirt than to follow such a path."

Concrete results at bedrock level are nearly nil. Biological organization is still an enigma: the central and most characteristic feature of life has not yielded to current physics and chemistry. Will it ever do so? The answer hangs on the question: Does the integrated unity exhibited by life at all stages and levels resemble whatever unity non-life presents? Sherrington, as we saw, compares a grey rock and a dragon- fly because both are energy-systems in commerce with their surround. But clearly the grey rock as such is not a unity: it is a mere aggregate. The various bits of grey rock-stuff adhere to one another, without in any sense cohering in a sustained pattern. They compose no such organization as is the dragon-fly's. It is when we consider the molecules and atoms of its stuff that we reach a describable unity. The molecule is a unity of different atoms, the atom a unity of protons, neutrons and electrons. Can they be compared to the unity of the cell composed of colloidal particles? If we say that the cell-organization is something unique, it may be pointed out that the molecule-organization is not like the atom-organization and that either is unique. But even among uniquenesses there can be a similarity and a difference. Let us clarify to ourselves why we call a particular organization living and the rest non-living.

First, each part of a growing organism carries in itself up to a certain early state of the organism's development the presence or pattern of the whole, so that, if separated from the other parts with which it was co-operating through a particular function, it can produce a complete organism of the same type. Secondly, each part, up to a certain stage, can change its function if its place in the organism is changed an" do what the new place which it occupies needs it to do, as it each part had the sense of each point of the pattern and as u the pattern were independent of the material from which if

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seems to be made and could use any material to serve the function assigned to each point. Thirdly, each part joins with the others to form a separate distinct complete single organism, an organic individual, in which there is to a consider- able extent not only a functional dependence of the parts on the whole so that the parts, if isolated, would be disorganized but also an existential dependence such that the parts in isolation would cease even to be recognisable. Each of the three features and a fortiori their ensemble appear to prove that the whole has a primacy and that the parts are brought together essentially for its sake, for the purpose of expressing it.

The expression of the whole, over and above the general and fundamental features we have formulated, has some particular features in which the type or species of organism is thrown into relief as being the whole. Often the experiments of Driesch are turned to stress these features most. Sinnott succinctly illustrates them in two statements: "Each part or quality (is) so related to all the rest that in its growth the individual marches on through a series of specific steps to a specific end or culmination, maintaining throughout its course a delicately balanced state of form and function which tends to restore itself if it is altered.... A remarkable fact about organic regulation, both developmental and physiological, is that, if the organism is prevented from reaching its norm or 'goal' in the ordinary way, it is resourceful and will attain this by a different method. The end rather than the deans seems to be the important thing."

Nothing in the uniquenesses of non-life's organizations really parallels all this. Of course, in an organism the unity we have pictured may not be always manifest in full: it may "Manifest even in full within limits and it may be seriously hindered in several respects, but inasmuch as the essence of it in some way or other is never absent and all the more since it is often in full play, we can assert that here is a uniqueness incomparable, sui generis. The fact is that all non-life's I Organization, every inorganic whole, for all its pattern and

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structure and coherence, is still only additive, even when it is not a mere aggregate: it is not what Sherrington terms "additive by co-organization of an integrative kind", its harmony is not "impressed on the parts by the whole", it is not "an individuality whose whole, as luminously said by Coleridge, is presupposed by all its parts."

Let us get such a whole into proper focus by further distinguishing "co-organization of an integrative kind" from a system of interrelated parts interrelated into a system instead of massed together from non-living wholes as distinct from aggregates. These wholes are of two kinds. One kind is exemplified by molecules and atoms, the other by man-made machines. The former, as we can see from our summary of life's organization, have no recognisable sign of "purposefulness", of teleology. The latter are teleological, they serve a purpose, but still have nothing in common with organic unity. Although their parts may be interrelated differently from those of atoms and molecules, they are the same type of system inasmuch as organic unity is wanting to them. And it is wanting because a machine is merely put together from the outside and its unity is imposed ab extra: it does not have an internal unity and an internal development, whereas an organism bears within itself an active sustaining principle of its own unity as if in some way it had a sense of its own wholeness. And the evident symbol of such a sense is in the very pattern of an organism as contrasted to that of a machine. A machine's coherent wholeness differs intrinsically from an organism's. A machine is a number of units that simply fit together and work by action and reaction, while in an organism the parts co-operate to perform different functions and are determined by the functions they perform and are functional differentiations of a unity which pervades them concretely and directly. Hence an organism in its wholeness is pre-eminently non-mechanistic in the literal sense.

This is not tantamount to saying there are no mechanistic elements in it. Bertrand Russell, in a chapter of his Human

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knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, seems to think that if a frog's heart can be kept beating, as it can under special conditions, after being extracted from the frog, the concept of organic unity is disproved. What is disproved is only the fantastic notion that a living creature is entirely an organic unity and has in it no processes comparable to those going on in the inorganic world known to physics and chemistry. Life's history being what it is, an evolutionary one, mechanism must take a considerable hand in every living creature. And, because there are mechanistic traits and the parts have a certain independence, an organ or other elements may pursue courses different from or actually antagonistic to those of the complete organism: a man's epithelial cells may start any moment to proliferate independently and cause fatal cancer. But this does not equate a living creature to a machine any more than to an aggregate. While it is not beyond a physico-chemical character in its parts or even to some extent in its totality when that totality is viewed only as a collection of parts, it is much more in its real wholeness. Its real whole- ness is not simply additive either by being massed together or by being a system of interrelated parts, whether that system be a man-made machine or a natural composite like a molecule, like an atom. It is integratively additive so that its totality is more than the sum of the parts serving it and is in a large measure their very raison d'etre and seems in a genuine though not easily analysable sense to be prior to them.

And it is because life's organization is not simply additive that life acts as if with "desire" and "purpose": "desire" and Purpose" become possible only when the whole can be said in some sense to pre-exist: "desire" and "purpose" are indeed inevitable assumptions in view of such pre-existence. No wonder that every biologist gets the impression as of ends in view and of a wanting to attain them. Sherrington, illustrating this fact, quotes R.C. Punnett as saying: "We can only understand an organism if we regard it as though produced under the guidance of thought for an end." Referring to the suggestion of purposive behaviour received by a

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"competent observer", E.G. Dru Drury, he admits: "That impression of concerted endeavour comes it is no exaggeration to say with the force of a self-evident truth." And yet he writes a propos the growth of organisms: "Because atoms combine on the basis of the arrangement of their sub-atomic parts we do not speak of those constituent parts as there for producing molecules. We do not speak of electrons as for producing atoms. Yet molecule-producing - and atom-producing - would seem as purposive as limb-producing. Our concept of an atom treats an atom as a deterministic necessity. To describe atomic behaviour science makes no appeal to purpose. In physics science would gain nothing by that appeal. Does it in biology?" Sherrington's broad mind and experimental temper do not allow him to be a crude dogmatist, but he feels that the balance tilts in favour of a negative answer and that physics and chemistry more than hint that they can out of themselves explain how a pin's-head ball of cells in the course of certain weeks becomes a child. He fails to fathom to its depths his own phrase: "co-organization of an integrative kind." He is misled by lack of appreciation of the genuine difference between the organic whole and the inorganic - a difference which, if we look at it from the side of physics and chemistry, is clearly not of degree but of kind.

The central characteristic of life falls outside all materialism a la Sherrington.

3

In biology mechanistic or mechanical materialism is» strictly speaking, the view that the organism is a sum of the processes of the units composing it and that this sum is just an ordered aggregate such as a machine illustrates, but with- out any mechanic creating the order. Sherrington passes beyond so crude a view by saying that the organism is "additive by integrative co-organization" and, despite the machin6' features in it, is more than a sum of unit processes in action and reaction; its wholeness exceeds such a sum. However?

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he finds this wholeness merely a highly complex version of v/hat science by its growth in subtlety has come to recognise more and more in inorganic nature: namely, balanced systems. It is therefore simply a phenomenon, not yet fully analysed, belonging to the domain of physics and chemistry of the type already known to us in our laboratories. And, if one sees life thus, one's biological theory is still a mechanical materialism, though more refined than the old variety.

We have shown Sherrington's materialism to be untenable because of its being based on a misunderstanding of the true nature of the central characteristic mentioned by himself of life - organic unity, the individual whole that an organism constitutes by integrative co-organization. A similar misunderstanding - curious in one with a greater philosophical acumen - leads also the most prominent name in non- mechanistic biology, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, not only to criticise defects in prevalent vitalistic theories but to repudiate the very essence of vitalism which posits a purposive more-than-material life-force utilising physico-chemical processes within certain limits imposed by them: he adheres to another type of materialistic thought which has come to be known as "organicism". We must now examine his thesis as propounded in his famous book. Problems of Life.

At about the same time as J.H. Woodger in England (1926), von Bertalanffy brought to light a theoretical position purporting to avoid both mechanism and vitalism. The "organismic conception", as he called it, agreed with Driesch that the results of his experiments could never be accounted for by crudely considering the organism as the sum of its Parts in action and reaction. It went further and found even refined mechanism wanting. And yet vitalism was given no quarter. In consequence, biology was seen as irreducible to the current type of physics and chemistry, yet not as exceeding all chemistry and physics. A physics and chemistry specific to biology was sought for. The theme was: what new Physics and chemistry would explain organic unity, the distinct biological whole?

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The difference between this theme and that which k Sherrington appears to pursue can be shown by indicating how each proposes to join the physico-chemical with the biological. As already hinted, minds like Sherrington are disposed to incorporate biology into physics and chemistry by a mere extrapolation of the laws of the latter: the same laws are supposed to operate in a more complicated medium in biology, and biological laws are taken to be nothing except special extensions of them. Minds like von Bertalanffy believe that biology must have an autonomous development which, while not entirely refusing extrapolation from physics and chemistry, has its own postulates, its own set of laws and when the synthesis with physics and chemistry finally takes place an enlargement of the conceptual scheme of these two sciences will be necessary on account of biological study, without, however, the introduction of any factor which is not physico-chemical.

Surely the organismic attitude is more sane than the mechanistic. It is also more in tune with the actual procedure within physics and chemistry themselves. Von Bertalanffy gives a few examples, of which we may cite one. "Classical chemistry attributed to every atom a definite number of valencies, saturated when the atom enters into chemical combination with another. These valencies are sufficient so far as chemical compounds in the classical sense are concerned. They are not sufficient, however, to explain, for example, crystallization, macromolecular compounds, cohesion and so on; rather does the atom display further forces termed secondary valencies, lattice or van der Waals forces. In turn, they are explained by modern electron and quantum theory. In all such cases the inclusion of new phenomena into physical theory necessitates a modification and refinement of the original picture."

This is sound observation. But the bed of Procrustes is suggested if one assumes that biology must be incorporated into the physico-chemical at all costs. The chopper is evidently in the hands of the fear lest the admission of a supra-

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material agent should end the attempt at objective description, precise calculation and unequivocal correlation. This fear is to a considerable degree a mistake. If there is a life- force, it does not act without physico-chemical modes nor is its action unrestricted: an intricate web of process within process would be present in the organism in connection with the acts of such an agent. It can be investigated and a host of specific laws formulated without necessarily involving the denial of a supra-material entity as the ultimate source and presiding genius of the organism's "wholeness" and of organic control and regulation. The physico-chemical ceases only to be the final ground and determinant. And for a scientist to neglect physico-chemical investigation in the name of the supra-material would be an obscurantist vital- ism. But likewise would it be for a scientist an obscurantist materialism to go about with the preconception that nothing should be admitted except matter. A balance between the material and the supra-material should be possible in science - provided one condition is satisfied in the very last and culminating statement, a condition which vitalistic theories mostly ignore. Although a present difficulty in satisfying it should not restrain one from vitalism if the evidence is strong against the materialistic theory, no vitalism can be finally adequate unless matter and life are proved to be not essentially dissimilar. Essential dissimilarity would preclude interaction and make any balance between the two unintelligible. However, there can be a lower synthesis and a higher synthesis. In the one, life is reduced to matter, whether matter be conceived according to current physics and chemistry or according to an expanded version suggested by biological processes. In the other, matter is reduced to life and taken as a special limited case of vitality which is thus seen as fundamental.' So long as an ultimate reduction in

' Of course the term "fundamental" is relative. We are using it only as between two categories, matter and life. More fundamental than life would be mind and even beyond mind there could be spirit. But these are not our concern here.

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some form is the goal, there should be scientifically no less than philosophically as little a priori objection to vitalism as to materialism. To insist either that the reduction should be only in one direction, the materialistic, or that if there is to be a reduction in the opposite direction it should be immediate is to harbour prejudice and to lack in proper humility before Truth.

Von Bertalanffy professes to keep an open mind as to the metaphysical truth or illusiveness of vitalism but says that in science vitalism is illegitimate. Hence organic unity is bound to be chopped up by him to be something never sui generis: biological wholeness can never escape being so defined as to drop out all significant uniqueness. How completely this uniqueness is dropped out is clear when he tells us the rule that "holds for every 'whole'". He writes: "The question arises as to what the supposed 'non-summativity' of higher levels with respect to the lower ones really means, and in how far the former are explicable in terms of the latter. The answer is simple. The properties and modes of higher levels are not explicable by the summation of the properties and modes of action of their components taken in isolation. If, however, we know the ensemble of the components and the relations existing between them, then the higher levels are derivable from the components." This kind of whole is certainly not the organic unity we have spoken of and distinguished from a system of interrelated parts, whether the system be a molecule or a man-made machine. Von Bertalanffy, although he is not crude enough to deny all distinction, sees no such difference. And immediately after the above passage he exemplifies his definition. "Naturally, a mere summation of, say, a number of C,H,0, and N atoms gives no adequate knowledge of the compound molecule. This is readily seen, for example, in isomerism, when compounds consisting of the same atoms, but in different arrangement, have different properties. If, on the contrary, the structural formula is known, then the properties of the molecule are intelligible in terms of its parts, the component atoms..

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Adding up the charges in the parts of an electrical conductor, we cannot find the distribution of charge in the conductor as a whole, because it depends on the configuration of the whole system. If the parameters of the parts and the boundary conditions of the whole system are known, the distribution of charge in the latter can be derived 'from the parts'."

We have thus a complete dilution of the concept of the whole. And, for von Bertalanffy, the peculiarity of the organic whole lies not in its incomparable uniqueness but in whatever relations of a biological as distinct from a non- biological kind exist between the parts - relations which, despite this distinction, are still akin in essence to those obtaining in inorganic wholes. Exactly as it might be in physics and chemistry, says von Bertalanffy, "the lack of a rigid theory in fields like developmental physiology is connected with the fact that they have not yet found the necessary abstractions and symbolisms." The absence of a special "biological mathematics", so to speak, concerned not so much with the notion of quantity as with those of "pat- tern", "position" and "shape", is all the gap in these fields: organic unity, though restricted in its particulars to the biological level and to that extent unique, is in its generalities just another form of inorganic unity.

Apart from the prejudice that vitalism is illegitimate in science, von Bertalanffy is influenced by a defect in the vitalist Driesch's conception of the structure of an organism. Driesch conceives the wholeness of an organism as due to a factor different from and added to the material system rather than immanent in that system's constellation. If it is different from and added to the material system, von Bertalanffy argues, the system is looked upon as just a sum of its parts modified towards non-summativity by a life-force which stands apart from it. Driesch's vitalism, therefore, takes a "mechanical" view of the organism. Surely, in this respect von Bertalanffy is right as against Driesch. The entirely mechanical view of the body is mistaken, whether taken by a mechanist or a vitalist; but does that alter the character of

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organic unity? We may look upon a material system as not a sum of its parts but a unity, and yet stick to vitalism if organic unity exceeds the type which von Bertalanffy has in mind and which, despite specificities as between level and level, takes in both the atom and the cell by its too broad definition. His criticism of the vitalistic theory may very well be criticised as applying to a non-essential, of this theory. Vitalism would not be rendered superfluous by our being told that before positing a life-force we have to deal not with a mechanical organism but with an organism which acts as a whole. All depends on what sort of whole a non-vitalistic idea of the organism would provide.

