THE ULTIMATE CANON OF KNOWLEDGE

Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn

Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. I can be contacted at pc93@bellsouth.net. I will be greatly indebted to the individual who can put me in touch with the Estate of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of the following works:

The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon, Nature as Symbol, The Tree of Knowledge, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of the Two Truths, At Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and the Actual, Immortality: Yes - But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of the Four Elements, Through Science to Religion, Creation in Six Days?, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy, A. B. Kuhn's graduation address at Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn's unpublished autobiography, Great Pan Returns.

CHAPTER ONE

ECHOES OF PAST WISDOM

Ever since man has found himself in this particular world and possessed of an order of consciousness that dowered him with the power to think about his situation, he has also recognized that he is ineluctably driven to wonder about his existence in such a universe. From the start of his self-awareness, he has been persistently haunted by the desire to know the what, the how, and, ultimately, the why of it all. With the dawn of sentience there arose first the questions about his environment, this amazing world in which he finds himself cradled, its components earth and water, air and fire and all their interrelations, those stars that glitter in the upper firmament, and all the phenomena attending the cycling round of day and night and the seasons, sun and moon, lightning, thunder, rainbow, aurora borealis, ice, steam, hail, cold, heat, color, life and death of vegetation, and the endless forms and movements of things.

Then, as this wondrous gift of consciousness develops its astonishing powers, he finds that it introduces him into a world that lies not outside, but inside, himself, so that he must balance himself, as it were, between two worlds of being. He finds he must study both of these worlds, as his exercise of the powers of the one within gives him understanding and control of the one without. Finally when usage has sharpened the faculties of consciousness to great acuteness, his genius drives him to seek answers to the question of how these two worlds may be related to each other. He thus becomes a philosopher seeking that inner satisfaction of his thinking power which he calls meaning. Vaguely at first, then more clearly, he finds that his experience leads him to believe that this precious core of meaning is involved in the relation between the two realms of his being. All through his history he has wavered between two positions, at times being convinced that the keys to meaning are to be found entirely in the outer world, but again being persuaded that they are better to be discovered within the area of his reflecting consciousness. So his philosophy has oscillated between naturalism and idealism, and it can not yet be said that the human mind has arrived at an understanding of precisely how the two areas of his experience, his two worlds, are related to each other. The quest for a more lucid insight into this problem and a sounder understanding of its total import is the theme of the present work.

The evolutionary development of man’s powers of consciousness, deepening and exalting his intelligence, commits him inevitably to an ever-intensifying search for knowledge and the satisfactions and delights of understanding. The scriptures of antiquity which he has cherished as his greatest treasures of light and truth admonish him that understanding and wisdom are the most precious things he can discover in life. He feels within him an insatiable curiosity, a veritable hunger and thirst for the truths and realities of his existence. He is still Ajax crying for the light. For all too largely his life is a groping amid shadows, a wandering in strange and uncertain courses, a stumbling progress not without falls and injury. Ignorance, breeding doubt and fear, still darkens his vision and makes his advance precarious, perilous. In want of clear knowledge of his road, evils ambush his path among unknown ways, accidents befall him, catastrophe strikes him suddenly and he writhes too often in misery and suffering.

So his quest for the understanding that brings wisdom and security still persists and grows more exciting as his continuing effort brings him new rewards that enlighten and cheer him and entice him on to further pursuit of his high goal. Thus goaded and lured, driven by pressures and elated by fresh delights, he presses on toward some distant goal, which a more or less blind instinct seems to tell him lies ahead for his attainment.

The world and his experience with it confront him with the staggering fact of the endless diversity and multiplicity of the phenomena of life. He is constantly challenged, first with the meaning of particular events, then with the meaning of the total ensemble of world existence. Deepening reflection seems to convince him that the solution of problems posited by the flow of immediate and particular events can be found only in a comprehensive understanding of the ultimate meaning of the whole. The quest for this consummate insight has led him to formulate the principles of what he calls the science of total being, ontology. After centuries of effort to reach determinations as to this crowning interrogatory, he seems forced to fall back on the recognition that life and the universe are gigantic mysteries which overtax his present powers of full comprehension. However they give evidence all along of embodying the mighty secrets of their nature and being, prodding man’s undying curiosity to delve into them. When he presses for an answer to the inevitable question as to what the world is, he sees that it is virtually impossible for him to frame anything but a tentative answer and never a final one. For if he settles upon some conceived or postulated primary essence as the substrate and core of all being and names it, he is at once faced with the question of what that original essence is. The ultimate thing that is the what of existence is beyond his ken. If Thales thought this basic constituent of being is water, Anaximander, air, Heraclitus fire, and Democritus atoms, and modern science finds that it is indeed atoms, yet the search for what they are must still go on. Centuries of the profoundest reflection of the Hindu mind have been crowned with the simple realization that the universe of life exists and that man himself is an integral part of its substance and its mystery. The inner and the outer worlds of his dual existence find, and will increasingly find, themselves convergent and unified in his own experience.

The brooding mind of the German Emmanuel Kant assured us that we can never know the objective world, what anything is in itself. But if man and the universe are identical in ultimate essence, there is the cheering possibility that man will come to know the universe as he comes to know himself in the heights and depths of his own nature. In fact it was the Greeks who urged man to know himself first of all, and he would progressively know all things. Much futile effort, especially in the domain of religion, has been put forth over the centuries to discover the nature of man entirely apart from his relation to the objective world that extended outside his interior world of consciousness. In fact this move was motivated by the supposition that his true nature could best be introspected when he detached his consciousness and interests as far as possible from the concrete world and concentrated intently upon the world within. Much philosophical persuasion of the sort still drives religious and cultural endeavor in the groove of this belief. It will be a primary objective of this essay to uncover the supreme falsity of this conviction. The effort will be to establish beyond dispute that the highest and most blessed attainments of wisdom and understanding open to man’s consciousness will accrue to him through the exercise of his faculties of intelligence by which he will be able to relate his life most harmoniously and benignantly to the objective world outside himself.

It is the record of a lugubrious history that, particularly in the area of our Western world, the aberrations of the human mind under the spell of subjective religious misconceptions cut off the life of society from wholesome conceptual

relation to the external physical world. The whole bent was to abstract the soul of the individual as far as possible from absorption in the interests of the flesh and its place in the outside world. This motive sprang from the persuasion, fostered by ecclesiastical pietism, that interest in the life of the senses detracted from the primary interests of the soul, that a hearty indulgence in the natural impulses of the body were hostile to the life of the soul, and that therefore the lure of the world was to be resisted and destroyed.

It needs no dissertation to elaborate and certify what the record of history reveals as to this portent obsession of the dour religious consciousness over the centuries. It has left its lamentable record in the tale of corruption, banality, superstition, bigotry and general moral and mental blight that overspread the area of Christian Europe over the middle period which has come to be known as the Dark Ages. The liberalization of the Medieval mind that came with the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth century turned attention to some extent back to the world of nature, and salutary results were manifested. It was the force that possibly led most directly to the first real investigation of the natural world that came with the seventeenth century and has now burgeoned into the prodigious marvel of modern science. The benefits and blessings accruing to humanity from the relatively few years of this late focusing of the powers of the human mind upon the life of nature have at last administered the just and stern rebuke to the follies of pietistic religionism which arrant fatuity in that field had so fully deserved. The blight of evil character was lifted off the field of nature, and the moment man sought her companionship and her secrets, she rushed forward to reward him with an infinitude of blessings. This has been mostly, however, on the side of physical easements and comforts for his bodily existence. The question to be discussed here is whether man has yet gained from nature anything like a full measure of her power to illuminate his consciousness with the light of infinite knowledge, wisdom and understanding. Wonderfully as she has demonstrated her ability to contribute to our physical well-being, is it possible that she has still untapped resources to enlighten his intellect and beatify his spiritual life? The essay will aim to make clear her marvelous potentiality to ennoble the character and elevate the position of man’s cultural status in his life on the planet.

The modern world is not at all cognizant of the splendid achievement of the ancient civilizations of two lands at least, namely Egypt and Greece, in so relating their minds to the order of nature that their life in general flowered out in a state of health and wholesomeness that has hardly been matched in the history of the world since. History discloses that the daily life of the Egyptian citizen was one lived in close and intimate relation with the life of nature. No one can study the life of the Greek people of two to three millennia ago without recognizing the tremendous part that what they called physis, or nature, played in their modus of living both at the physical and the intellectual level. Their philosophy, which is still regarded as the heyday of the human achievement in that field, was solidly based on the foundations of all conceptuality found in the order of the natural world. Man and the meaning of his life were not envisaged as detached from the material world, but as of kindred nature with it and in its higher ranges an efflorescence from it. Man was considered as a blossom or flower on the highest branch of the tree of nature. Man was the highest product, the ripest fruit on the tree of the world. His life therefore inevitably stood in close correlation with the life of nature. The truth of nature could be truth for him. And significantly enough, the genius of Greece’s two most inspired thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, essayed to place man in proper and salutary relation to the two worlds of man’s life, the ideal and the physical. Plato strove to place the foundations of human life in the domain of the ideal; equally Aristotle sought to establish them in the domain of the physical. It must be conceded that it was Aristotle who achieved a more satisfactory

amalgamation of the two phases of our existence in the union of the noumenal and the phenomenal worlds. The Stagirite did not discount the ideal basis of our life, but he emphasized the utility of its unfoldment to beauty and its ultimate divinization.

But since the days of ancient Greece and Egypt, the mental attitude toward nature has floundered about in a sort of semi-darkness only dimly lighted at times by a more competent insight. A special kind of introspective envisioning of nature, which the Greeks had developed to a state of fair acuity seems to have been lost with that general decay of philosophical acumen that all too quickly followed on the age of Plato and Aristotle, and that left the near-Eastern world conditioned for the message of Christianity, which offered the vistas of heavenly consolation and bliss when sturdy effort to achieve the good life on earth seemed to have collapsed.