Let us recall the general fundamental features underlined by us of organic unity when we were dealing with Sherrington's confusion. "First, each part of a growing organism carries in itself up to a certain early stage of the organism's development the presence or pattern of the whole, so that, if separated from the other parts with which it was co-operating through a particular function, it can pro- duce a complete organism of the same type. Secondly, each part, up to a certain stage, can change its function if its place in the organism is changed and do what the new place which it occupies needs it to do, as if each part had the sense of each point of the pattern and as if the pattern were independent of the material from which it seems to be made and could use any material to serve the function assigned to each point. Thirdly, each part joins with the others to form a separate distinct single organism, an organic individual, in which there is to a considerable extent not only a functional dependence of the parts on the whole so that the parts, if isolated, would be disorganized but also an existential dependence such that the parts in isolation would cease even to be recognisable. Each of the three features and a fortiori their ensemble appears to prove that the whole has a primacy and that the parts are brought together essentially for its sake, for the purpose of expressing it."

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The immanent whole as postulated by von Bertalanffy is inadequate to organic unity as we find it - basically as inadequate as the mechanical structure postulated by the summationists, to which Driesch felt obliged to add a transcendent factor. The call for vitalism remains even after we discard the old mechanical theory of the organism. The whole as a factor genuinely transcendent in some manner can alone give us organic unity.

Another argument of von Bertalanffy's against a transcendent factor rests on certain experimental observations. Among the several signs of such a factor in embryonic processes Driesch had mentioned "equifinality" - the reaching of the same end-results from different initial conditions - and the movement towards the most nearly typical result in the future despite interference, provided sufficient material is available during the process. Casting doubt on Driesch's notion of "entelechy", of a director of embryonic events in anticipation of the goal, von Bertalanffy writes: "Experience shows that the 'whole' on which determination depends is not the typical result to be reached in the future, but the actual state of the developing system at a given time which can be indicated in any particular case. To be sure, inasmuch as determination has not yet taken place, there is equifinality. However, development does not proceed 'purposively' in the sense that the best and most typical result possible is achieved, as should be the case with an entelechy directing events in foresight of the goal. What really happens, whether, when, and how regulation occurs, is unequivocally determined by the conditions present. For example, ½ -- blastomeres of the sea-urchin yield complete larvas, and so do ¼ blastomeres; from parts of the eight-celled and later stages complete or defective formations develop, depending on the cell material present or experimentally combined, and it can be indicated in every case which results will be obtained in a given cell combination. It has been said that the course of development proceeds with 'the senseless industry

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of necessity' irrespective of whether the result is good or bad, teleological, dysteleological, or ateleological. Also, it cannot be maintained that entelechy would try to achieve the most typical result possible, and is prevented from attaining this goal by the inadequacy of the material available. For example, in super-regeneration up to six hind legs can be developed in toads if suitable incisions art made. Obviously the work of entelechy is not limited here by the lack of material at its disposal; rather the process is necessarily determined by the material conditions present. The force of this argument is enhanced by remembering that, according to Driesch, one of the fundamental actions of entelechy is 'suspension' of potential processes, meaning that it stops certain processes in normal as well as regulative development, in such a way that the most nearly typical whole is formed. Super- regenerates 'and other monsters clearly demonstrate the impotence of entelechy.... Therefore, we can exclude the assumption of a principle which joins the material system of the embryo and governs its action in dependence on the typical result to be reached in the future. The 'wholeness' manifest in the processes of development is immanent in, not transcendent to, the embryo."

The precise bearing of this argument on our thesis can be measured if we hark back to our qualification of organic unity when we spoke of mechanistic elements present in the living creature. We said that such elements are bound to be there and can at times work so as to go against organic unity. In von Bertalanffy's passage we see another example of mechanistic action - or rather, since he repudiates mechanism in the ordinary sense, non-vitalistic action - yet it is as little subversive as the rest are of the fact that organic unity does exist. If a heart taken out of a frog and kept beating, if the growth of epithelial cells in a chaotic way to destroy the organism cannot cover up the fact of organic unity, neither can "super-regenerates and other monsters". The issue is really not whether Driesch's conception of vitalism is correct in all details, or whether the future rather than the actual

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state of the developing system at a given time is the determinant, or whether there are conditions under which even with ample material the most nearly typical whole is not formed. The issue is whether, no matter what happens, there is or there is not in a radical sense "a whole presupposed by the parts".

At every moment the embryo is, in Sherrington's phrase, "never any less than a self-centred individual... a self- centred co-operative society which is familial and a unity - an organization of family cells, with corporate individuality." This individuality may find itself limited by external circumstances, it may go in several respects wrong with regard to the form expected; but under all conditions it still remains evident. It acts as a "co-organisation of an integrative kind" which means that the organism behaves in general as if every component were itself the whole in a particular aspect - that the components do not merely get organized to act in a system of interrelations while themselves remaining foreign to the idea of the system, but are imbued with the idea, as it were, and spontaneously co-operate from within themselves and serve the whole as if that whole were their own being, on a larger more fully manifested scale. It is because the components act, to a greater or lesser degree, like self- differentiations of a unity that the biological whole varies from a whole purely physico-chemical. A power seems there, pre-existent to the components and securing their organization. The term "entelechy" does not describe all the phenomena of this power: it stresses the goal more than the whole:

this power's main characteristic is perhaps hit off by saying that an integratively co-organized whole of some kind or other is the principal goal. As long as some such whole is achieved by it, be it the most nearly typical or no, a unity which differs radically from any physico-chemical one possible is in action. Super-regenerates and similar monsters wake no odds to the essence of vitalism, for they are still wholes physico-chemically impossible.

In face of this impossibility we cannot stop at the immanent

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"wholeness" insisted on by von Bertalanffy. But, inasmuch as the organism is proved to be not a mechanical structure and inasmuch as the transcendent factor works under limitations imposed by the material system, we must grant that side by side with the transcendent factor and to a degree subduing it is an immanent whole which is just a sum of the relations among the parts at each moment, the parts themselves by entering into relation with one another undergoing in their processes a change from what they do in isolation yet never behaving as though each were in a less or more measure the very whole in a particular aspect. It was this immanent whole that was forgotten by Driesch who took the organism per se to be mechanistic. But just as he was mechanistic in regard to the parts, von Bertalanffy is mechanistic in regard to their relations: both are in their different ways additive and summative and the mistake of the one leads him to a transcendent factor while ignoring the immanent "wholeness" and the mistake of the other leads him to an immanent "wholeness" to the exclusion of the transcendent factor.

The strongest argument of all that von Bertalanffy musters, against mechanism on one side and vitalism on the other, and in support of his affirmation at the same time that biological relations are distinct from non-biological and that both the types are finally one - his strongest argument comes from his brilliant formulation of a physics and chemistry peculiar to the biological whole. The formulation is designated by him as "an open system in a steady state" and he has constructed a theoretical model - that is, a mathematical model on paper and not in the laboratory - of a material system of this kind, which is proved by him and other organicists to be suggesting the causes of certain special biological features apparently without needing a factor apart from the system. An example of such features is the dynamic equilibrium of an organism undergoing metabolic processes. Another is the constancy of the entropy content: Prigogine has calculated that in an open system, in contrast to a closed

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system such as we find in inanimate nature, the entropy content is constant but not maximal as in the equilibrium of a closed system. Under certain conditions it can even decrease, proving very pointedly the limitations of the second law of thermodynamics, and conduce to an increase in complexity and order. Again, the open system can achieve the same steady state whatever the starting conditions and return to a steady state after deviation: here we have an "equifinality" giving the appearance of purposefulness as if the system were directed towards the attainment of a given state in the future - quite the opposite of what happens in a closed inanimate system where the state at any moment depends on the state in the past. An extremely interesting account of the open system and its various physico-chemical capacities is provided in von Bertalanffy's Problems of Life and a fine summary of the mathematical findings of von Bertalanffy as well as others in the same field may be perused in New Biology 16 in the article The Organism as a Physico-chemical Machine. No doubt, it is a system with many serious gaps, as von Bertalanffy himself admits in the words which, in the second installment of our series, we have quoted in connection with the present posture of affairs in embryology. But it is developed enough to mark a momentous step in the physics and chemistry of the organism. It fully justifies von Bertalanffy in saying that biological relations are distinct from non-biological. On the strength of it he can substantiate his statement that not even in principle can organic unity be reduced to the laws of physical gestalten - that is, of physical systems that attain a state of equilibrium and represent wholes. He declares with perfect right that here are "problems that are beyond a mere application of gestalt principles known in inanimate nature. Rather a specific gestalt principle immanent in the organism is to be supposed."

But is he justified in repudiating vitalism? His new physics and chemistry is surely an eye-opener for the vitalist when the latter tends to regard vitalism as immediately resulting on the rejection of mechanistic materialism in

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biology. All the same, do they support von Bertalanffy's claim that they lead to a non-vitalistic theory of life? The answer is: No. His work demonstrates in some detail how the specific biological gestalt functions. But organic unity, as already pointed out, exceeds a whole such as understood by the gestalttheorie which gives us merely the physico-chemical configuration, whether the configuration be in the domain of the physico-chemical of the current type or in that of the Bertalanffian type. The biological gestalt remains a configuration whole, whatever its specificity. By the vitalistic features it exhibits it does not bring life under the rubric of the physico-chemical. When, for instance, we are told that the same end-results can be reached by it from different initial conditions, we have only to ask: Are the end-results organic unity? If not, the equifinality exhibited falls short of life's manifestation. What the biological gestalt constitutes is nothing more than the right physico-chemical basis for the unity that is organic.

But, of course, if it is nothing more, it is also nothing less. For, without it life cannot build itself in matter and the theory of vitalism will be somewhat freakish. So, while we must refrain from believing with von Bertalanffy that an expansion of the accepted physico-chemical scheme by the concept of the open system in a steady state is sufficient for the arrival of life and that the functioning of inorganic components in an unknown physico-chemical manner can give us the full biological phenomenon, we cannot deny the necessity of such expansion and such functioning. How else is the biological gestalt to take shape and serve as life's indispensable medium of manifestation? Even if we posit a life-force we can but regard it as using matter not only according to its own vital character but also according to what matter itself is capable of. Unless matter is found to have properties un- known to us today, we cannot conceive of the emergence of the biological gestalt under even the stress of a life-force. For, the life-force would be dealing with matter and if matter did not prove capable of a new physics and chemistry it could

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not be vitalised. But the question is whether in accounting for the new physics and chemistry of the biological whole we would not need to go ultimately beyond all physics and chemistry.

There is no doubt that we would. Still, two alternatives face us. Is life something utterly different from matter or is the inorganic merely a condition of involved vitality - matter being then nothing save vitality in a particular state of self- concealment which at a certain point of physico-chemical change releases the concealed nature? The release would mean the formation of the new gestalt by that nature as the basis of the latter's manifestation. On principles of science as well as of philosophy we must look on matter as involved vitality if we cannot be satisfied with looking on life as merely evolved materiality.

Such a view, fully worked out, would imply the existence of a life-force in itself, unconcealed and uninvolved, on a "plane" of its own and the concealment and involution as a partial phase of its being, an adventure of losing itself and finding itself under circumstances that start with seemingly its very opposite. In that case, the release or evolution of vitality from the apparently inorganic would be due at the same time to an urge from within the concealed and involved condition and to a pressure upon that condition by the life- force from its status as a free and undiminished agent. Then we should expect in the phenomenon of life four things together - an amount of the physico-chemical directly extrapolated from the inorganic: an amount of the physico-chemical specifically biological, irreducible to the former, joining it only in an expanded scheme of physics and chemistry:

tentative touches of something that transcends all physico- chemical formulas: direct activity of the transcendent factor at crucial decisive points. We suggest that an unbiased gaze on the organic phenomenon reveals just these four things simultaneously, and the transcendent touches of both kinds come in not as purely inexplicable intrusions but as creators of unsuspected and unique physico-chemical processes,

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perhaps some functioning of matter even beyond the open system in a steady state, and the main wonder of these touches lies precisely in their role as such creators. They can play that role because the life-force is not alien to matter:

only, it is not matter that is the explanation of life but life that explains matter by being the original power whose involved condition in various degrees is the physico-chemical. The problem of interaction is thus solved and intelligibility given in principle to a balance between the material and the supramaterial. Also, the sway of the physico-chemical over so much of the biological is rendered clear since the involution must make the former the widely determinant matrix of the latter. But the almost unlimited potentialities of development of the physico-chemical is no less given a rationale, for matter is no longer confined to a single cadre or a few sets of cadres and the life-force is no longer an agent acting quite ab extra: it acts as matter's inmost hidden nature and even the most transcendent touches have an underlying continuity with the immanent whole.

Everything considered, a position of this kind appears the most logical, if not the solely logical. Von Bertalanffy's work does not at all justify any doubt about the essence of vitalism. And we may state some inferences from this conclusion as follows. To begin with, the expanded scheme of the physico- chemical which he hopes for will go a long way towards providing rationally for the possibility of a transition from the inorganic to the organic, but by itself it will not make the transition completely explicable. Apropos the problem which we mentioned in our opening article - that of synthetising life in the laboratory - and which we declared on the way to being solved, we may remark that indeed the solution will take place soon, but, when we succeed in synthetising a colloid of a certain complexity and structure, something will suddenly animate it and the logical connection will never be entirely struck upon in physico-chemical terms. Only by the operation of a life-force the inorganic interrelated closed system can become in full the biological interrelated open

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system in a steady state and supply the required physico-chemical basis for organic unity. Further, if in physico-chemical terms there is no totally intelligible transition between the inorganic and the organic, what brought about this crucial becoming must also sustain it, for otherwise the new condition will lapse into the old. Also, what effected the transition by acting from beyond the physico-chemical may be thought of as subtly influencing in various directions the physics and chemistry of the new condition throughout an individual organism's career as well as throughout the history of organic evolution.

The last inference is the most important, but we shall not undertake here to give it an elaborate illustrative content. A separate article would be needed for that. What we shall do, before closing, is to face in brief a certain philosophical question posed by the formula that has been used so much by us - organic unity. We have also employed the word "individuality" as a synonym for the formula. Well, if organic unity implies an effective whole prior in some sense to the parts as well as to the relations between them, if it is a unity from which interrelated multiplicity originally proceeds as though to serve an overall purpose, a unity not built out of multiplicity and then reacting as a system of relations upon the relata, does it imply a sort of individual "soul" for each organism? Our answer can only be: "From the philosophical standpoint, organic unity implies primarily that under material conditions tending to obstruct and obscure all surface manifestation a supra-material power works out in each of its expressions an 'idea' in its secret being: this power carries on a purposive activity, much as a poet inspired by a situation may purpose to create a poem, each part of which would serve and express its general motive, and move towards the creation of this form through conditions of varying difficulty. We should also say that behind each organism thus fashioned, there must be not only a general life-force but some individualising character in the force, as if there were 'souls' trying to effect forms for themselves and

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tending through the long history of evolution to emerge more and more from their subliminal stations, as it were, into the surface awareness - 'souls' which we may regard ultimately as themselves numerically multiple and diversified expressions of an essentially single universal being that is the life of all lives."

These philosophical significances inevitably arise from the scientific fact ascertained by us that, if we approach from the side of the physico-chemical rather than from the side of a life-force whose partial phase is a concealing self-materialisation and an involution in physico-chemical process, we shall always strike against a difference of kind rather than of degree between matter and life - a difference which cuts the ground from under every species of biological materialism.

4

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Materialism, either with a mechanistic theory or with an "organismic conception", has been found by us incapable of accounting for the integratively co-organized self-differentiated unity that is the organic whole, a whole that has to be considered as in some genuine sense pre-existent to the parts each of which acts in varying degrees as if it were the whole itself in a particular aspect and function. A fundamental principle of life - or life-force, to use a popular expression - is required by biological phenomena: life can never be rendered completely explicable in physico-chemical terms.

Further, whatever physico-chemical terms are present - necessarily present since biology studies embodied life - are not merely extrapolated into a more complex medium from the physics and chemistry we have developed in our laboratories. The organization of a new physico-chemical process called by von Bertalanffy "an open system in a steady state and so far elucidated in the main by only a theoretical model is the bodily basis of vitality. This organization whose

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mathematics cannot, under the present physical postulates, be derived from the mathematics of matter experimentally known to us but calls for a broadening of those postulates constitutes the "immanent" whole supporting the action of the "transcendent" whole that vitality really is.