We should never forget or minimize the importance of the recognition of the historic phenomena which the philosophical life of the ancient Greeks presents as challenge to our intelligence. Greek thought rose to its highest summit of lucid envisioning of truth when it was still invigorated by the conviction that the world of external nature was permeated and animated by the spirit of the divine mind. The benignant force of the great God Pan was present in every tree, brook, hill and woodland nook. If nature could be so enlivened, beautified and sanctified by the deific principle, it was reasonable to assume that the life of man might equally beneficently partake of the universal largesse of felicity. If the historic record can be taken as confirmation of the soundness of the philosophy that generated its special outcome, it must be a judgment in the case that Greek pantheism produced an elevation of the human mind that still commands the unbounded admiration of mankind. It somehow committed the civilization of the epoch to the thesis that man’s life with nature afforded him the most propitious opportunity for the attainment of the supreme values. The benignant and felicitous aims of life might be achieved here on earth if one lived in harmony with the soul of nature. If such was the source-spring of the élan that exalted the Greek mind to the heights, we are challenged to review this bright episode to recover the dynamic principles involved in it. For with the coming of Christianity no one longer listened with enchantment to the shrill piping of the goat-footed god in sylvan dell, as the piety-drunk zealots of the new faith shouted in riotous exultation, "Great Pan is dead." We shall never perhaps know how crucial was this crisis in human thinking, for the issues of two thousand years of tragic history were weighing man’s mind in the balance. An obviously high intelligence had inspired ancient civilization to place its faith in nature, and for a moment it brought a splendid flare of human genius that has enlightened culture ever since. Why the brilliant light was so quickly extinguished is one of the most intriguing puzzles of world history. It is hoped that the present work may offer something in the way of a solution of this mystery, so fateful for all later development in the West. If a wholesome faith in the beneficence of nature somehow deceived, betrayed or failed the human spirit at this crucial juncture, it is of infinite importance that the causes of this tragic debacle should be discovered. Sir Gilbert Murray has characterized it by his famous phrase, the "failure of nerve." But if the Greek genius failed to sustain human confidence that supreme values were to be found in nature and the life of earth, does history, on the other side, certify beyond question that Christianity’s contempt for the world and nature and its flaunting of the banner of salvation through Christ have exalted human life above the level to which paganism had raised it in the Platonic era?

What is obvious of course is that the exaltation of man is to be achieved, not by the dominance of either of the two elements of culture over the other,

but by the fusion of both phases of influence in the life of the race. It is probably a quite adequate statement of the general truth of things in the realm of religion and philosophy that the aberration and error that has pervaded these areas of human ideation have sprung from failure to keep the two sources of dynamic influence, the objective nature outside man’s consciousness and the spiritual forces within it, in complete and harmonious accord with each other. To open human life to the sweeping forces of the one, while closing it against the other, has at all times brought debacle and wreckage.

Since the human being stands at the point of balance between the two areas of his being, the physical and the spiritual--the astute Egyptians of old said that he stood on the horizon line between the heaven of spirit and the earth of matter--it is undoubtedly the supreme task of his existence that he master the consummate art of maintaining himself in as steady a balance between the claims and the forces of his dual life as possible. All religion, along with philosophy, has exhorted him to the cultivation of the interests and potentialities of his spirit conceived as divine. Perhaps paganism fell before Christianity because, in spite of its confidence in the beneficent offices of nature, it had not adequately discerned the principles and divined the technique of the truly harmonious adjustment of human life to the natural world. The human child is born into the very lap of nature, his nurturing mother, and he accepts her fostering ministrations gratuitously. His relation to her is instinctive and spontaneous, and most intimate. But when with maturity and the emergence of intellect and reflection, the matter of maintaining his salutary relation to his benignant mother becomes an obligation demanding the exercise of a phase of his genius which is little known to average humanity and is developed only by the highest culture of his psycho-spiritual capability. It was never enough simply that he dwelt with nature as a chick under her wings, that he partook of her lavish gifts for his sustenance, that he accommodated himself harmoniously to her requirements, or even that he received her bounty with gratitude and delight. For the ultimate exaltation of his being from his cradling in her lap there is demanded a refinement of his aesthetic and intellectual faculties that is beyond the attainment of common humanity and has been rarely achieved by exceptionally evolved souls.

It was a revelation of immense significance to the world when Kant brought thought to face the stern fact that the external world of nature was, so to say, opaque to man’s cognition until he himself supplied the lens of vision through which her features took form and began to have meaning for him in every way. Just ahead of him, Berkeley had elaborated the conception that the world of nature was in fact not external to man, but existed only within the area of his own consciousness. It had no existence until human faculty created it by his perception. Kant went with this formula to the point of admitting that the objective world was in existence for us only as far as and such as we could interpret it to our cognition, but held to the conclusion that our translation or reproduction of it was not at all what the world was in itself. Knowledge of its true being was beyond our reach. Whatever it was in itself, we beheld it draped in the mantle woven of our own conceptual faculty. And this veil was so dense and impenetrable that seldom could the vision of man catch more than the dimmest outlines of nature’s beauteous forms. There was needed, but seldom provided, the development of an intellectual-intuitional lens of vision powerful enough to refute Kant’s interdiction of our knowledge potential and to give us glimpses of nature’s real being.

Through the voice of the personified Isis, nature has so far declared that no man has lifted her robe of mystery to disclose her real being, which was the inner essence of the light of the suns. But now modern nuclear science has so thinned the texture of that robe that at least the mechanism of her infinite

power is in part observable. This still is not enough. The canon of knowledge of the thing which nature is in itself will be available to man when, with science trembling on the verge of discovery that matter is not only energy, but the energy of infinite mind, he can so align his mind with that which the cosmos essentially is, that his knowledge of nature will match her own intelligence.

At any rate it has been generally recognized that whatever the world might be in reality, if it was to be lived with to best advantage by us, its children, the whole enterprise in living with it had to be engineered and managed under the terms imposed by our own faculties and resources. Only as man came to know its procedures and habitudes could he cope with it successfully. The matter of first importance for him was to learn to utilize the available resources of his own intelligence to acquire a mastery of the energies and materials which nature placed in his hands. This committed him to a study of his experience with her forces, a problem of quite an empirical nature. Yet so infinite and varied were the elements of this experience that his mind was challenged to rationalize the vast multitude of facets and nuances which the business of living in the milieu of nature presented to him. Thus he was led to departmentalize his quests and his knowledge into the separate sciences dealing with the subjective side of his nature, in distinction from those that were concerned with the world which he naively persisted in thinking lay objectively outside his own consciousness. So he formulated the study of the various phases of his own inner phenomena, such as religion, philosophy, psychology, ethics, logic, epistemology and their corollaries.

But, dowered as he was by nature with an irrepressible yen for knowledge, the more familiar he became with the ways and habits of the world about him, the more insatiable became his demand to know the why of the total scheme of things. For, whatever wonderful things were revealed to him in his effort to accommodate his life to that of nature, he still remained in ignorance of what a perfect science of living demanded for his highest happiness until he had some clearer vision of the ultimate end and goal toward which he should orient the direction of his total effort. His knowledge of the what and the how of the universal order could instruct him how to adapt his life, by sheer empirical outcome of his constant tentative, to the interests of his security and his well-being. Still every deliberate choice of action in daily living had to be grounded on some reason, however vaguely formulated, and that reason had to bear some relation to a larger context of meaning which by regression brought thought back to some total and ultimate motivation for the existence of man and the world. The little ill-defined reasons which at times seemed no more than idle whimsicalities, dimly perceived and often demonstrably erroneous and even harmful, had to have some integral place and function in a universal scheme and synthesis of the total meaning of life. Hence was born the mental enterprise which is known as philosophy, regarded by reflective minds as the noblest engagement of man’s interest in his life in the world. It sprang from the necessity of his knowing how best to order his life in its relation to the cosmos as a whole. The issues of pleasure and satisfaction following certain modes of his activity, and the issues of pain and suffering ensuing upon certain other modes of behavior, bred in his consciousness the concept of meaning. By trial and error, if by no other route, things, events, actions came to have meaning; but the meaning of small immediate events had in turn to find itself validated in the context of a larger vista, in fact only partially spoke its piece and rendered its verdict unless it could hint at some significance for the wider range of values. As mind power developed and expanded, this perception of meaning, generated by smaller eventualities, seemed to demand for their rational justification an extension of their reference and pertinence to some final synthesis of all possible knowledge. The view of a tiny area of experience

always seemed to necessitate for understanding a fully synoptic, all-embracing perspective.

This effort, in fact, is the gist of the highest endeavor of man’s mental faculty. The bent, the drive, the inappeasable hunger of his mind for consummative intelligence must be recognized as the supreme and incontrovertible evidence that the indefeasible fire of a divine nature glows within the depths of his organic being. It is the certification of his membership in an order of being transcending the level of existence to which he is attached by means of his animal body. This was categorically stated by Plato, who declared that "through body man is an animal; through intellect, he is a god." Plato’s predecessor in philosophical excogitation, Heraclitus, had put it in terms conveying the same affirmation: "Man is a portion of cosmic fire imprisoned in a body of earth and water." This understanding was one of the prime canons of pristine spiritual wisdom of antiquity, out of which came the various revered "scriptures" of the world.

The quest of philosophy, the term significantly meaning the "love of wisdom," and not, except indirectly, the science of wisdom, has thus been the loftiest incitement of the human spirit toward its fuller grasp of essential and ultimate verity. It inspires his endeavor to know more thoroughly the nature of the forces that breed, enfold, nourish and sustain his existence. The quest engages the exercise of his faculties of cognition at their highest degree of clear vision and piercing insight. It is believed that he rises to the expression of his divinest potential when this quest most enthusiastically absorbs his interest. The smoldering embers of his Promethean fire are fanned to brightest flame when the winds of his purest intellectual understanding blow across the field of his spirit. The ancient seer-psalmist did not miss the mark when he adjured the human to seek wisdom and understanding, rating them above all other things deemed precious. Indeed he postulated them as the essential bases of any true happiness. They are the well-spring of blessedness; those who neglect them become the victims of ignorance and calamity.

Down through the ages, then, the human mind has grappled with the facts of his experience, the data of history, the world of nature and has striven to distill out of the melange the priceless essence of comprehension and knowledge, the better to guide his way. As nature takes the water in the soil and by passing it through the fiber of a grape-vine converts it into the life-giving substance of wine, so the genius of the human strains the raw matter of his experience through the alembic of his thought faculty and distills out of the composite the essence of knowledge and enlightenment. Mind, so to say, compresses out of the crude elements of earthly experience the ichor, the wine and nectar of a semi-intoxication of consciousness that yield intimations of divinity. Philosophy thus inspires the most exalted delights of which the human genius is capable. "Sweeter than honey and the honeycomb," exults the Psalmist.