But matter and life are not to be regarded as two opposed or entirely distinct principles. Life is indeed more fundamental and has a characteristic action of its own, yet it cannot be something quite other than matter: if it is something quite other no ground is provided for the interaction which undeniably takes place between the two and for the close- knit system which they form in the phenomena studied by the biologist. Consequently, when matter with its typical characteristics cannot be looked upon as fundamental and as sufficiently explicative of life, it must be viewed as life itself in a concealed shape, in an "immanent" condition admitting of diverse levels, life's self-involution in a mode apparently the very opposite of its own nature and serving as a starting- point for that nature's slow difficult evolution to the surface and graded developing disclosure of typical supra-material characteristics.

Finally, if the organisms constructed by life are each a self-differentiated unity, an organic whole that is everywhere individual in different shades and measures, the one life manifesting in space and time through such unities and wholes is likely to be itself a unity that is self-differentiated, a whole whose individuality does not preclude a manifoldness of subordinate individualities or individual "souls", as it were, numerously expressive within it of a single universal essence and emerging more and more to the surface of embodied life in the course of evolutionary history.

This, scientifically and philosophically, is the general picture to which we have arrived by our scrutiny of the phenomena pertaining to the organism. What we propose to do now is to cast a brief glance at the phenomena of organic solution and see whether the scientific facts of evolutionary history bear out our central notion of life.

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Evolution has been considered by scientists from one of two standpoints: naturalism and finalism. Naturalism holds that the course of evolution has run blindly, as a chapter of accidents, a movement without any aim, producing by sheer operation of unconscious physical and chemical agents through a long series of changing animals the self-aware and goal-seeking creature named man. Finalism implies a supra- material reality operating with an aim, a reality equated in most cases with a life-force governing matter under certain limitations. Even if a clear aim is not implied, at least some sort of direction is. A directional life-force may not render evolution strictly finalistic and Bergson who believes in just an élan vital, a vital impetus without a clear aim, disclaims the title of finalist; but inasmuch as his élan vital is not quite indiscriminately creative but pushes towards an ever greater efficiency and ever keener consciousness it has a vague kind of goalful striving, an undefined aim of higher and higher and is therefore still finalistic though in a broad and unspecific sense.

Some finalists take up the peculiar position that there are no élan vital, no mind-force, no individual "souls" apart from the body, nothing except matter, but God, while not canceling the brute "say" of matter in particulars, makes it evolve according to His own plan and manifest vital and mental modes dominating its usual physico-chemical ones. Lecomte du Nouy calls himself a "telefinalist", meaning that the ultimate aim of evolution - namely, man striving to be a perfect spiritual being - has been fixed by God and certain crucial transitions depend on Him but what he works upon is a movement of matter whose details develop by purely natural means and are ruled by "chance". He offers the simile of a number of streams issuing from a mountain lake and set going by the distant force of gravitation and executing various turns and twists, delays and rushes, stoppages and breakthroughs determined by the brute lay-out and contour of the land down which they flow, until the far-off valley, which is the goal, is reached by what is uniquely

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destined to overcome somehow all the intervening conditions. In the course of the telefinalistic evolution, however, several phenomena of "anti-chance" (to quote a term of Eddington's) occur because God has willed them: these cannot be explained by the natural trend of things according to the laws of probability and elude scientific analysis. The two most outstanding among them are the properties of life which cannot be linked to those of inanimate matter and the properties of mind which cannot be linked to those of matter animate. But even prior to life's arrival there are, in the scheme of du Nouy, puzzles like the chemical characteristics of molecules in relation to the qualities possessed by atoms. Du Noiiy, in Human Destiny, has many penetrating observations on biological problems and some intuitions of great cultural and spiritual value, yet both philosophically and scientifically his supernaturalism paired with materialism is torn by an immense hiatus between two extremes and it resorts to a kind of miracle-mongering and affords no abiding significance to the individualisation that is the constant factor in biological history and is of the widest import in human destiny. Also, it is exposed in part to the same objections that apply to the theory, at once materialistic and theistic, advocated by Lloyd Morgan: Emergent Evolution.

In Lloyd Morgan's theory of emergence material components are credited with forming by their interrelation a series of wholes whose properties are novel and, from a consideration of the parts, unpredictable: these properties are described as emergent rather than resultant. Emergents are said to arise widely in the domain of matter; on the level of the atom, the level of the molecule, the level of a collection of molecules. Lloyd Morgan claims, for instance, that the liquid or solid condition of a substance cannot be predicted from a complete knowledge of the molecules of that substance in a vaporous condition. C.D. Broad, an enthusiast for emergence, asserts that experiment alone and never any calculation from the components can teach us the chemical behaviour of any elementary substance. According to him,

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nothing that we know about hydrogen itself or in its combination with anything but oxygen would give us the least reason to expect that it would combine with oxygen at all, much less that two atoms of it would combine with one of oxygen. On the analogy of such physical "emergents", life is deemed an emergent from physico-chemical events related among themselves in a particular Way and mind an emergent from vital events in a particular interrelation.

But Lloyd Morgan adds that he is no stark materialist. He realises that Emergents has to avoid two errors: on the one hand, the higher must not be read down into the lower without any difference and, on the other, the lower must not be supposed to explain the higher without possessing in it something akin to what emerges. Lloyd Morgan, while refusing to accept a distinct life or mind, tries to comply with these conditions by postulating that all physico-chemical events have vital-mental correlates of their own which are imperceptible except when these events join together in a special manner as in organisms. He also seems to suggest that in perceptibly emergent life no less than in perceptibly emergent mind there is released an impulse which becomes free in some measure to control and direct what has hitherto bound it. Lastly, to explain what makes emergents emerge in a progressive direction, as they seem to do, in the total computation of evolutionary history, he posits the Activity of Divine Power, an Activity omnipresent throughout emergent evolution and expressive of Divine Purpose.

Like Lecomte du Noiiy, Lloyd Morgan strains at the gnat of a distinct life or mind governing matter under certain limitations and swallows the camel of Divine Activity a"0 Purpose. There need be no quarrel with this camel: in fact it has to be brought in sooner or later, but to go straight to 1 without taking first the gnat in one's stride is not very convincing, scientifically or philosophically. Even apart fro this, the theory of emergent evolution as presented by Lloyd Morgan is internally unsound. The suggestion of an imp1115 which becomes free in some measure to control and dire

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what has hitherto bound it is flagrantly contradictory of the idea of correlation between the material and the vital-mental. Life correlated to a system of physico-chemical events may be manifested as a property not to be found directly in the parts of the system but it cannot be anything else than a version in perceptibly vital terms of what exists in physico-chemical terms: there can be no turning of life upon matter to regulate and adjust. Similarly, mind cannot turn upon what has hitherto bound it to exercise a new power of orientation and selection, design and valuation. A new controlling and directing impulse can be released only if life or mind is no mere correlate of matter, no mere vital or mental aspect of it, helplessly attendant on physico-chemical interrelatedness, but an existent in its own right, however concealed and suppressed it may be before the emergence and, moreover, only if matter is not intrinsically different from life or mind and prohibitive of interaction with it but just an involved form of it from which the vital or mental evolves its own characteristic action.

In the second place, Lloyd Morgan's claim, as also Broad's and that of every other adherent of Lloyd Morgan's theory, about unpredictable physical Emergents is faulty. It is made with the intention of "naturalising" the emergence of life and mind and doing away with distinct vital and mental entities. To thinkers who do not feel bound, as Lloyd Morgan does, to acknowledge a progressive direction in evolution and to explain it by Divine Activity and Purpose, this naturalising of all emergence has been a prop to materialism. But, as McDougall acutely reminded us long ago in Modern Materialism and Emergent Evolution and as Reginald A. Kapp brilliantly drives home in Science versus Materialism, the emergence of life or mind is not on a par with that of physical properties. The simple reason for the disparity is: the latter are not really unpredictable at all. Physical chemists have successfully predicted the properties of atoms and molecules and collections of molecules, which they have never observed. No limits can be set to the physical chemist's power

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of prediction, for all the properties can be related either to the shape and arrangements of the molecules or to the numb and position and movement of the electrons associated with atomic nuclei. Even if the fallibility of the physical chemist prevents prediction at times, the emergent properties, after they have come, grow intelligible and explicable in terms of their antecedents and are therefore predictable in at least principle.

A capital example of the prediction of all the chemical properties of an atom from a knowledge of the atomic nucleus is given by Kapp. "Substances had been discovered," he writes, "of which the atomic nuclei carried nearly all the numbers of positive unit charge from 1 to 92. These corresponded to all the known chemical elements. But there were a few gaps. For instance, no nucleus had been found with 72 charges. Physicists knew that such nuclei must exist and that they would represent an undiscovered element. Though no one had ever met it, its properties were predicted. Eventually nuclei carrying 72 charges were found. They belonged to the atoms of a new element which has received the name Hafnium. This exhibits the predicted properties."

Apropos Lloyd Morgan's claim that a complete knowledge of the molecules of a substance in a vaporous condition would not enable the liquid or solid condition of that substance to be predicted, Kapp writes: "The physical properties of liquids and solids depend on the way in which the molecules are packed when they shake down, and this is known if the shape of the molecules is known. The molecules of oil, for instance, are long and cling firmly to each other, side by side, so that a collection of them tends to be grouped in layers like the stalks in a cornfield. But the ends cling les5 firmly and easily lose their hold. Consequently one laye1' slides easily over another. This explains why oil spreads over the surface of water and why it is a good lubricant, A physicist who discovered a vapour consisting of long molecules with the appropriate distribution of clinging power

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the sides and ends could predict the lubricating properties of that substance in the liquid state."

Broad's assertion that the power of hydrogen to combine with oxygen and much more its power to combine in the proportion of two atoms to one could not be predicted is also false. To quote Kapp again: "Electrons are kept in the vicinity of the atomic nucleus by electrostatic attraction. They are not prevented from falling into it by centrifugal force only. Their mutual electrostatic repulsion keeps them at a distance from each other and, therefore, also from any single spot such as the nucleus. A compromise is reached between the pulls towards the nucleus and the pushes between the electrons when the system settles down to a condition in which the electrons are not very crowded. In the oxygen atom stability exists when two of the eight electrons describe orbits comparatively near the nucleus in what is called an inner shell, or K-ring, and the remaining six describe orbits in an outer shell, or L-ring. These six are not very crowded. The electrons are said to shield the nucleus. This means that at a little distance from the atom the negative charges on the electrons completely cancel the positive charges on the nucleus. The atom behaves as if it carried no charges. It is electrically neutral and can neither attract nor repel other particles. But the wide spacing of the electrons in the oxygen atom causes the shielding to be imperfect at very short distance. Some of the electrical field of the nucleus gets through the mesh as it were, so that there are regions where a positive electrostatic field occurs. There are other regions very close to the atoms where the negative field of the electrons preponderates. Consequently the atom can both attract and repel particles which come sufficiently close. It has some electrostatic activity. The hydrogen atom consists of a nucleus carrying a single unit positive charge called a proton and one negatively charged electron. Each sometimes comes into a region where 11 is attracted. The hydrogen atom is then captured. The Proton allies itself with the oxygen nucleus and the electron which was associated with this proton in the hydrogen atom

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enters the outer shell. As I said already, the six electrons in the outer shell of the oxygen atom are not very crowded. As many as eight can be accommodated in this shell before their mutual electrostatic repulsions become pronounced. But more than eight are not possible. If a ninth tried to enter, it would be too strongly repelled, even though the requisite attractive force existed at the nucleus. The ninth would have to stay outside in a third shell. Hence we say that the second shell is complete when it contains eight electrons. This number is provided when one atom of oxygen has combined with two of hydrogen."

A physical emergent is actually no genuine emergent since it has no genuine novelty so far as any property is concerned which scientists count as objectively connected with it or even as having an objective basis in it of stimulus to our subjectivity. Thus, all the properties that science studies of the molecule produced by the combination of two atoms of hydrogen with one of oxygen are actually non-Emergents, but a property unpredictable either in practice or in principle is, for instance, the name by which we know the combination: "water"! Scientifically, this property depends entirely on the observer and not on the observed. A genuine novelty, traceable in the observed itself and yet not only unpredictable but also inexplicable after its arrival, can never arise unless the emergent is the manifestation of a principle exceeding matter and having matter as its involved condition instead of itself being a condition of matter evolved.

The immediate desideratum in biology is a vital principle of this sort. That principle may - indeed, must - be an index to others of the same sort with, at the top. Divinity. But to jump straight to them would be illogical. Much more illogical would it be to jump straight to the God of Lloyd Morgan and du Noiiy who supply no ground for interaction between Him and matter. Lloyd Morgan, however, appears to feel 1" general an inadmissible hiatus between matter and God: else he would not see the necessity to talk of psychological correlates or aspects of matter from the very bottom up to

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man. What he fails to see is the utter inadequacy of such correlates or aspects to account for the partially free domination which he acknowledges of the vital and mental over the physical and which we have established in biological terms by our study of organic unity.

So, finalism without vitalism of the type we have outlined is defective when dealing with evolutionary history no less than when treating an individual organism's career. What, in the biological sphere, we have to pit against the materialistic hypothesis is a vitalistic finalism. But, in the above considerations, we have pitted it against that hypothesis with regard only to the two crucial turning points in evolutionary history, the development of life in matter and that of mind in life. What about the particular course and the specific process? Do they support our vitalistic finalism or do they allow a materialistic picture?

Let us look at the picture painted by materialism. The old Darwinian version is well-known: minute variations some- how occurring as between individuals and gradually piling up to radical changes, a struggle for existence among the bearers of these changes as well as of those variations, the survival of the fittest and the continuation of their characteristics by heredity. The phrase "natural selection" covered the process by which the unfit were eliminated in the actual struggle and through environmental conditions. Today 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 designated as "differential fertility" among populations geographically distributed in several ways - a peaceful process sifting and reinforcing and accumulating, through the unequal reproductive capacities °f differently distributed groups, a series of mutations (both small variations and radical changes) which are known to be due to a shuffling in the pattern of chromosomes and genes

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in the germplasm. This peaceful working has been elucidated with a manifold mathematical analysis in a number of studies by a host of researchers, especially R.A. Fisher T R c8 Haldane and Sewall Wright. But, whatever the new understanding of natural selection, the blind nature of evolution affirmed by Darwinism is "confirmed" by Neo-Darwinism

In fact it has been further emphasised, since characters and adaptations desired and acquired by individual organ- isms are no longer considered inheritable and as the mutational pattern-shuffling in the chromosomes and genes seems to be following no purposive factor and even to be observing no formulable law. Both spontaneous mutations and those induced by artificial agents like heat are seen to be "accidental" with respect to external conditions: they show no adaptive character to the conditions under which they arise. For instance, the mutations that arise at increased temperature do not represent adaptations to that higher temperature: there is only an increase in the rate at which mutations appear. Even if, with von Bertalanffy, we hold that the uncontrolled character of mutations and their lack of adaptiveness and direction with respect to external influences do not necessarily mean that nothing in the nature of the organism itself determines them systematically on the whole, the Bertalanffian view does not do away with the essentially naturalistic and non-finalistic standpoint, since this view is not at all tantamount to vitalism.

The most purposive-looking feature of evolution - the manner in which organisms are marvellously suited for efficient functioning within their environment as if a life- force had made a calculated adjustment of organ and form to the demands of the surround - materialism explains, on the strength of observations, by saying that the general absence of anything except what is closely adapted to the calls of life s milieu is the result of nature's eliminating all that was n01 best adapted out of a vast number of accidental differences of detail among individual organisms. Moreover, the old ides that an intricate structure is useful only after it is complete

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and that therefore the production of it must have taken place a purposive miracle of all-at-once or else that the slow production of it was not affected by the non-purposive and blind play °^ natural selection but was a Ideological preparation in advance of actual use, is discredited by materialism: at all stages of development most structures are, according to it, useful in their own ways. Not that non-adaptive (of no particular advantage or disadvantage) or in adaptive (disadvantageous) or even pre-adaptive (non-adaptive or in- adaptive for the ancestral way of life but adaptive for some other way which happens to be available) features escaping the pressure of natural selection are denied, but their rarity is pointed out and they are regarded as simultaneous with adaptive ones and not over-balancing the advantage of the latter or as secondary results of these. Even if they persist for a longer or shorter time without connection with adaptive ones they are shown to be exceptions rather than the rule. And though the extremely rare pre-adaptive features are admitted to be of great importance as mechanisms for the rise of radically new types of organisms, they are not taken to be the usual modes of transition from type to type. If they were the usual modes, some sort of teleology would be suggested. The usual modes are seen to be those not incompatible with a play of blind forces.

A minor concession is, however, granted to the part played by the individual organism's acquired changes: such changes are not hereditary and therefore are unrelated to evolution directly but, as G.G. Simpson puts it, "any individual change not itself hereditary may nevertheless strongly influence the individual's ability or opportunity to reproduce and in this indirect way will affect the course of evolution of the group as a whole". Far more important than these Ganges acquired consciously or unconsciously are others that have little to do with the individual organism's initiative or its newly developed response to environment. The adaptations that really count, according to the materialistic hypothesis, are fortuitous mutations favoured by natural

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selection and getting integrated into the genetic system and leading from type to type by a long-range extension of the synthetic process sketched by Fisher, Haldane and Wright

The picture painted by materialism of "blind forces" cannot be arbitrarily shoved aside. Of course it is not an absolutely verified picture. Although plausible, it contains bold extrapolations. Thus, during nearly fifty years of genetical research on some dozens of animals and plants, a lot of mutations have been observed but except for some cases occurring in polyploid plants no transgression of the limits of the species has been accomplished by chance mutations, let alone "macro-evolutionary" changes needed for differences between fundamental groups (phyla). From this we cannot assert that nothing else could have occurred in a billion years of evolution; yet to say that something else has occurred is to extend universally a principle we have experimentally demonstrated to a rather limited extent. When we turn to the record of fossils, we do find a multitude of transitional types between species, many between genera, a few between classes, but none at all between phyla - and these last would be the most important and convincing. Probably early geological conditions are responsible for the lack. As to adaptive mutations, there seems some contradiction between the fact observed in the laboratory that mutations occur without reference to advantage within the environment acting upon the organism and the fact that in nature we find mutational features integrated with extraordinary adaptiveness into the environment. Even if minute advantageous mutations occur, the highly complex precision of adapted structures appears a far cry from them and not all the processes elucidated in the Fisher-Haldane-Wright synthesis strike one as quite convincingly explaining the almost expert skill of these structures and the countless convergence of mutational features that go to render them coherent co-operative wholes. Again, to take the "accidental usefulness" is of a character as the supreme deciding force m evolutions too sweeping a generalisation. In order to survive

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organ or trait has to be somehow useful or related to useful features, but, as Goebel, the celebrated botanist, has emphasised, the manifoldness of organic forms is much greater than the manifoldness of environmental conditions. For instance, as von Bertalanffy notes, in a uniform marine environment, forminifera or radiolaria develop hundreds of species, whose fantastic diversities of shape are "natural art- forms" far removed from the need to be merely useful. Also, how is it that life not only expands horizontally but climbs vertically as if there were a nisus to create a qualitative hierarchy? Within the usefulness (supposedly accidental) of organic things a lot of other motifs richer or deeper or at least more dramatic and in any case not easily to be explained away as accidental seem to be at work. Lastly, as von Bertalanffy reminds us, we have no more than one or two dozen experiments in which the "accidental usefulness" of a character is demonstrated, as when, for example, those individuals of a species of insect which have a colour identical with the background are less eaten by birds than those with contrasting colours. But there is no way to verify or falsify experimentally the extrapolation that evolution was controlled by "accidental usefulness".

Yes, the materialistic picture is not an absolutely verified one. Huxley and Simpson, two of its best exhibitors, are also aware of this, but they feel that, while here an extended hypothetical application of causes concretely tested in a limited field is made, causes like inherent tendencies, vital urges or cosmic goals are vague and not equally demonstrable by experimental technique. So they deem the materialise picture well-founded and plausible and not illegitimately

generalised. Though we may not quite agree we must concede a certain cogency to it. Only, we have to ask ether it is the sole truth and whether it is a truth which we should not expect on our vitalistic and finalistic theory. Our theory makes matter a state of concealed vitality, in which at the start vitality is, to all seeming, completely contradicted: the elements of dispersion, accident, undirectedness and

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waste are at their maximum. Evolutionary life's matrix therefore, is such as to sustain in many passages of life' history and in many phases of its activity the forces of blindness - at least a strong surface appearance of them in many details, just as in the details of an individual organism numerous non-vitalistic and non-finalistic features meet a superficial survey. Anything else than this would run counter to our theory. So the argument for a materialistic interpretation of evolution is itself an important point in favour of our vitalistic finalism!

But, of course, if our theory is correct, the materialistic picture would not be the sole truth. An opposite suggestion would offer itself - and more and more in the onward course of evolutionary history. This is exactly what we find. Let us mark what materialism is obliged to admit of an overall impression of, in the first place, insurgent abundant all- spreading creativity and, in the second, directed and purposive process. Of course it attempts to explain away that impression by stressing as basic the play of apparently blind forces already mentioned and exhibiting prominently the fumblings, the dead-ends, the deteriorations, the extinctions and the maze as of a vast randomness and opportunism. But life as creative artist cannot be gainsaid. "For naive and unbiased contemplation," writes von Bertalanffy, "nature does not look like a calculating merchant; rather she looks like a whimsical artist, creative out of an exuberant fantasy and destroying her own work in romantic irony. The principles of 'economy' and of 'fitness' are true only 1" a Pickwickian sense. On the one hand, nature is a niggards" when she insists on abolishing, say, an already minute rudimentary organ; this little economy having, as main a by the theory of selection, enough advantage to be decisive in the struggle for existence. On the other hand, she produces a wealth of colour, form, and other creations, which, as far as we can see, is completely useless. completely useless example, the exquisite artistry of butterflies' wings/ has nothing to do with function, and cannot even be appreciated

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by their bearers with their imperfect eyes. This productivity of creation seems to be expressed in the 'horizontal' multiplicity of forms on the same level of organization ,g well as in the 'vertical' progress of organization, which can, but need not necessarily, be considered as 'useful'.... go, evolution appears to be more than the mere product of chance governed by profit. It seems a cornucopia of evolution creatrice, a drama full of suspense, of dynamics and tragic complications. Life spirals laboriously upwards to higher and ever higher levels, paying for every step. It develops from the unicellular to the multicellular, and puts death into the world at the same time. It passes into levels of higher differentiation and centralization, and pays for this by the loss of regulability after disturbances. It invents a highly developed nervous system, a brain which allows consciousness that by means of a world of symbols grants foresight and control of the future; at the same time it is compelled to add anxiety about the future unknown to brutes; finally, it will perhaps have to pay for this development with self- destruction. The meaning of this play is unknown, unless it is what the mystics have called God's attaining to awareness

of Himself."

Profoundly suggestive eloquence, this. But the materialist that von Bertalanffy believes he has to be in the interests of science makes him conclude that though the theory of natural selection of the advantageous among the products of random gene-distribution of indifferent mutations is not satisfactory, "this does not imply mysterious controlling forces that in an anthropomorphic way strive towards Progressive adaptation, fitness, or perfection." Rather, he searches, according to his "organismic" approach, for materialistic laws inherent in the organism's activity as a specific biological whole instead of accepting unreservedly the formulas of Neo-Darwinism.

such denouement to the "crisis" suggested by him is indeed disappointing and ultimately as inadequate as the Neo-Darwinian formulas. A life-force with a godhead hidden

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in its depths, exploding through the obscurative and obstructive covering put on its energy by itself, displaying c' numberless roles its imaginative zest, its will of self-figuration and self-diversification and self-transformation, weaving a tense symphony out of its own motifs of unity and wholeness and "excelsior" and matter's motifs of division and break-up and degringolade, shooting up yet through this tangle of notes towards the grand finale of a conscious- ness which not only rises to the surface from subliminal depths and gets more and more intense but also visions and works out through all dangers and conflicts and setbacks some ideal perfection in both the inner and the outer being - this reading alone of the multi-coloured prolificity and productiveness revealed by evolutionary history can do justice to the facts.

(ii)

To buttress our vitalistic and finalistic reading of evolutionary facts and to give another facet to von Bertalanffy's dramatic presentation of life the creative artist's horizontal . richness and vertical novelty, we may quote a passage from 'l: me the Refreshing River by another materialist in biology, now a dialectical one rather than a mechanical or an organismic: Joseph Needham. "Modem biology," says Needham, 'is nothing if not evolutionary. There are now no reasonable grounds for doubt that during successive ages after the first appearance of life upon the earth it took up a succession of new forms, each more highly organized than the last. This is not gainsaid in any way by the existence of highly adaptive parasitism and retrogression in certain types of plants and animals, nor by the fact that a hundred disadvantageous mutants may have to be produced for every one w is of evolutionary value. As we rise in the evolutionary s from the viruses and protozoa to the social primates, there is

(1) a rise in the number of parts and envelopes of the

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organism and the complexity of their morphological forms and geometrical relations;

(2) a rise in the effectiveness of the control of their functions by the organism as a whole;

(3) a rise in the degree of independence of the organism from its environment, involving diversification and extension of range of the organism's activities;

(4) a rise in the effectiveness with which the individual organism carries out its purpose of survival and reproduction, including the power of moulding its environment."

The key-note of Needham's passage is "evolutionary progress". How in terms of materialism one can explain so definite a rise in living values is a standing puzzle. Material- ism would be expected to say that the rise, if any, is purely accidental and without significance. Matter, as conceived by materialism, can only show greater and greater complexity. But mere complexity is not progress. To be progress, increase in complexity must be coupled with increase in efficiency and there can be no efficiency without an aimed function to be performed; this means that matter which is not credited with any aimed function by the materialists cannot be efficient in any sense, leave aside its rising in efficiency. It is doubtful whether matter, qua matter, can be said even to keep increasing in complexity. No doubt, electrons get arranged into an atom, atoms build up a molecule, molecules combine into a colloid; but it is equally the case that a colloid breaks up into molecules, a molecule separates into atoms, an atom disintegrates into electrons. We cannot affirm that it is typical of matter to become more and more complex. As Kapp re- marks, "Material particles tend as much to fly apart as to come together. The only general way in which we can describe their behaviour is to say that they fly about." They get associated when the conditions are favourable for dissociation; and they get dissociated when the conditions are favourable for dissociation; they sometimes adopt intricate- looking configurations and sometimes simple-looking ones. "there is," to quote Kapp again, "exactly the same justification

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for propounding a law of simplicity as for propounding law of complexity." There is nothing in the nature of matter qua matter, to conduce to more and more complex formaltions. On naturalistic grounds the contention popular in many quarters that matter tends to fall into ever more complex wholes is unadulterated nonsense.

Even if we consider matter in the phase dubbed by von Bertalanffy "an open system in a steady state" and deduce mathematically that under certain conditions its entropy content can decrease unlike in a closed system and that complexity and order can increase in it, we cannot declare that it is in the nature of matter to fall more and more into such a system. Besides, no such system exhibits these progressive qualities except in an organism. Nor can the fact that matter of a certain degree of complexity grew organic at a particular time in the remote past be used by a materialist to prove that it reached this degree as a result of its nature to increase in complexity. When this degree was reached in one or more places, other places were as surely losing complexity, for, at any given time, it is, according to physicists, the nature of matter to move towards a maximum of entropy and realise further and further what they call disorganization - that is, conversion of energy into a form unutilisable for

work.

Does materialism alter its essence if it is entitled dialectical? Dialectical materialism holds that any state of matter sets up by its own nature an opposite state and that the two opposites - thesis and antithesis - join in a new whole o synthesis. It also avers that quantitative increase in change creates at a certain point a qualitative difference and that therefore new levels are organized. The majority of materialistic scientists - in other words, all non-Marxists who are inclined to be materialists in science - dispute the doctrines of dialectical materialism. But even if we grant truth to these doctrines, what we have is nothing more than new levels novelty of synthesis and a novelty of qualities. But there 1& intrinsic implication of progress in such production. Through

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perhaps an increase in complexity would be implied, such increase, as we have already noted, cannot constitute progress in any valid connotation unless it is coupled with increase in efficiency - that is to say, with an ever better performance of aimed functions such as no materialist, dialectical or organismic or mechanical, ascribes to matter. Further, an increase in efficiency leading on to a creature like man who embodies mind par excellence in relation to the rest of the organic world and who is regarded as at least the initial stage if not the actual realisation of evolutionary fulfillment - an increase in efficiency of this sort which makes mind the most important and valuable fact in the universe goes ill with the assertion central to all materialism that matter and not mind or even life is basic.

We may be told at this point: "Needham as well as von Bertalanffy deludes himself in getting an impression of evolutionary progress. Are they supported by other biological materialists?" We have made an admiring reference to Simpson, author of The Meaning of Evolution, and to Julian Huxley who wrote Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, as two of the ablest biologists with a materialistic penchant. Well, what do they have to tell us?

Huxley, summing up his attitude in an essay on evolution in his Man in the Modern World, says that most of the results of evolution are not progressive, much is mere change, much else, though advance, is one-sided advance, doomed to come eventually to a cul-de-sac, but a narrow thread of true progress does run through the whole web of change. And he goes on to argue that by progress he does not mean progress merely from a human standpoint. "Progress can be denned biologically in a perfectly objective way as denoting increased harmony of construction, increased capacity for knowledge and for feeling, and increased control over nature, increased independence of outer change." And he adds: "Man hap- pens to be at the top of the trend towards progress." In further elucidation of this statement we may quote the following words of his: "There has been only one progressive

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line in the whole of evolution - that which has led in 't stages through fish, amphibian, reptile and mammal to man for it appears established that all other lines have come t an; evolutionary dead-end well before the later part of n" tertiary period. Thus, in the broad view, evolution process consists of one line of unlimited progress among thousands of long-range trends towards specialisation each of these latter in turn beset with a frill, so to speak of thousands of short-range diversifications producing separate species."

On man, Huxley writes: "To assert that man is the highest product of evolution to date is a statement of simple biological fact. There are, however, some other points concerning man's position relative to evolutionary progress that are less obvious. First is the curious fact that the human species is now, in all probability, the sole repository of any possible future progress for life.... Second, with the evolution of man the character of progress becomes altered. With human consciousness, values and ideals appeared on earth for the first time. The criterion of further progress must include the degree by which those ideal values are satisfied."

What are we to make of all these statements? If, surveying a mass of proliferating and changing life over millennia, biology can demonstrate with objective and non-anthropomorphic criteria that there is such a thing as progress and that this progress has driven in the direction of man s appearance and that man is the highest product of evolution and is the sole trustee of further advance of life and that life s advance culminates in the quest for satisfaction on ideal values, are we not justified in considering as capitally sensible the hypothesis of a supra-material reality essentially purposive in character and with a drive towards ideal values acting through physico-chemical and "accidental" factors and winning somehow over their colossal obscurity obstruction and being able to do both these things because is itself those factors in one aspect of its existence, an aspect. self-willed but genuinely accepted afterwards in all its grim

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possibilities of challenging the original power whose para-paradoxical phase it is? Is not such a hypothesis more truly explanatory than the "blind forces" that Huxley, misguided by a falsely scientific scruple, posits as sufficient?

In passing, "we may remark on the scruple on Huxley's which he considers scientific. It is exemplified in his statement approvingly cited by Simpson that the vitalists' ascribing evolution to an élan vital no more explains the history of life than would ascribing its motion to an élan locomotif explain-i the operation of a steam engine. No doubt, the utmost effort must be made to discover the physico- chemical terms of a scientific problem, but the analogy Huxley draws is superlatively jejune. With all the physico- chemical terms available for a steam-engine, its operation cannot be explained without an élan locomotif in the form of the engine-maker's idea and aim as well as the engine- driver's control and direction. The history of life is concerned with organisms which are systems not ever inferior to a steam-engine but immeasurably superior and more versatile, systems including the best of a mechanism and at the same time far exceeding it in efficient unity no less than in multiplicity of function.