Since this quest is the noblest interest of mankind, the picture which world history paints as to the fortunes of the great effort to pursue it is fairly disenchanting, even distressing. To a depressing extent it is a record of failure, of blindness and confusion, of mental darkness, rather than the glow of the sacred fire on the hearth of the human temple. The sad reflection about it is that this diviner flame of the human spirit appears to have flared out for want of adequate fuel since that "ancient" epoch. The flame was bright enough to enlighten the mentality that produced those "sacred scriptures" which are still revered as the core of divine truth, the actual "Word of God." That glorious flare-up left us the Hermetic wisdom of Egypt, the epic of creation and divine ordinance of the Hebrew Old Testament, the lofty mysticism and profound

rationalism of early Greece, the legacy of Zoroaster, of the Buddha, Sankaracharya, Krishna, Confucius and Orpheus. But then, after a last outflaming in Neoplatonism in the first three Christian centuries, the light dimmed, and nothing can be recorded but faint stirrings and flickering among the ashes and embers ever since, giving fitful flashes at various times. And as zest for keeping the divine flame aglow on the human hearth diminished, the hopes of a bewildered humanity turned toward heaven in yearning for new lightnings from the empyrean. The candle light of the human mind, after one brilliant flash, appeared to be too feeble to sustain itself. Overwhelmed with despair of attaining the good life through human wisdom, men fell back on the age-old tradition of the coming of Messiah, who would fill the world with the radiance of his celestial glory. The road to blessedness ran not though the terrain of divine philosophy, as the Neoplatonists had endeavored to convince the darkening world, but through the frenzied zeal and pious faith of a belief in the advent of Messiah.

The obsession of the general mind with this expectation, entailing as it did the end of the world in the apocalyptic crash, suffocated all hope of resuscitation from the esoteric message of man’s own divine potential that had come down from ancient Egypt. Down plunged the soul of the West into the abyss of the Medieval Dark Ages, as Justinian at last closed the Platonic academies, the fanatical mob burned the great Alexandrian library in the fires of their hatred of philosophy and learning and Hypatia was slaughtered at the altar. Even Jerome was forced to recant his former joyous declarations of his love of the classic literature of Greece and Rome. "What," shrieked Tertullian, "have Homer and Virgil to do with Jesus and the Gospels?" The celestial radiance of the embodied Son of God had dimmed to near extinction the brightest flame of pagan wisdom. All history converged in the person of Jesus and all salvation was henceforth provided by the supernuclear dynamic concentrated in the essence of his shed blood. All previous pretension to wisdom was rendered irrelevant by the Savior’s death and resurrection. Man’s best wisdom is blatant folly compared with God’s revelation of his nature in his Son.

Hence the humanistic sagacity of a primeval arcane science of the soul was crushed into nescience and oblivion for all the ensuing centuries. Yes, now and again sporadic efforts were made by intelligent individuals or groups to bring to the surface the submerged heritage of wisdom, but such attempts to restore the light were forced to remain subterranean to escape the watchful surveillance of the all-powerful Church. Finally after the Italian Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation had to a degree emancipated the mind of Europe from the strangling tyranny of ecclesiasticism, the quest for light and truth could be resumed at its ancient humanistic level. Whatever the voice of God in divine revelation might proclaim of truth and wisdom for humanity, it could now be complemented and reinforced by his voice made articulate in nature. And it could be a festal day for all the race if perchance it were found that the divine voice spoken through nature is more authentic than that uttered through assumed revelation.

CHAPTER TWO

MIND AND SUPERMIND

But even with the freedom to follow truth to its hidden lairs in all fields, and with the energy of modern intellectuality assiduously in pursuit of essential knowledge in every area of discovery, the cultivation of philosophy has not been adequate to the task of recapturing the full light of the lost heritage. Philosophy has become too largely the dry bones of a once lush and dynamic corpus of living truth. It has become the jejune and desiccated husk of its former meaty substance and has withered away into something called in dilettante fashion the "speculative enterprise." It is hardly expected anymore to go beyond speculation; any serious effort to find and establish truth with any degree of finality is regarded as rash presumption. If the cause of this default of wisdom and certitude be sought, it is as likely as not to be found in the faulty way in which man’s intelligence has been utilized to determine truth. It has been exercised too largely in vacuo, that is, in logical processes that are rendered inane and irrelevant by too complete abstraction, in which truth is contorted into amorphous forms by the indeterminate connotation of the words used to express it. The search has been too largely confined to the purely subjective and ideological milieu and reference. Mind has tried to find its way to truth through jungles of the filmiest concepts whose outlines are blurred by the hazy and wavering definitions given to the words utilized for description.

Truth is being sought in the too rarefied atmosphere of pure logic and the thinnest abstrusities of thought. The effort at this level severs thought from life and reality. However god-like the faculty of reason, its operation is rendered futile and treacherous if it be detached too completely from the basic grounds of reality where alone its initial premises can be established with certitude. It will lose its way in the criss-cross of twists and turns in a pathless woods of abstractions if it does not hold itself in firm anchorage to the realities of the universal order. Given concepts embodied in language, which itself often gives misshapen form to ideas, he uses logic to weave a tangled skein of ratiocination that leaves him with nothing substantial in his hands. It is an effort to rationalize the principles of logic, when the aim should be to rationalize the real world. He attempts to construct a fabric of concepts of gossamer thinness, assuming that it must necessarily match the pattern of the objective order, but finds in the end that it is a gross caricature of the world. How often it has been found that the status of things in the actual arena of natural event belies the conclusions of abstract logic!