Let us now turn to Simpson. He is more cautious than Huxley at the outset, yet he cannot help ending on as positive a note. We may summarise his position by linking together several passages: "...General and objective criteria of progress are available and corresponding sorts of progress exist in the history of life. These fail to designate man's ancestry as a central line, and indeed fail to reveal any one such line.... There is no criterion of progress by which Progress can be considered a universal phenomenon of evolution.... All-over progress, and particularly progress toward any goal or fixed point, can no longer be considered as characteristic of evolution or even as inherent in life. Progress does exist in the history of life, but it is of many different sorts and each sort occurs separately in many different lines. One sort of progress in structure and function

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that stands out as particularly widespread and important is increasing awareness of the life situation of the individual organism and increasing variety and sureness of appropriate reactions to this. Among the many different lines that show progress in this respect, the line leading to man reaches much the highest level yet developed. By most other criteria of progress, also, man is at least among the higher animals and a balance of considerations fully warrant considering him definitely the highest of all.... It is a fact that man is an animal, but it is not a fact that he is nothing but an animal.... Man has certain basic diagnostic features which set him off most sharply from any other animal and which have involved other developments not only increasing this sharp distinction but also making it what amounts to a difference in kind and not only a relative difference of degree.... Even when viewed within the framework of the animal kingdom and judged by criteria of progress applicable to that kingdom as a whole and not peculiar to man, man is the highest animal.... It is still false to conclude that man is nothing but the highest animal, or the most progressive product of organic evolution. He is also a fundamentally new sort of animal and one in which, although organic evolution continues on its way, a fundamentally new sort of evolution has also appeared. The basis of this new sort of evolution is a new sort of heredity, the inheritance of learning. This sort of heredity appears modestly in other animals and even lower in the animal kingdom, but in man it has incomparably fuller development and it combines with man's other characteristics unique in degree with a result that cannot be considered unique only in degree but must also be considered unique kind.... Man's knowledge that he exists is, at the least, more conscious and particular than that of any other animal. alone knows that he has evolved and is still doing so. alone places himself in a conceptual framework of space time. Man possesses purpose and exercises deliberate c to a unique degree, even if, indeed, these capacities c said to be the same in kind in any other animals. It is most

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improbable that any other animal has more than an inchoate or largely instinctual sense of values, while in man this is normally conscious, orderly and controlled."

In face of these cumulatively wide and far-reaching admissions of evolutionary progress uniquely culminating in man in spite of a doubt whether man's ancestry can be said to be a central line and indeed whether there is any such line, Simpson, whose outlook here is in essentials practically the same as Huxley's, strikes one also as arriving at a huge reductio ad absurdum in his materialism. He keeps railing at vitalistic and finalistic theories as being obscurantist, evasive, remote from causalism, and apropos of man he writes: "Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned.... Purpose and plan are not characteristic of organic evolution and are not a key to any of its operations. But purpose and plan are characteristic of the new evolution, because man has purpose and he makes plans. Here purpose and plan do definitely enter into evolution, as a result and not as a cause of the processes seen in the long history of life. The purposes and plans are ours, not those of the universe, which displays convincing evidence of their absence." Simpson's intellect, acute though it is in many respects in the field of purely biological discussion, seems to work queerly in this general semi-philosophical argument. To say that purpose and plan are the cause of the evolutionary process is considered irrational, non-causalistic, ignorance-covering finalism or vitalism which is regarded as an unscientific theory because purpose and plan are held to be not "evident" in or "characteristic" of organic evolution before man's appearance. But to say that lack of purpose and plan is the cause of the appearance of man who purposes and plans and after whose appearance purpose and plan are found to be "evident" in and "characteristic" of further organic evolution is considered quite rational, causalistic and knowledge-revealing materialism which is regarded as a scientific theory. Surely this is logic standing on its head. If the most important

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product of evolution - the most important from even a standpoint of biological objectivity - and the one through whom the main, if not the sole, evolutionary progress in future will be made is distinguished by purposing and planning, is it not more logical, more in harmony with factual evidence, to take this product as the key to the secret of evolution and read in the long historical organic process a hidden purposive and planning power which at last emerges, through obstacles and envelopments, with some of its wonderful potencies to the surface? A finalism of this kind does not deny the existence of randomness and hence the randomness which is indeed there is accounted for. Simpson's theory does not at all account for the purpose and plan which are actual in man and which seem on a sweeping general vision of evolution to be a subtle potent current in what precedes him.

Simpson may be excused for having a grouse against certain forms of finalism as well as vitalism: no defence, however, can be made of his being so shortsighted as to miss the imperative need of some form or other of both vitalism and finalism. Whatever appears purposeless and planless can be conceived of as purpose and plan suppressed or in abeyance, especially if out of it undeniable purposing and planning evolve; but to posit as purposeless and planless the origin of a being who undeniably purposes and plans and, in addition, pursues ideals and values is not merely to want something out of nothing but everything out of nothing.

We have now come to a non-materialistic conclusion after weighing all the evidence supplied by materialists: it is actually by their own evidence that we have decided against them. And the broad decision has been reached according to an eminently logical procedure charted by Simpson himself in a moment when he is not ridden by what we have criticised in Huxley as a falsely scientific scruple which a priori would rule out as non-explanatory whatever is "° physico-chemically describable. Simpson says: "Although the metaphysical cannot be directly investigated by

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methods of science, its results may be . It is, indeed, one of the greatest values of our present that it can serve as a means of testing the fundamental philosophies of materialism, vitalism, and finalism. Vitalism and finalism involve elements postulated as beyond the reach of purely material scientific investigation. Yet the truth of these philosophies would involve material con e in the history of life. The investigation of these possible consequences is within the scope of scientific method, which therefore can provide evidence on which to base a dice among materialism, vitalism, and finalism, as wells among the variety of particular theories that have to elaborated within the framework of each of these philosophies. Conviction as to the essential truth of materials! need not, then, be the result of bias or of the limitations of the scientific method, but may be the result of careful evaluation of evidence. A scientific bias cheerfully confessed the belief that the results of such evaluation are likely to be nearer the truth than are the inclinations of personal preference or the traditions of a less knowledgeable and less critical past."

Quite so. But, while Simpson chooses with a keen mind several such phenomena of evolution as should provide particular crucial evidence of this short and sets forth a fairly impressive case for materialism as against certain kinds of vitalism and finalism, he fails to plumb the significance of life's horizontal exuberance and vertical inventiveness and of man's place in the evolutionary scheme and to formulate any argument likely to meet in antiqiion the vitalistic finalism which we have sponsored and which can assimilate to its own advantage Simpson's own case for materialism.

We may, then, regard as completely justified the verdict for a supra-material reality on the evidence of biological science. Since biology is, properly speaking, the study of life- Phenomena we have called this reality life-force, but in view of the mind-phenomena increasingly come into our purview with the rise of life in the evolutionary scale we should be more correct if we tat mind rather than life as

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basic. Some might urge that mind is just a development of life, but, inasmuch as man the mental being is acknowledged by biologists to be a unique evolute with whom the character of evolutionary progress becomes altered, mind must be distinguished from life. The distinctive traits of life are things like growth, metabolism, propagation, regulation, tissue- regeneration, adaptation, response to stimuli, insurgent idiosyncrasy and, central to them all, organic unity. In organic unity we have mind most vividly translated into life- terms, for here are both harmonising purpose and integrating individuality. Mind-terms themselves are recognisable in their own right when in an organism's behaviour these two ingredients of organic unity manifest as things like instinctive planning, "perceptual logic", reconditioned reflex, experimental adjustment of means to an end, individual leadership, concerted action. In whatever form they may be found, they are the mental strain in organic evolution, the spearhead, as it were, of that which ultimately emerges in a unique shape as technical and artistic creativeness, conceptual systematisation, conscience, social communion, intuition, sense of the Holy and, central to all of them, self- awareness with its possibilities of "soul"-experience. Thus there is more than one "depth-phenomenon" behind the "surface-phenomenon" of matter. A plane of mind no less than a plane of life must be declared to exist together with the material plane.

However, to render interaction possible, we should say that just as matter is an involved form of life so also life is an involved form of mind. That would explain the steps of the evolution - the advent of explicit vital processes from the material and of explicit mental processes from the vital, both advents helped, of course, by pressure from the planes where life and mind are each a separate uninvolved force and from where originally the precipitation of something of life and mind into matter-form took place and also the reverse push bringing about life's and mind's emergence was originally planted.

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One mistake must be avoided. To give mind the basic status and to make life its involved condition and, through life's involution in matter, matter too the same at a further remove is not subjectivism in the ordinary philosophical sense, for it does not reduce matter to the individual's sensation and perception and idea. Although it opens up the possibility of the individual consciousness's partaking in a consciousness which is cosmic and by which matter is not experienced as an extraneous foreign substance, it asserts merely the relation between the different grades of universal being.

Here we must halt if we are to remain within the biological sphere. A further step in one direction would carry us into psychology and the field of the extra-sensory if not of the mystical as well. A further step in the opposite direction would bear us into physics and the field of relativity theory and quantum theory. In an earlier series of scientific essays we have already tackled the problem of consciousness and the brain, explored the implications of extrasensory perception, touched on the individual and cosmic subliminal and stopped at the threshold of the mystical. To round off our scientific survey we should glance at modern physics and examine what it has to reveal in the question of the material and the supra-material. We have spoken of interaction between the former and the latter and designated the one as an involution of the other. Would the findings of modem physics elucidate our idea and show matter to be such as would not contradict, even though it may not directly prove, our conception of it as diminished life and mind? An affirmative answer would be eminently in order after demonstrating biologically, as we have already done, that, if matter is held to be basic, life and a fortiori mind cannot be conceived of as mere developments and intensifications of batter.

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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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New Trends in Biological Theory and

Psycho-physiology

Some Scientific Approaches Towards Sri Aurobindo's Vision

1

Perhaps the most interesting finger-post in recent science to the presence, in general, of a psychic energy in evolution such as Sri Aurobindo discerns as ascending to homo sapiens and pointing beyond him has been put up by the English biologist. Sir Alister Hardy.

The import of Hardy's most impressive book. The Living Stream, based on his first series of Gifford Lectures, is twofold. It lies not only in suggesting at the end more persuasively than ever before a background of psychism to the evolutionary process, which sets this process ascending in the midst of the energy modem Darwinism reckons with in the play of random-seeming genetic mutation and in the work of natural selection upon this material to bring about the survival and propagation of the forms best adapted by heredity to the environment. The import lies also in proving psychism to be in action in the very forefront of evolving life. Hardy's pre-eminent stand comes out in the words: "My 'vitalism' is a belief that there is a psychic side of the animal which, apart from inherited instinctive behaviour, may be independent of the DNA code [of the genes] that governs the form of the physical frame but that it may interact with the physical system in the evolutionary process through organic selection.'"

"Organic selection" or, as Hardy prefers on the whole to say, "behavioural selection" means in the simplest terms:

If a population of animals should change their habits (no doubt often on account of changes in their surroundings such as food supply, breeding sites, etc., but also

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sometimes due to their exploratory curiosity discovering new ways of life, such as new sources of food or new methods of exploitation) then, sooner or later, variations in the gene complex will turn up in the population to produce small alterations in the animal's structure which will make them more efficient in relation to their new behaviour pattern; these more efficient individuals will tend to survive rather than the less efficient, and so the composition of the population will gradually change. This evolutionary change is one caused initially by a change of behaviour.2

Hardy does not claim to have discovered behavioural selection. It has been a fact long admitted. Julian Huxley in his Evolution, A Modern Synthesis (London, 1942) refers to it twice (pp. 304, 523), mentioning the original enunciation of it by three early biologists: Baldwin (1896, 1902), Osborne (1897) and Lloyd Morgan (1900). At the end of his second reference he remarks: "The principle is an important one which would appear to have been unduly neglected by recent evolutionists."3 G. G. Simpson too has a general review of it and puts his finger on the cause for the neglect of the ideas described as the "Baldwin Effect": they were put forward "shortly before the rediscovery of Mendelism gave a radically different turn to biological thought."4 Many biologists dismiss the "Baldwin Effect" as of minor value. Even Huxley, though granting importance to it, does not dwell on it. Hardy makes it his central thesis and illustrates it with many examples culled by himself, as well as with the corroborative researches of Dr. R. F. Ewer and C. H. Waddington and numerous contributory studies like those of Sidnie Manton, J. W. L. Beament, J. M. Thoday and W. H. Thorpe. From his demonstration behavioural selection emerges not as a mere subsidiary effect but as a major or perhaps the most operative factor whereby the species is to a gre31 extent the master of its fate. Linked with this demonstration is the array of the diverse problems which raise difficulties

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for the accepted theory of the mechanism of evolution.

Most surprisingly, Jacques Monod, the foremost apostle of "chance" in genetics, displays keen appreciation of Hardy's standpoint without naming him. We find him writing:

...the selective pressures exerted by outside conditions upon organisms are in no case independent of the teleonomic performances characteristic of organisms. Different organisms inhabiting the same ecological niche interact in very different and specific ways with external conditions (among which one must include other organisms). These specific interactions, some of which the organism 'elects', determine the nature and orientation of the selective pressure sustained by the organism....

It is obvious that the part played by teleonomic performances in the orientation of selection becomes greater and greater, the higher the level of organization and hence autonomy of the organism with respect to its environment - to the point where teleonomic performance may indeed be considered decisive in the higher organisms, whose survival and reproduction depend above all upon their behaviour.

It is also evident that the initial choice of this or that kind of behaviour can often have very long-range consequences, not only for the species in which it first appears in rudimentary form, but for all its descendants, even if these constitute an entire evolutionary sub-group. As we all know, the important turning points in evolution have coincided with the invasion of new ecological spaces. If terrestrial vertebrates appeared and were able to initiate the wonderful line from which amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals later developed, it was originally because a primitive fish 'chose' to do some exploring on land, where it could however only move about by clumsy hops. This fish thereby created, as a consequence of a change in behaviour, the selective pressure which was to

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engender the powerful limbs of the quadrupeds. Among the descendants of this daring explorer, this Magellan of evolution, are some that can run at speeds of fifty miles an hour; others climb trees with astonishing agility, while yet others have conquered the air, in a fantastic manner fulfilling, extending, and amplifying the 'dream' of the ancestral fish.5

Monod refers also to the 'choice' by the ancestors of the horse "-to live upon open plains and to flee at the approach of an enemy (rather than try to put up a fight or to hide)". As a result of this behavioural selection, "the modern species, following a long evolution made up of many stages of reduction, today walks on the tip of a single toe".6 Coming to the birds, Monod further explains how "it is correct to say that sexual drive - or better still, desire - created the conditions under which many magnificent plumages were selected".7

However, even more surprising than Monod's Hardyan biology is his failure to realize the profound implication of his own "choice" of such a biology. Behavioural selection throws into prominence throughout the story of life the activity of what becomes most marked in man: awareness. Hardy observes: "Dr. Thorpe in his penetrating survey of different kinds of animal learning in his Learning and Instinct (Second Edition, 1963) follows Agar8 and Whitehead" in regarding the animal as an essentially perceiving organism. He suggests 'that the concept of perception includes an actively organizing, possibly a purposive element; and that perception is a basic characteristic of the drive of the living animal.'"10 A quotation Hardy makes from Waddington also discloses the implication of the word "behaviour". Waddington, in The Nature of Life (1961), writes: "We have considerable grounds for believing, then, that mentality (in the broad sense), or at least behaviour (biologists tend to be very timid about mentioning the mind), is a factor of importance in evolution."" Waddington, passing from animal to human mind,

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goes still further in his assumption. Hardy quotes him as saying in "his arresting book. The Ethical Animal" (p. 31),

about consciousness:

As soon as one places the problem of freewill in juxtaposition with that of consciousness it becomes apparent that it cannot be solved either by any manipulation of our existing physico-chemical concepts, since these include no hint of self-awareness, or by any analysis of the language used in formulating the situation, since no linguistic analysis can annul our experience of self. We need ideas which depart more radically from those of the physical sciences; something perhaps akin to the thought of philosophers such as Spinoza and Whitehead, who have suggested that even non-living entities should not be denied qualities related to the self-awareness and will which we know, in much more highly evolved forms, in ourselves.¹²

The passage from Waddington is used by Hardy to bear upon what he designates as "natural theology" and conceives as a legitimate pursuit of science. Before moving to that subject he touches upon a number of topics. He has a whole chapter entitled "Problems for Current Evolution Theory". For instance, he notes how the current explanation of "homology" (similar organs in different animals under many varieties of form and function) in terms of similar genes handed on from a common ancestor has broken down. Another problem is linked to Monod's mention of sexual desire in the female bird leading to the selection of "many magnificent plumages" in the male. One reason why Monod, in spite of admitting "behavioural selection" on a large scale, fails to move in the Hardyan direction is that he is unconscious of a subtle point about those plumages. Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of natural selection, brings up the puzzle in his Tropical Nature (first published in 1879). Criticizing Darwin's theory of "sexual

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selection" in this field, Wallace, as quoted by Hardy, writes in his chapter, "Colours of Animals":

We now come to such wonderful developments of plumage and colour as are exhibited by the peacock and the Argus-pheasant.... The long series of gradations by which the beautifully shaded ocelli on the secondary wing-feathers of [the latter] bird have been produced are clearly traced out, the results being a set of markings so exquisitely shaded as to represent "balls lying loose within sockets" - purely artificial objects of which these birds could have no possible experience. That this result should have been attained through thousands and tens of thousands of female birds all preferring those males whose markings varied slightly in this one direction, this uniformity of choice, continuing through thousands and tens of thousands of generations, is to me absolutely incredible. And when, further, we remember that those which did not so vary would also, according to all the evidence, find mates and leave offspring, the actual result seems quite impossible of attainment by such means.13

Hardy tells us that Wallace's solution to the problem - "the action of a hypothetical 'male vigour', the bright pigments being supposedly due to a higher male metabolic rate"14 - has not proved satisfactory. The colour patterns and behaviour we now know to be certainly directed towards the female. "Nevertheless, the puzzle which Wallace pointed out of the extraordinary constant nature of the patterns still persists."15 Hardy has no doubt that the "design" is coded by the genes, yet in view of the great variability which science has observed in the gene-complex how does the design, the plan of its layout, remain so constant?