A homely illustration of what is affirmed here may be cited to show the possibility of the miscarriage of logic which can miss the mark of truth and fact. Pure abstract logic would certify the truth in the following proposition: If an apple a day keeps a doctor away, two apples a day would keep two doctors away, and half an apple would keep half a doctor away! In the thin air of abstraction, the logic is impeccable. It may be objected that it is unfair to introduce mathematical considerations into it; that this presumes a comparison between two elements that are incommensurable. This is admitted, but it demonstrates how readily logic can be twisted awry of truth by just such matching of incommensurables. The premises for syllogistic reasoning must ever remain grounded in the concrete world. If the mind soars too far aloft, it loses sight of landmarks and may become lost in the void.

Thus so much of the effort of the human mind to ratiocinate the living world by formal logic has rendered the house of philosophy a ghost-like domain of dry-as-dust concept juggling and dialectical hair-splitting. It has become a battle of formal concepts, one being used to test another, and out of the jostling and confusion have come much incongruity and contradiction. In the attempt to explain such of the catagories as substance, essence, subsistence, existence, space, time, dimension, succession, duration, contiguity, continuity, division, wholes, parts, unity, plurality, quality, change and a lot more, argument runs into such twists and turns that often a proposition can be shown to negate itself or stand stripped of all possible meaning. Mind can think of the common supposititious case of the irresistible force meeting an immovable object, yet knows that it could not occur in reality. Thought can claim that no object can be so small that it can not be further cut in two, yet factually the claim is belied. If space is to be filled with some substance, are the particles composing it continuous with each other, or must there be interstices filled with air or with nothing?

The quantities and qualities hypostatized as the data and tools for the work of pure science are never factually existent in the objective world. The theoretical "point" whose movements generate the dimensions of geometry has no factual existence. The concrete belies the abstract; the objective phenomenon balks when the subjective harness is thrown upon it. Living matter at many a turn controverts the formal principles of thought. When logicians argue profoundly whether there can be a vacuum; whether an extended object can occupy space; whether a thing can legitimately be said to be in a "place;" whether it is possible to conceive of a thing changing in any way; whether the man who was the boy twenty years ago is the same person; is growth a real possibility?; is form the same thing as shape?; is space real or imaginary?; can a thing be one when it is composed of parts?; and finally whether it can be proved that a thing is identical with itself; it can be seen that human thought can follow the abstract principles of "pure" ideation into all quirks and oddities of fancied logic. In one case it has been contended that it is impossible to determine the meaning of the preposition "in." Zeno "proved" by incontestable "logic" that Achilles could not overtake the tortoise and the flying arrow could never reach its target, because it had to stop to "be" somewhere at each moment.

When one has tried to follow the processes of this sort of reasoning, one turns with mental relief to the actualities of the concrete world with the firm conviction that the mind can never apprehend the deepest truth of the living experience. The conclusion from all this must be that thinking which does not start from and continue in close relation to its foundations in the physical universe must lead to falsity.

Facing this general realization that naive reflection could hardly miss, the philosophical reaction could move in two directions to find a way out. Since mind in its own domain and relying on its own resources could not be trusted to encompass truth, might it not be possible that consciousness could use some other faculty than sheer reason to attain the truth objective? The other alternative was the instinctive supposition that truth could be learned by direct observation of the world of life as it lay naked under man’s eye. The first line led to the predication of the existence of a "higher" faculty in the psychic nature of man than reason or even mind itself, to which the name of intuition was given. The second line led to the study of natural science, or what the Greeks had first called natural philosophy. The Greek word for nature was physis, but it embraced a wider field than is commonly subsumed under the modern term physics. The Greek conception so closely linked the possibility of the discovery of truth by the mind with the world of nature that all philosophical study would have to be nature study. All philosophy would have to be natural philosophy.

But with the decay of the Greek brilliance after the Platonic period, the perception of the indissoluble kinship between mind and nature faded out; and religion, exulting in the cry that Great Pan was dead, swung the pivot of thought clear off the pedestal of nature and strove to ground it on sources of intelligence emanating miraculously when tapped by the power of faith, from some fount of revelation transcending the range of all intellectual faculty. Since the mind alone seemed to disqualify itself by its own illogicality, the idea that mind, steadied and guided by reference to the truth irrefutably established in nature, might still find the road to understanding and wisdom, did not occur to religionists swept impetuously up to the heights of mystical afflation and straining feverishly for effluxions of divine unction. Nature’s silent voice could not be heard by zealots filled with wild expectation of Pentecostal inspiration and Messianic eschatologies. If the world is shortly to be dissolved with the "fervent heat" of the Apocalypse, one could hardly look to it for salvation. So the alternative possibility that intellect, working in close harmony with the living world, might enlighten the human mind with true knowledge leading to wisdom and the highest blessedness possible to humanity, was occluded from the philosophical purview for many doleful centuries. The historical outcome was the unrestrained revel of religious zealotry in wild extravaganzas of faith and pietism which stretched through the European Medieval period till the age of modern science. Under Christian influence, the focus of philosophical reflection retreated from the physical world into the metaphysical. The truth that was only to be gleaned from the study of outer objectivity was sought in the recesses of inner subjectivity. Thought cut itself loose from earth and sought its answers in the misty void assumed to be bathed in celestial omniscience. Pious imagination, under the spur of exuberant faith, was free to sweep and scar amid the beatific creations of its own inspiration. Of a surety there was much here to engage the soul in the delights of mystical revel, as the unctuous recital of such experience from the long line of Medieval Christian mystics abundantly testifies.