We may approach an answer by quoting from a review of Hardy's book in the Times Literary Supplement (London) of December 23, 1965 under the caption "Masters of Our Fate?" After referring to Hardy's chapter on the inadequacy of

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current biological science face to face with topics like homo- logy, the reviewer says:

He then runs the risk, as he admits, of diverting attention from his main argument by introducing the biological relevance of telepathy. He is in no doubt - nor can any reader who examines his evidence objectively be left in much doubt - that the mind can be in contact with mind other than through the senses. If telepathy is proved to exist in man, it is a major biological discovery, for it is unlikely that so remarkable a phenomenon should be confined to just a few individuals of one species. It will, of course, take place mainly in the realm of the subconscious, but that does not lessen its importance.

With telepathy proved, the extensive operation of the psychic factor in evolution by way of Hardy's "behavioural selection" should lead us naturally to accord a momentous evolutionary role to so extraordinary a psychic power as telepathic communication. The existence of such communication "between members of the same species of animals might at least help in developing and stabilizing common behavioural patterns" resulting from behavioural selection and making them "widespread" and thereby creating the conditions necessary before they can be "incorporated" in the DNA gene complex - the complex which we know to be governing all "truly instinctive behaviour".16 "Such a hypo- thesis might help to explain the development of elaborate instinct in invertebrate animals among which it would be difficult to conceive of new habits spreading by copying and tradition."17

Now Hardy takes a further step. Reminding us of how, in the various telepathic experiments he has described, "impressions of design, form and experience... can occasionally be transmitted by telepathy from one human individual to another". Hardy asks: "might it not be possible for there to be in the animal kingdom as a whole not only a telepathic

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spread of habit changes, but a general subconscious sharing of a form and behaviour pattern - a sort of psychic 'blueprint' - shared between members of a species?"18 Then Hardy refers to similar notions, put forth by different thinkers, of common experience participated in by individuals, below or beyond the level of ordinary consciousness. He writes: "if there were such a psychic plan it would be something like the subconscious racial memory of Samuel Butler, but it would be a racial experience of habit, form and development, open subconsciously to all members of the species, as in Whately Carrington's group mind, or as in Jung's shared unconscious, if I understand him aright."19 Then Hardy conceives of "the psychic stream of shared behaviour pattern in the living population" flowing on "in time parallel to the flow of the physical DNA material".20 He continues: "External conditions being equal, those animals with gene complexes which allow a better incarnation of the species plan would tend to survive rather than others whose gene complexes produced less satisfactory versions."²¹ As a general reflection Hardy tells us:

If such a highly speculative concept of a 'racial plan' were true, then the old ideas of a 'morph', 'form' or 'archetype' of the pre-evolutionary transcendentalists... might not seem quite so quaint as we have sometimes thought them; they might perhaps be the equivalent of what Jung has called the psychological archetype of his shared subconscious in the human species. Again might not the shared subconscious mind, in man, provide some reality for Plato's world of ideas: shared ideas built up with the evolution of conceptional thought?²²

Mention of Plato must make strict Darwinists shudder. But if something akin to Platonism serves science we cannot attend to their idiosyncratic sensibilities. And it is the theory of the "racial plan" that best explains "the secret of homo- logy in face of an ever changing gene complex".23 This theory

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also sheds light on the riddle of the Argus-pheasant's precisely articulated and long-persisting splendour of plumage. Such splendour has "all the appearance of a definite mental conception like that of an artist or designer - a pattern outside the physical world - which in some way has served as a template or gauge for selective action".24 The "plan in the group 'mind' indirectly selects those gene complexes presenting (in development) its best expression".25 Hardy does not wish to be dogmatic and calls his theory speculation, but he validly remarks that such speculation is "no more fanciful than some of the statements that are made in all the confidence of proven fact by some of our mechanistic biologists - such a statement, for example, as...: 'We now find our- selves... reducing the decisive controls of life to a matter of the precise order in which the units are arranged in a giant molecule.' "26 Hardy is glancing at the substance of a pronouncement by a competent but dogmatic geneticist, F.H.C. Crick.27 It may as well serve to illustrate the general attitude of Monod and all who swear by him.

We do not suggest that Hardy is totally capable of carrying to their ultimate conclusion the implications his speculative genius lays bare in the field of biology. But he goes sufficiently far for the purpose of opening eyes like those of Darwinian extremists. We may again draw upon the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement to finish our survey. He follows up thus his reference to telepathy and biology:

From this it is not a far step to assert that the living world is as closely linked with theology as it is with physics and chemistry. The feeling of contact with a greater power beyond the self seems to be a fundamental feature in the natural history of man. Sir Alister Hardy believes that science will come to make a second great contribution to natural theology by showing the reality of that part of the universe which is not accessible to the physical senses. It is in this apparently non-material part of the universe that the power called God must lie - some sort of influence to

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which man can have access in an extra-sensory way by the communicative act called prayer.

Finally, the reviewer eagerly awaits Hardy's second series of Gifford Lectures where the present ideas would be developed, and concludes:

In the meantime he has given us a book in which theologians, philosophers and men of science will alike find stimulating ideas backed by penetrating argument and sound experimental evidence.

2

Apropos of Alister Hardy, let us glance at a subject he treats in his second series of Gifford Lectures. He tells us that "a number of scientists with greater vision are now realizing that the problem of the nature of consciousness, embracing that of the mind-body relationship, is one of the most important facing mankind today.'728 Jacques Monod, whom we have called the foremost apostle of "chance" in genetics, has himself the following confession, though still with a materialistic undertone and with desperate anxiety-allaying assumptions:

There lies the frontier, still almost as impassable for us as it was for Descartes. Until it has been crossed a phenomenological dualism will continue to appear unavoidable. Brain and spirit are ideas no more synonymous today than in the seventeenth century. Objective analysis obliges us to see that this seeming duality within us is an illusion; but an illusion so deeply rooted in our being, that it would be vain to hope ever to dissipate it in the immediate awareness of subjectivity, or to learn to live emotionally or morally without it. And, besides, why should we have to? What doubt can there be of the presence of the spirit within us? To give up the illusion

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that sees in it an immaterial 'substance' is not to deny the existence of the soul, but on the contrary to begin to recognize the complexity, the richness, the unfathomable depth of the genetic and cultural heritage and of the personal experience, conscious or not, which together make up this being of ours, unique and irrefutable.29

All this double-faced rhetoric is empty. Spirit's or consciousness's existence as an irreducible fact cannot be called "an illusion". Monod, a few sentences earlier than the cited passage, has declared of "this marvellous instrument" of "subjective experience": "Physiological experimentation has so far been unable to help us."30 Does "the analysis of language" give us help? Monod tells us that this analysis discloses the subjective experience only after it has been "transformed" and "certainly does not reveal all its operations".³¹ What then remains? The "genetic heritage" cannot enlighten us, for genes are as physical as the brain and belong just as much to the one side of the "duality". Looking at the "duality" from the materialistic angle which Monod Stubbornly chooses, we have no reason to use the adjective "seeming", no cause to count as an "illusion" our seeing here an entity that is "immaterial", whether we rate it as a "substance" or not. Our "immediate awareness of subjectivity", standing opposed to all that we define in science as material, cannot but be considered "immaterial" until such time that this "area", labelled by Monod elsewhere as "still 'reserved' ",32 has been covered by what he pins his hopes on: "development in molecular biology", which, in his eyes, "over the past two decades has singularly narrowed the domain of the mysterious".33 The view scientists like Monod take of matter, regarding it as blind mass or energy, a phenomenon never to be interpreted "in terms of final causes - that is to say, of 'purpose' ",34 can never cope with "subjectivity" whose "witness to itself" Monod cannot help admitting to be "irrefutable" and incapable of being dispelled.

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If we are to dissipate dualism we must proceed the other way round and explain genetics and physiological events by a hidden or disguised consciousness at work - matter being veiled life, life veiled mind, mind veiled Supermind, as Sri Aurobindo would have it. After all, what we know as matter is, to make a pertinent pun, a matter of experience and of conceptual extrapolation of experience - in other words, the same awareness which is witness to our self is here an encompasser of the not-self: the so-called objective, too, is known only through and within the subjective. A greater Self in which all that we now consider not-self is also covered, a supreme experience-holder, must be taken to find expression in both sides of our experience.

Anyway, Hardy draws our attention to the fact that master neurologists and brain-specialists refuse to equate consciousness with the cerebral organ. Thus Sir Cyril Hinshelwood, in his Presidential Address in 1966 to the British Association at Cambridge, entitled "Science and Scientists" says: "... what remains utterly incomprehensible is how and why the brain becomes the vehicle of conscious- ness.... Some philosophers have wanted to talk away the mind-matter problem as a verbal confusion. I suspect that at bottom they simply attach no importance to the scientific description of things and are therefore indifferent to any divorce between it and the language which describes the world of experience."35 A little earlier in his Address Hinshelwood remarks about Sir Charles Sherrington:

"Though he more than any other man elucidated the nature of nervous reflexes, he was strongly opposed to any mechanistic view of the world. 'Mind,' he writes, 'knows itself and knows the world; chemistry and physics, explaining so much, cannot undertake to explain Mind itself.'"36 Hardy adds on his own a passage from Sherrington's Gifford Lectures, Man on His Nature:

...mental phenomena on examination do not seem amenable to understanding under physics and chemistry. I

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have therefore to think of the brain as an organ of liaison between energy and mind, but not as a converter of energy into mind or vice versa.

We have, it seems to me, to admit that energy and mind are phenomena of two categories.37

Then Hardy turns to the views of Lord Brain. In his book, Mind, Perception and Science, Lord Brain answers the question:

"What have you to say about [Gilbert] Ryle's view? Hasn't he finally demolished 'the ghost in the machine' and with it many other functions you evidently attribute to the mind?" Lord Brain says: "It would take too long to discuss all the views which Ryle expresses in The Concept of the Mind, but I must comment on his ideas about sensation, observation and imagination, since if he is right about these I must be wrong and, incidentally, his approach to these topics will illustrate what I believe to be the fundamental defect of his book."38 Lord Brain goes on to demolish, on neurophysiological grounds, Ryle's argument.

Hardy continues: "Sir John Eccles, one of our leading physiologists of brain action, in his Waynfleete Lectures at Oxford in 1952, to the astonishment of many supported the concept of the 'ghost in the machine'."39 Finally, Hardy refers to Sir Cyril Burt who "has recently in two important papers, 'The Structure of the Mind'40 and 'The Concept of Consciousness',41 shown the absurdity of both the epiphenomenal view of mind and the old behaviourist* type of psychology....42 The shallow materialism of those biologists and psychologists who imagine that, in reducing all life to physics and chemistry, they are taking the only truly scientific course, is now giving way to a wider vision." 43

Doubtless, the view of perception taken by Sherrington, Hinshelwood, Brain, Eccles and Burt is not without difficulties from the philosophical standpoint, but so are all other

* Not to be confused with the modern behaviour studies, the investigation of the behaviour of animals under natural conditions which has developed to become a new branch of biology now called ethology.

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theories. What this view stresses is the physiological mechanism science cannot ever overlook and which must involve a radical difference from subjectivity. From the joint operation of subjectivity and the physiological mechanism three problems arise: (1) How does a subjective state interact with a mechanism composed of material factors? (2) How does the experiencing subject, which is connected only with complex nerve-operations, get the sight, sound, smell, taste and touch of a manifold world of objects? (3) Confined to inter- action with neural events, how can the experiencing subject know that its experience of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch corresponds to what objectively exists?

We have already indicated the direction in which the answer to the first question must lie: a more-than-human Consciousness relates itself to itself in the form of mind, life- force and matter which are all projected experience-moulds of that Consciousness. But, from the argumentative angle, no answer is immediately necessary. For, the alternatives to the interaction-theory pose equal difficulties. If we say, as some older philosophers did, that physical events and mental events constitute two parallel series corresponding to each other in their own peculiar terms, we may ask how two such unlike series, each supposedly irreducible to the other, could have come together to constitute a parallelism. Or if we say, as many modern materialists have done, that the mind is a mere epiphenomenon, a state caused by brain-activity but with no active effect back upon the brain, a similar query is legitimate: how could brain-activity which is alleged to be so different from a mental phenomenon ever come to cause it? Besides, how could a phenomenon, so useless as an active agent, have not only persisted as an evolutionary feature but actually gone on increasing in biological history? On the ground of dissimilarity, all theories are on a par as regards conceptual hurdles.

The two other questions hang together. And if the scientific description of what is involved in perception is correct - and surely scientists can fundamentally give no

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alternative account - then there is only one solution. Sri Aurobindo has hinted at it.44 An intuitive activity of several kinds intervenes and establishes an immediate intimacy with the external object to be perceived. There is a sense-mind intuition which seizes the suggestion of the image or vibration touching off the nerve-message. There is a life-force intuition which seizes the object's energy or figure of power through another sort of vibration created by the sense- contact. And there is an intuition of the correlating mind which at once forms a right idea of the object from this double testimony. But Sri Aurobindo adds that all here is an action through a dense medium, as it were, and the image thus constructed is somewhat deficient. What is deficient is filled up, as far as the field or the scale of experience concerned permits, by the intervention of the reason or the total understanding intelligence. Nothing except such a direct perception, an extra-sensory perception, can disclose the manifold world of objects to us and enable us to judge the correspondence of that world with our experience of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.

The Aurobindonian view explains why in perception we feel not that there are the percept and the perceived but that the two are one and the same. The direct intuitive impression is superimposed upon the response of the mind stimulated by the code-message of the nerves. The Aurobindonian view also establishes at the very outset a kind of supernormal knowledge exceeding the conditions under which the mind has to work in the present state of affairs - namely, the arrangement of neural stimulus and mental response. In fact, the very language we have to use in talking of perception assumes such a knowledge. For, neural stimulus is as much a part of the ordinary world of objects as are clouds, cascades, flowers, fruits and stones, whose message is conveyed in code by neural movements. Thus consciousness is proved in even its most elementary act to be not clamped to the brain, not inseparably associated with the grey cells. It is something independent, however limited and covered-up its usual

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functioning. Hence the evidence recently accumulated of extra-sensory perception and of other forms of paranormal cognition is demonstrated to be nothing utterly out of the ordinary. A prima facie case for their authenticity is created

Sri Aurobindo does not seek to bypass science's account It is valid to him but must be very significantly supplemented. Science, on its side, cannot bypass the fact of "mind" and indeed has to make this fact all too patent when it speaks authoritatively through its master neurologists and brain- specialists.

To round off our discussion we may close with a remark of Hardy's, side by side with one from another source. There is the point Hardy brings up when reflecting on his idea of telepathy being a general phenomenon in biology, rendering it possible for us to imagine a pattern of shared "unconscious" experience, a kind of composite species-pattern of life. He comments on the mysteriousness which may be alleged against this experience:

It is important to remember that in the concept of the individual mind we are faced with a mystery no less remarkable. The mind cannot be anchored to this or that group of cells that make up the brain. The community of cells making up the body has a mind beyond the individual cells - the "impression" coming from one part of the brain receiving sensory impulses from one eye and that from another part of the brain from the other eye are merged together in the mind, not in some particular cells as far as we know. The mystery of the mind and body seems to be as inconceivable as the speculation I am suggesting.45

Once more we are in the midst of things in common life which are impossible for science to reduce to any materialistic phenomenon.

Perhaps Hardy, who has quoted so many authorities on cerebral processes, would appreciate the last word being

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given to one more such name, the most renowned in our time. Dr. Wilder Penfield. In his book. The Mystery of the Mind, Penfield confesses that all his attempts to understand mental experience — the mind — on the basis of brain-studies have come to nothing. He concludes that the mind is a peculiar energy whose form is quite different from the electrochemical energy in the brain's nerve-pathways.46

Thus here, as elsewhere, scientific attitudes and contemporary world-insights are not so simple and naive and single- tracked as superficial commentators may pretend. They leave ample room for and even demand a vision, like Sri Aurobindo's, of the universe and man.

REFERENCES

1. The Living Stream: A Restatement of Evolution Theory and Us Relation to the Spirit of Man (Collins, London, 1965), p. 254.

2. Ibid., p. 170.

3. Ibid., p. 163.

4. Ibid., p. 165.

5. Chance and Necessity (Collins, London, 1972), pp. 120-21.

6. Ibid., p. 122.

7. Ibid.

8. The Theory of the Living Organism (Melbourne University Press, 1943).

9. Process and Reality (Cambridge, 1929).

10. The Living Stream, p. 172.

11. Ibid., p. 190.

12. Ibid., pp. 281-82.

13. Ibid., pp. 231-32.

14. Ibid., p. 232.

15. Ibid., p. 233.

16. Ibid., p. 255.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., p. 257.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., p. 258.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., p. 259.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.. p. 260.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., p. 261.

27. Cf. the end of his article in Scientific American, September 1957.

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28. The Divine Flame: An Essay towards a Natural History of Religion (Collins, London, 1966), p. 222.

29. Chance and Necessity (Collins, London, 1972), pp. 148-49.

30. Ibid., p. 148.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., p. 37.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., p. 30.

35. Ibid., p. 223.

36. Ibid., p. 224.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., p. 225.

39. Ibid., pp. 225-26.

40. The British Journal of Statistic Psychology, 1961, Vol. 14, pp. 145-70.

41. British Journal of Psychology, 1962, Vol. 53, pp. 239-42.

42. Hardy, op. Cit., p. 227.

43. Ibid., p. 228.

44. The Life Divine, p. 473.

45. The Living Stream: A Restatement of Evolution Theory and Its Relation to the Spirit of Man (Collins, London, 1965), p. 257.

46. The Mystery of the Mind (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1975).

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LSD and the Mind of the Future

1

Extraordinary experiences by the use of drugs: this issue has been growing ever livelier since 1954 when Aldous Huxley conducted experiments on himself and wrote on the consciousness-changing effects of Mescaline. With the many- sided study of a drug 7000 times as potent - LSD, after the German Lyserg Saiire Diethylamide (=Lysergic Acid in common English) - we have reached the peak-point of controversy. For, with a pill weighing 1/200,000 of an ounce, LSD not only releases the human consciousness from its common bounds but also expands it to an extent which seems infinite. We thus pass beyond medical science and even psychotherapy into profound parapsychology and impinge on the realm of metaphysical values. Two questions of extreme significance arise:

(a) What is the bearing of psychedelic drugs, as they are called, on the ultimate being of man, the ultimate reality of the universe?

(b) If the bearing is truly revolutionary, how far is it permissible to use in the interests of the mind of the future a chemical as powerful as LSD, which is fraught with the gravest dangers in unqualified hands and for unfit subjects?

2

Of course, critics will urge: "An experience produced by an artificial agent like a chemical can only be hallucinatory and bear not at all on any ultimate truth."

Well, while alcohol or opium weakens the commonsense grasp of things, coffee or dexedrine is known to strengthen it: an artificial agent like a chemical can make us contact day- to-day reality with a surer and more penetrating power. In

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LSD we have an artificial agent which paradoxically combines the two opposite workings and carries them much farther.1

Now we are not borne along in a happy haze which is out of touch with the known world, but rather the known world itself grows richer, more vivid and concrete. Flowers, leaves grass, even inanimate objects acquire a mighty "Van-Gogh" intensity of colour and they pulse and breathe with some life of their own. They also become endowed with qualities that make us intimate with their very selves, as it were. One may be lost "for hours in rapt contemplation of a piece of wood, a stone, a flower, and feel that at last he understands the essential nature of these things". "Intensification of sounds too (such as the singing of birds, though far away) is often commented on with fascinated surprise." And when one "discovers what an ample store of unhastened attention he can give to all the rich content brought him by eye and ear, he finds it hard not to believe that somehow time has been stretched. But a glance at his watch tells him it is a new-given power of super-attention that is allowing him to make such full use of every moment".

Side by side with the intensification of individual objects and the increasing insight into them, there may come a "flowing" and "waving" of shapes; and one's sense of personal distinction from things may tend to be over- whelmed and one's own self may seem not quite to hold together.

Then the known world, outer and inner, opens up, so to speak, into subtle forms and views, remarkable for their plasticity. "Brilliantly coloured geometrical patterns present a constantly changing spectacle of aesthetic delight." "Crystalline landscapes, jewel-encrusted mountains of gold... flowers, birds, butterflies, fountains of color" kaleidoscope before the attentive gaze. "The visions may portray scenes and incidents, as in a technicolor dream, or they may take the form of abstract symbols, and may become fraught with meaning..."

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Next, the awareness deepens into the complex secret places of the subliminal being. Memories quicken up, old events with people and objects participating in them, voices from early childhood - and one "may feel that he is 'reliving' the experience with the same emotions he had then". But, while a detailed exploration goes on of such "subconscious" or "unconscious" material as figures in Freudian or Jungian psychoanalysis, the explorer remains detached and lucid. So the knots of the forgotten past are slowly untied and one "accepts himself completely for what he is with a massive reduction in self-conflict and guilt". New insights are obtained also into the individual's place in a larger, more meaningful pattern. A keener feeling of relationship to other people develops. Not uncommonly there is a "humanity- identification", in which one feels "love, grief, loneliness or physical suffering as though he is experiencing it as it has been felt by all people at all times and places".

Finally, the outer and the inner world widens into a dimension whose nature, supernormal in the extreme, may be best indicated by a few substantial testimonies from those who have gone into it with their different temperaments:

"During this stage... comes that experience called by the mystics 'the realisation of the God within us'... This... is an indescribable, piercing, beautiful knowledge and knowing, which goes beyond the body, the mind, the reason, the intellect, to an area of pure knowing... There is no sensation of time. God is no longer only 'out there' somewhere, but He is within you, and you are one with Him... You are beyond the knower and the known, where there is no duality, but only oneness and unity, and great love. You not only see Truth, but you are Truth. You are Love. You are all things! It is not an ego-inflating experience, but on the contrary, one which can help one to dissolve the ego...."

"...I am much struck with the older looking hills... Feel they were there before time, before eternity, before God... but - not before me. What does it mean? Terror and bewilderment and then a burst of tremendous truth. J am God. I am

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utterly shaken by sobs and trembling all over. The enormity is too much; sudden blazing joy, realization, humility, power, tumbling one on the other. Can I accept this? This' the Ultimate Reality... I am God, the universe, Christ, all men, all everything - all exists within me. The Self is limitless, endless, eternal - it is all knowing, all aware, and at bottom God... And this Truth is not only true of me but of all men...."

"Suddenly I burst into a vast, new, indescribably wonderful universe... I was immediately aware that I exist (not just at that moment, but always) in a trans-physical universe, perceived spatially although it seemed clear that the usual space concepts don't necessarily apply. The feeling was that just as when one turns his attention outward he finds the vast physical universe stretching out an infinite distance in all directions, so on turning inward I had come to a vast realm of inner space which likewise extended out in all directions without limit. But I too am limitless, I perceived, and all of this vast realm is somehow me. Even as I perceive it I am only becoming aware of myself... I knew too that the T I was now experiencing had existed long before the physical me was born and would continue to exist long after the organism was dead. In fact, this newly discovered T', outside of physical time and space, is responsible for the creation in space and time of the physical universe...."

Gerald Heard, himself the subject of an LSD-experiment, has given a description in general terms of "the full power of the experience" which comes during the third and fourth hours after the drug has been taken:

"Now the whole outside world becomes a composition that embraces and interfuses everything. And yet this composition, though constantly changing, is also (strange paradox) all the while complete and instant in a fathomless peace. At this point one could say that he crosses a watershed. In this all-pervading

Energy he feels around him, the subject realizes that he cannot be isolated. It is flowing through him, as it flows through all that surrounds him.

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"Here his experience with time goes still further. Time appears to have stopped, disappeared. What has now befallen the 'voyager' is not merely that he is on the high sea with his ship in a vast calm, but that the ship itself no longer seems distinct from the infinite ocean. He stands outside of and apart from his familiar ego, all its protective barriers having been shed; and this can lead in some to transcendent experience, while in others to a deep panic. To those for whom their ego is their only possible self, the only possible mode of consciousness, its disappearance is a kind of death.

"It is here that the subject, however independent minded, may literally welcome a helping hand. Of all the senses, touch is naturally most firmly anchored in the material world. So it is the least liable to illusions. It has been found that if at the moment of this 'trans valuation of all values', this double change of the view of one's self and one's view of nature, a hand is actually held out to the subject, he will be able to keep his bearings. If the subject uses this simple 'sea anchor', he may discover that he is not merely 'riding the swell' but has entered a condition of what until then may have been inconceivable. With his consciousness enlarged out of all bounds, he may - if all goes well - find that he no longer feels any anxiety about past or future."

In philosophical language we may sum up: there is a widening out into a dimension where the perceiver is united with the perceived and both fuse into an immensity felt as creating, containing, pervading, harmonising, illuminating all - a limitless existence beyond the separative ego, the outsideness of one object to another, the cross-purposes of poignant combative particulars, the ravage of death and, despite the altering aspects everywhere, the very passage of time.

To all appearance, the culmination of the LSD-experience is akin to the "unitive knowing" of mysticism. Everyone may not reach this culmination. Some may stop short with the amazing artistic splendour of the world. Others may progress no more than to a clearing up of their own depths.

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Those who are not willing to make terms with the strangeness' of the new perceptions and feelings and either resist it or try to fit it into old frameworks of ideas and reactions may become uncomfortable and confused, with their sense of single personality temporarily affected. But when the final possibility is present not only of a finer psychological reorganisation but also of what has been named "liberation"- therapy, which yields conceptions exceeding even the largest and boldest terms of Western psychiatry and seems analogous to the highest Vedantic realisation - the Universal Self and the Cosmic Consciousness - we cannot help seeing that a tremendous breakthrough is made available towards the ultimate of both the subjective and the objective worlds.

Here we must keep sharply before us a few important points. Not merely is the LSD-user in a state of "realistic" awareness, free from amnesia, capable of clearly recalling - though with a wise disinterestedness - past businesses and future concerns, convinced that he is as little under any delusion as when he knows the life from day to normal day. He can, in addition, be shown to be under no suggestive influence of upbringing or inclination. In a paper jointly written by Dr. T. Leary and W. Houston dark,² we find that when psylocybin, a drug allied to LSD but quantitatively 100 times weaker, was administered to more than 400 volunteers, "less than ten per cent... were orthodox believers or churchgoers, yet such terms as 'God', 'divine', 'deep religious experience', 'meeting the infinite', occurred in over half of [the] reports". The paper 3 even declares that "about One-half of the 'hardened cynics' who were given the drug behind the walls of Concord Prison experienced 'classic mystic conversion reactions'".

Scientific scepticism is thus fairly well countered. Scepticism from the religious side can also be parried. For, religious experience, like all experiences of the psycho-physical human system, may be presumed to have chemical or hormonal bodily changes as accompaniment, dark and Leary make the highly instructive statement:4 "we know that the natural

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chemistry of the body includes biochemical substances, known as the indoles, which are similar in structure to the consciousness-expanding chemical and seem to be connected with some of the same psychological states as those produced by psylocybin. The question then immediately arises whether a naturally-occurring excess of the indoles might not predispose some people to certain kinds of mystical experience or whether a mystical state of mind might not, on the other hand, stimulate chemical changes in the body." The truth would seem to be that in both ways religious experience is associated with the indoles during at least its "take- off" stage and thus the outcome of psychedelic drugs carries no special materialistic taint in comparison with the analogous result which may take place without them.

Hence the charge of hallucination, from whatever quarter it may hail, against the LSD-"liberation" should, in reason- able eyes, fall to the ground.

Nor are the amazing philosophical implications of LSD necessarily to be paid for by serious sacrifices in other respects. None of the psychedelics can run off the rails, so to speak, during an experiment. Their effects can be stopped immediately at any stage by means of an antidote at hand with the qualified attendant under whose care always the experiment is to be done. There need be no danger of any possible untoward reaction getting out of control.

LSD in particular is, clinically, a safe drug in the right microscopic quantities - for patients properly "vetted". As Huxley5 warned about mescaline, "those who have had a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer from periodical depressions or a chronic anxiety" must keep off it: it might literally let loose hell for them - at least for a time. Otherwise it is innocuous. And, according to Heard,6 "the optimum dosage - that which produces the most informative results - lies between 100 and 150 'gamma'; and 100 'gamma' is approximately one ten thousandth of a gram."

LSD is not habit-forming. Neither, as a rule, does it have unfavourable after-effects. Physiologically, it is less dangerous

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than aspirin. Even while its action is going on, there is n bodily disequilibrium: most often, except for a slight feeling of chilliness at the start and perhaps some dilatation of the pupils of the eyes some time later, the results are entirely psychological.

Further, Heard7 has noted: "Any sexual sensation, any erotic fantasy or preoccupation, is nearly always reported as absent. So, for all its liberating power, LSD remains noneuphoric: as the Greeks would say, it is 'eudaemonic' - 'a possession by the spirit of wholeness'." This characteristic brings it nearer to the traditional via mystica.

And the eudaemonism of LSD is, in certain ways, a long-term affair. Hallucinations, however brilliant, leave no lasting mark. But here the effect is such that the entire outlook on life may undergo a change. The great ideas of religious philosophy, which in themselves are life-influencing agents, spring to a potent sense of immediacy with the help of LSD. For, they turn, in their general implications, into direct knowledge and the individual begins to feel a contradiction between the infinite unity, to which his new knowledge testifies and the egoistic inharmonious nature of his ordinary actions. Slowly, old behaviour patterns tend to get removed and a beginning of moral regeneration to set in. LSD, there- fore, can lead not only to a new metaphysical outlook but also to a good deal of benefit in the field of social relations, political procedures and even international adjustments.

Again, as marked by both Huxley and Heard, psychedelics can be a spur to artistic creation. A study of the sense- impressions of the poet, the painter and the musician discloses striking parallelisms with the vision of object and scene, the perception of shape and sound, which the taker of LSD enjoys. An intensity of impression and a cross-light of significance such as plays in the process of artistic symbolism and, at the starting-point of experience, a greater sensitive- ness, a keener awareness, a more joyous responsiveness, a more spontaneous power to concentrate attention and integrate perception - all these developments may issue from the

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proper use of LSD on well-chosen and sufficiently spaced- out occasions. And they could serve the ends of scientific no less than artistic thought; for, the progress of science also depends initially on - in Heard's phrase⁸ - "the act of sudden insight, the brilliant hypothesis, the truly 'creative' leap".

All in all, there is much to be said in favour of LSD as an apercu to aspects of reality not compassed in common life. At its best, it is the most effective counteragent, apart from the mystical life itself, to the materialistic view of the cosmos. Modem science has departed from the strictly mechanistic model so dear to the old physics, but to pass from such a model to an abstract mathematical formula may be a good fillip to the speculative mind to seek affiliations on scientific grounds with non-materialism. But that is about all. The scientific attitude is still very positivist; and abstract mathematics, however four-dimensional or "indeterministic" in import, does not check that attitude enough; nor does it push the experiential level of man's consciousness above the surface of matter and its space-time limitations. Man, both as the quotidian perceiver and as the laboratory observer, cannot but be, in terms of experience, a materialist. The deeper reaches of the heart and mind, which artists glimpse and the adepts of mysticism and Yoga explore, are mostly outside his range. Whatever he may choose to think, his sensation and feeling are caught in a materialistic mesh. And there can be no genuine and permanent break-away from it except through a spiritual discipline. But such discipline is usually impossible to the common man - whether he be directly the homme moyen sensuel of Montaigne or the more systematic lover of the sense-world that is the scientific student. LSD would prove for him a shining window thrown open on "more things in heaven and earth" than positivist philosophy dreams of, and on a mysterious ever-living one- in-all whose concretely experienced influence must work a revolution in his outlook and inlook.