The human mind is bound at times to exult in its sense of freedom to fly at will through the upper regions of thought and feeling. As antidote to the suffocating thralldom of dull and commonplace existence, it can be thrilling and transporting. It is a legitimate exercise of the powers of consciousness, one of the modes of expression of the natural force of the life principle itself in its effort to relate itself harmoniously with the conditions of its existence on earth. But the whole issue of sanity or dementia, happiness or wreckage, hinges upon its being exercised in a balanced relation to the actualities of physical existence and the instruction that is to be in the end gained from the observation and intelligence of nature alone.

But always the adventure into the world of transcendentalism, the reaching out into the unknown for mystical rhapsodies, is beset by difficulties and is rendered precarious by lack of any charts of the terrain or directions for finding one’s way. Even India has supplied no Baedecker for planned tourism in this region where consciousness is expected to be ravished with divine enchantment. There are no road signs marking the turns and crossroads. The soul traversing this fancy-land must really create the scenery he enjoys, for what objectivity the adventure seems to have must be the product of his own fabrication. If imagination is not sufficiently productive, the sense will be frightened at the emptiness, the blankness and the hollowness of the dismal abyss. There is nothing to put bounds to the forms created by the vagaries of wayward thought. There is nothing substantial for thought to take hold of. Fancy can run riot to its wildest fling, but it all can be a chaos of senseless chimerical hallucination, lacking all coherence or vital meaning. Catalogued now in the terms of modern psychology as the region of the unconscious, it can be found as likely haunted by the demons of guilt, the monsters of fear, as by the cherubim and

seraphim of divine ecstasy.

The thesis presented here does not concede for an instant that the use of the intellectual genius of man in its exercise of pure reason is a fruitless enterprise. The function of the reason is to test the principia of truth and the concepts of the understanding by logical processes. This mental faculty must be the ultimate arbiter of what will pass the judgment as truth. It is the instrumentality by which decisions can be determined as right or wrong. It is man’s guide to safe walking on the pathway of life.

The contention of mystics that the mind, sheer intellect, is incapable of giving man the vision of truth or the experience of reality, and that for these he must develop the function of a higher faculty known as spiritual intuition, is erroneous because it is expecting and demanding that the mind, as intellect, should exercise a function and render consciousness a service which is not at all within its province. In thus depreciating the mind as inadequate, they are judging it on the ground of its failure to furnish the content of exalted experience, when its proper service is to pass judgment as to the truth or falsity, the right or wrong, of experience furnished by life itself, the content of experience furnished by the other modes of perception, mainly sensation, feeling and reflection. They demand that intellect weave the warp and woof of experience, when its prerogative and duty only require that it pass judgment on the character and value of the experience undergone by the total organism. They ask it to render heroic service beyond the line of duty and outside the range of its capability.

Moreover, in disdaining the use of the intellect in their groping for rapturous adventure in the transcendental void "above the mind," they run the risk of losing balance and suffering psychic damage in consequence. For the maintenance of this psychic equilibrium, an essential of stability and happiness at all times, even the most divine entrancements of the feelings must be in the end checked and evaluated for their good or evil influence by the cold judgment of the intellect. It marks a significant epoch in the history of Hindu mystical philosophies that India’s most eminent and brilliant philosopher, Sri Aurobindo, has in categorical terms declared that the most enchanting afflations of the soul in mystical union with the divine must in the end be submitted to and passed upon by the logic of the mind. The mind is thus the court of last resort in determining the value of experience in any area of consciousness. It is the umpire in the game of life.

Furthermore the mystics base the claim for the superiority of this alleged "higher" faculty of intuition on a distinction between two phases of the activity of mind which in truth are not to be thus set apart. They arbitrarily take one mode of the mind’s activity, which is its normal activity when functioning at its highest and best, extrude it outside the province of mind itself, classify it as a separate and distinct faculty and locate it "above" mind, when it is in reality the most perfect functioning of the mind itself. Aurobindo has been at pains to correct and rebuke this unwarranted and false differentiation between mind and its own supreme form of brilliant operation. The intuition so lauded and exalted "above" the intellect is only that intellect itself sharpened and developed to almost magical competence by long and exacting training in logical processes. Insights and determinations that in the initial stages of mental development were reached only by the slow steps of discursive reasoning, at a later stage of proficiency are caught in lightning flashes of vision and understanding, darting so rapidly into the field of cognition as to seem like the operation of a higher faculty. It is comparable to the brilliant and spontaneous execution of a Beethoven or a Paderewski at the piano, in contrast to the slow, tedious and laborious efforts of their first childhood

practices. This thing called intuition is simply mind functioning like the geni that it is, at the incredible height of its magical power. Intuition may be said to be the attic of the house of mind, but it is still beneath the roof, not above it. It is the marvelous flower of the mind. It is still "intellectual." A vast confusion could be avoided and a great simplification of the principles of epistemology achieved if this false distinction was obliterated.