The benefits we can think of are indeed impressive. Still, the last word on this psychedelic - no matter with what

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scientific care it might be employed - cannot be a sweeping "Yes". The doubts and reservations of a higher court of judgment than any to which we have so far appealed have yet to be considered.

3

Now we may enter a number of important caveats.

Nothing that LSD may provide can be equated altogether with the revelations of the mystical life as practised in various modes down the ages. First, there is no permanent establishment of whatever supreme experience is accessible to LSD in the consciousness of its user. The experience is a wonderful visitation and no more. Doubtless, as we have stated, a certain behavioural sequel of its eudaemonism is there, yet the immediacy of the "liberation" itself is short-lived. Mysticism, in the true sense, means a constant presence of the Infinite, the Eternal, the Divine - an abiding realisation.

Again, LSD at its highest effectivity does not leave behind a persistent aspiration to live at all moments in the state of "unitive knowing". It can spread a general regenerative influence over one's common condition but does not render one a dedicated soul. Whatever the numerous redeeming features of improvement in conduct, it lets one go back to many of the ordinary hungers. For instance, no report tells us of a complete change in the individual's sexual stance. The sex-appetite, progressive freedom from which is part of all mystical endeavour, encounters no new force in the will to curb it, much less to outgrow it and convert its energy into a pure flame of amor dei. Neither do the reports give news of that patient general striving after a desireless though not passive equanimity, which distinguishes in India the seer, the sage, in the making. The highest effectivity of LSD is thus not a straight evolutive nisus. The via mystica aims at a wholesale transformation of one's being, a radical irradiation of all that one is and does.

Finally, what is analogous in the LSD-experience to

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"unitive knowing" is not actually the Vedantic Knowledge in however temporary a form. All practitioners of Yoga9 are aware that there are many "planes" of existence and on each plane there is a universal consciousness which is not the ultimate Ground - Atman, Brahman - or the total Cosmic Consciousness, but only an immensity of the principle basic or active on that plane - the Life Force or the Mind Force or any other Force intermediate between them and the earth. And what LSD is likely to do is to expand our consciousness for a while into any of the planes that are in constant commerce with the organic physical state - the Life-plane or the Mind-plane or the planes of the "subconscious" and "unconscious". It is, prima facie, impossible that a drug could direct our consciousness into occult dimensions with which we are not already in rapport either through our waking life of imagination and phantasy or through our dreams and nightmares. To penetrate truly mystical and spiritual dimensions our life has first to be oriented in their direction and set communicating with them. It is vain to hope that all on a sudden we can fly straight into the "transcendental" by chemical reactions in our brain cells.

Another point to remember is that, in its true connotation, the "transcendental" is even more than Cosmic Consciousness and the Ground of things. It is the Supra- cosmic, whose emanations are both the mutable universe and its immutable support of Self. And the Supracosmic is not only an Impersonal Absolute but also a Personal God, an Everlasting Being who is capable of intimate relationship with all the creatures forming part of His world-play - a Being whom these creatures can experience as Supreme Lord, Father, Mother, Lover, Friend, Guide - a Super- Person, in consecrated communion with whom man as an individual can feel the deepest and most dynamic fulfilment. The LSD- expansion of consciousness carries no trace, be it ever so remote, of this sovereign Divinity.

Nor is it the authentic "soul", the secret portion or spark within us of this Divinity, that is likely to be attained: we are

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not ordinarily in direct contact with our souls - our souls function through several media or instruments in us and what LSD makes us free of are the ranges of the instrumental mind and life and other subtle go-betweens, whose independent existence is mostly covered up by the mélange, if not melee, of them all in our surface being.

Huxley10 himself, for all his claims for drug-mysticism, has hit the truth of the matter in saying: "I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescaline, or any other drug prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life:

Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescaline experience is what Catholic theologians call a 'gratuitous grace', not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available."

As "gratuitous grace", LSD may be expected to play its part more and more in the lives of men, but it will not be practising mystics who will usually care to go in for it. They know that the expansion and release it gives is only into the intermediate planes and that too much interest or absorption in these planes can be in the long run an obstacle to Enlightenment. Besides, they have, in the course of their inward career, experience enough of marvellous colours and designs and queer recesses and astonishing extensions of themselves in the Subtle dimensions. Neurotics will be drawn to the supposed "kick" of LSD, but they are the least fit for it, and most psychotherapists have understood that except as an adjunct to ordinary methods of treating "twisted thought" LSD should be kept out of their reach. It is rewarding pre-eminently for "normal" people. And, among these, the subjects who would be most worth treating with an eye to the future of humanity are the practical thinkers, the matter-of-fact seekers, the leaders of organised common sense. As a result of their personal flashes of supernormal knowledge they would co-ordinate with the information of ordinary science the parascientific semi-mystic weltanschauung

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which LSD has proved on their pulses. And, under its inspiration, they would benefit the race by working constructively towards what the intuition of Teilhard de Chardin has called Omega Point, man's evolutionary ascent to a collective participation of consciousness in the Universal Self pervading as well as containing all things - the "Cosmic Christ", in the terminology which Teilhard has built on his own religion. To put it with a nearer view and in less metaphysical language, they would bend their energies with passionate conviction as never before to bring about what the idealists of internationalism have dreamed of as "One World".

But a very crucial problem still remains to be faced. And it stems from the nature of the "planes" into which LSD provides an entry. Valuable indeed as revealers of realities beyond the mere physical and as indicative in their own manner of the single yet multiple World-Spirit, they are yet not themselves strictly spiritual levels, and through the opening made in the LSD-subject the powers and beings of these occult ranges can come into him and move him to their own ends. He may be, according to the standards of medicine and psychiatry, "normal", but for the purposes of contact with such occult ranges normality would consist not only of a certain inner strength in addition to balanced nerves and sound health but also of an inner refinement and purity as well as an inner poise and impersonality. Indian Yoga speaks always of adhikara, "fitness", in a special sense, for any venture into the unknown beyond the earth. If the fitness is not already there, it can be acquired by a slow process of self-discipline. Without it, one lies exposed to disrupting forces which would insidiously take hold of one and, even if several experiences are enlarging and elevating, the final upshot may be disastrous. The subject may become either helplessly insane or powerfully paranoid. In ancient times there was a wide-spread wisdom which made each man recognise his own place and the need of preparation in order to move up in the psychological series. Modem man

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believes in equality and liberty and the right to rebel and be his own master. Not only does he flout the idea of total submission to a spiritual Guru or Teacher; he also cannot remain always under even a psychiatrist. If he feels that LSD supplies him with wonderful experiences, he may take the future administration of it into his own hands and somehow or other, through the numerous channels possible in the market of today, get possession of it. And when he is unprepared in the spiritual sense the very forces and beings that belong to the occult planes would secretly urge him to assert his claims and deal with himself independently.

Of course, these planes have fine and uplifting agencies too at work. We see them in great art and heroic enterprise and devoted service and altruistic endeavour: many a movement of bright idealism starts from there. But seldom is the work done without lower admixture. And what is done is through the accomplished organisation of established Nature, and the framework of sanity is not broken. But with a push beyond this organisation into unchartered domains - and an untimely or unprepared push at that - it is the more dubious agencies of the occult who would come into play sooner or later, leading to a shipwreck of all the hopes built on the grand experiences had at the beginning.

Even in the course of mystical discipline, even with a Guru in charge, lack of caution and of discrimination may lay one bare to dangerous attacks. Sri Aurobindo has very vividly brought them home to his own disciples. Referring to those who do not guard themselves and are led away by the intermediate planes, he" writes:

"Overwhelmed by the first rush and sense of power of a supernormal condition, they get dazzled with a little light which seems to them a tremendous illumination or a touch of force which they mistake for the full Divine Force or at least a very great Yoga Shakti; or they accept some intermediate Power (not always a Power of the Divine) as the Supreme and an intermediate consciousness as the supreme realisation

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Very readily they come to think that they are in the full cosmic consciousness when it is only some front or small part of it or some larger Mind, Life-Power or subtle physical ranges with which they have entered into dynamic connection. There are worse dangers in this intermediate zone of experience. For the planes to which the sadhak12 has now opened his consciousness, - not as before getting glimpses of them and some influences, but directly, receiving their full impact, - send a host of ideas, impulses, suggestions, formations of all kinds, often the most opposite to each other, inconsistent or incompatible, but presented in such a way as to slur over their insufficiencies and differences, with great force, plausibility and wealth of argument or a convincing sense of certitude. Overpowered by this sense of certitude, vividness, appearance of profusion and richness, the mind of the sadhak enters into a great confusion which it takes for some larger organisation and order; or else it whirls about in incessant shiftings and changes which it takes for a rapid progress but which lead nowhere. Or there is the opposite danger that he may become the instrument of some apparently brilliant but ignorant formation; for these inter- mediate planes are full of little Gods or strong Daityas or smaller beings who want to create, to materialise something or to enforce a mental and vital formation in the earth-life and are eager to use or influence or even possess the thought and will of the sadhak and make him their instrument for the purpose. This is quite apart from the well-known danger of actually hostile beings whose sole purpose is to create confusion, falsehood, corruption of the sadhana and disastrous spiritual error. Anyone allowing himself to be taken hold of by one of these beings, who often take a divine Name, will lose his way in the yoga. On the other hand, it is quite possible that the sadhak may be met at his entrance into this zone by a Power of the Divine which helps and leads him till he is ready for greater things; but still that itself is no surety against the errors and stumblings of this zone; for nothing is easier than for the powers of these zones or hostile powers to

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imitate the guiding Voice or Image and deceive and mislead the sadhak or for himself to attribute the creations and formations of his own mind, vital or ego to the Divine...

"The sadhak thinks that he is no longer in the old small consciousness at all, because he feels in contact with something larger and more powerful, and yet the old consciousness is still there, not really abolished. He feels the control or influence of some Power, Being or Force greater than himself, aspires to be its instrument and thinks he has got rid of ego; but this delusion of egolessness often covers an exaggerated ego..."

A drug like LSD is thus at the same time a promise of light and a potentiality of darkness. As the former, it is the mightiest member of the group of artificial aids that have been pressed into the service of religion and spirituality from ancient times for the sake of the common "normal" man in particular. In all the old Mysteries and initiation rites there seems to have been some sort of intoxication by whose help the individual caught a glimpse of supraphysical realities and became convinced that the visible and tangible of earth's time and space were not all. Even in the days of the Rigveda there was the sacred wine of delight and immortality: Soma. Soma, to the spiritual seer, is the Godhead of transcendental and world-creative Bliss, whose being flows into him as a result of Yoga and suffuses his consciousness with the direct sense of Eternal Life and Infinite Beatitude. But as a material analogue to this God-intoxication there appears to have been for ceremonial use the juice of some rare herb gathered on Himalayan heights. Sir Aurel Stein has suggested that Soma (Persian Haoma) was extracted from the plant Ephaedra pechyclada (intermedia) growing in the Western Himalayas and Western Tibet and known in the present Trans-Indus vernacular as Hum. When mixed with sugar, the juice of this plant does inebriate, but Stein's identification is very far from certain. We know with greater confidence some of the drugs employed in religious sects of a less ancient period. The most

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familiar derives from the hemp plant, Cannabis sativa. And Mexican Indians even today resort to the cactus Peyotl, source of Mescaline, in their religious rites.

But all truly fruitful "liberation"-therapy connected with religion has had a spiritual supervisor who was himself in masterful touch with the planes beyond and could keep guard over the man chosen by him for a mind-changing experience. The man too approached the experience with the proper attitude: he got ready for it by purifying his life, practising the mood of prayer, submitting his mind to the Guru. And the drug was the Guru's monopoly: he prepared it and, except from him, it could not pass to anyone.

If LSD, as a means to spiritual insight, could be operated under these three conditions, it would be safe not only in the mere scientific or clinical sense but also in a profound psychological one. In the absence of these conditions it should be restricted very rigorously, handled with the utmost care by the psychiatrist in his limited field of complexes and fixations, and dispensed in the most select cases alone - and perhaps no more than once to each of such psychologically "screened" subjects - for breaking through the protective barrier of the familiar self with indefinite expansion.

This expansion may be allowed more freely if by any chance a real adept of Yoga - at once mystic and occultist and living in the true Cosmic Consciousness - can vouch that when the subject breaks out of the familiar self he somehow experiences something essentially or predominantly spiritual rather than the ambiguous lights and largenesses of the supraphysical "mid-worlds".

Only after such an assurance - and even so with not a little discrimination - the qualified psychiatrist may step forth in the open to work creatively with LSD for the mind of the future.

Till then, LSD is fit to be dispensed on an extensive scale for its few hours of "liberation" by none except a Master of Yoga.

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But it is to be hoped that the Master will be found. For this far-reaching psychedelic appears indeed to deserve him.

11.3.1964

REFERENCES

1. The account that follows has been collated mainly from three sources :

(a) "Can This Drug Enlarge Man's Mind?" by Gerald Heard, Horizon (New York), May 1963, pp. 30-31.

(b) "The Chemical Mind-Changers" by Robert Coughlan, Life (New York) Vol. 32, No. 7, April 22, 1963, pp. 70-71.

(c) "The Issue of the Consciousness-Expanding Drugs" by Willis W. Harman, Main Currents in Modem Thought, Sept.-Oct., 1963 Vol 20 No 1 pp. 7, 10-11. ' ' '

2. Quoted in "The Hallucinogenic Drug Cult" by Noah Gordon, The Reporter (New York), Aug. 15, 1963, p. 38.

3. Ibid., p. 39.

4. Ibid., p. 38.

5. The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1961), p. 45.

6. Heard, op. cit.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., p. 114.

9. Yoga, in its true sense, does not mean merely the science and art of extraordinary body-postures and of an altered breath-rhythm to activate certain psycho-physical powers. It can do without these things altogether and is essentially a methodised movement of the inner life, a concentrated progression of the consciousness towards the Highest Reality.

10. Huxley, op. cit., pp. 59-60.

11. On Yoga (Letters), Vol. II, Tome Two, (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1958) pp. 1003-1006.

12. Follower of a spiritual discipline and process (sadhana).

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

1. The Problem of Aryan Origins: From an Indian Point of View Z Karpāsa in Prehistoric India: A Chronological and Cultural Clue

3. Problems of Ancient India

4. Ancient India in a New Light

5. The Beginning of History for Israel

6. Is Velikovsk's Revised Chronology Tenable? A Scrutiny of Four Fundamental Themes

7. Life-Literature-Yoga: Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

8. Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. I

9. Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. II

10. Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. Ill

11. "Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen" — The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets

12. The English Language and the Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna

13. Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna

14. The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry

15. Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation

16. The Inspiration of Paradise Lost

17. Inspiration and Effort: Studies in Literary Attitude and Expression

18. "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" — An Interpretation from India

19. The Thinking Comer: Causeries on Life and Literature

20. Adventures in Criticism

21. Classical and Romantic —An Approach through Sri Aurobindo

22. Mandukya Upanishad: English Version, Notes and Commentary

23. The Spirituality of the Future: A Search apropos of R.C.

Page 357

Zaehner's Study in Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin

24. Teilhard De Chardin and our Time

25. The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo

26. Sri Aurobindo - The Poet

27. The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

28. Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

29. Sri Aurobindo and Greece

30. Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare

31. The Passing of Sri Aurobindo: Its Inner Significance and Consequence

32. The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual System and the Mother's Contribution to it

33. The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems

34.' "Overhead Poetry": Poems with Sri Aurobindo's Comments

35. The Adventure of the Apocalypse (Poems)

36. Altar and Flame (Poems)

37. Poems by Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran with Sri Aurobindo's Comments

38. Talks on Poetry

39. The Sun and the Rainbow — Approaches to Life through Sri Aurobindo's Light

40. Our Light and Delight — Recollections of Life with the Mother

41. The Mother: Past-Present-Future

42. Light and Laughter: Some Talks at Pondicherry by Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran

43. A Follower of Christ & a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo:

Correspondence between Bede Griffiths and K.D. Sethna (Amal Kiran)

44. Problems of Early Christianity

45. The Virgin Birth and the Earliest Christian Tradition

46. Science, Materialism, Mysticism

47. The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

48. India and the World Scene

49. Evolving India: Essays on Cultural Issues

Page 358