Emmanuel Kant has contributed much to the matter of seeking the principia of truth and the grounds of reality in the realm of the transcendental and the abstract stretching into the upper regions of thought. He has concluded that in that airy domain lie the categories by which all judgments are gauged. Mind itself supplies the forms and molds into which the content of experience must be poured to take shape and meaning. These are native to the Overmind of the universe itself and emerge into the area of human consciousness from that source. They come to man along with the power of mind itself. But he is doubtful of the practical value of the "abstract universals" discerned by the mind by the processes of "transcendental logic." He goes so far as to call them "shams." He regards them rather as the ghosts of truth, not the actuality. He affirms in his Dialectics that in its highest efforts to conceptualize truth, reason endeavors to scar beyond experience, and that such speculation has never added to our knowledge. These wraiths of thought essence can give us no authentic certain knowledge of the reality of the soul, God and the world. Still he concedes that as far as they are clear determinations arrived at by correct logical courses they perform some useful service as "regulative ideas," tending to keep mystical ideation from running out of bounds.

It is a matter of incidental, but great curious interest to a deep student of philosophy to note, however, that Kant’s position on this item, the comparative valuelessness of the transcendental ideas, puts him in direct opposition to Plato, who made these "abstract universals" the very gist and essence of truth and reality, calling them God’s "archetypal ideas." He constituted them as the basic architectural framework of the universe, the patterns over which all things were made. And--also very curiously, but naturally enough--as Kant’s position reversed Plato’s stand as to the content and value of the noumenal world, so also it exactly reversed the Greek philosopher’s characterization of the phenomenal world. Plato considered the objective world of sensual experience to be but an imperfect, shadowy, dim blur of the real world of the divine ideation, rather an obscuration than a revelation of it. Kant thought that, in spite of the fact that we can not know the things in themselves, they yet did a fair job of representing their true nature and import to our cognition. But it was we who put our own stamp of recognition upon them. It is certainly true that we objectify them through the lens of our own cognitive powers.

In the light of the thesis to be adduced in this work, it is likely that Plato comes close to truth in affirming that the archetypal creative ideas are vaguely, if at all, perceived by the generality of mankind. All too universally the phenomena of the physical world speak no message beyond their crass objectivity. Mortals see their physicality, but not their ideality. Poets, artists, philosophers and idealists strain to catch something of noumenal import in the phantasmagoria of the scene. But to most the show remains opaque, never becomes translucent. The magic power to transform a concrete object or phenomenon into a divine idea demands a refinement of intellectual genius that is potential in our endowment but as yet not extensively developed. These "forms" of true being, as Plato called them, as yet hover over the human scene and haunt more sensitive minds with a half-spectral ghostlike appearance. The mind-magic that will enable reflection to bring them clearly within the focus of observation is the talisman that will open our blind eyes to the presence and their beauty.

CHAPTER THREE

REALITY AND APPEARANCE

Plato has charmed the fancy of thinking men since his day with the fascinating idea that the soul in its celestial state before descent to earth and body beheld these noumenal archetypes in their somehow objectified ethereality, but lost cognition of them when plunged into the coarser life of the flesh. To redeem her life to felicity it was her incarnational task to recover the memory of these forms and the method was a clarification of her vision by contemplation of the beauty of their earthly phenomenal representation. The soul must achieve a clear "reminiscence" of the divine ideas through a study of "divine philosophy."

But Plato’s academic pupil and successor, the great Aristotle, ventured to assign the category of reality to these forms in their physical objectivity here on earth. The objects and phenomena in nature were, he averred, precisely these noumenal structures crystallized in matter. God’s creative fiat had projected his divine thoughts into space and stamped them upon matter in its plastic state and they had hardened in substantial form. The question of their reality hinged on whether this category was to be attributed to them in their first or noumenal state or in their second or phenomenal state. Are things real when they subsisted as thought energizations of divine mind, or when they have concreted in material substance? Thus was the great debate launched on the world, and it has raged down the centuries; materialism versus idealism. No voice has as yet been strong enough to command the rating of authority to hand down a verdict as to which side holds the truth. Man lives in two worlds, one of physical objectivity, the other of consciousness: is his life in the objective world more real than his life in consciousness? As a thing would not exist for him at all if it was not existent in his consciousness, the noumenal form of the thing would seem to constitute its reality. However, if things were to exist for him only in their noumenal form, he himself could have no existence among them. Certainly they would seem to be most real in that form in which they sustain his own existence.

But is not this eternal debate in the end gratuitous and inane? Who shall say that a house is more real when it exists as a mental picture in the mind of the prospective architect or builder than when finally it stands in wood or brick on its site? All argument is certain to fall wide of the mark of specific reference if the terms used to define the matters at issue are not themselves rigidly defined. And who has ever laid down the precise definition of reality, or when has such an absolute definition been unanimously accepted? Fact is that the whole controversy is over this very point: What constitutes reality? If we had a categorical definition of reality, that itself would decide whether it was subjectively noumenal or objectively concrete. And since man must juggle the concept between the two worlds of his experience with it, true in one world and equally true in the other, and the ambivalence being irresolvable in favor of neither side, does not common sense dictate the final conclusion that things are equally real in both worlds? Or that the category of the reality of things is hypostatized when it is seen to be the product of the interrelation of both mind and matter in experience? Reality comes into being as the child of the dual parentage of ideality and objectivity.

Ancient Egyptian sagacity affirmed that man lived his life on the horizon line between the heaven of subjectivity and the earth of objectivity. The

profound truth expressed by this symbolism should long ago have enlightened the human mind with the knowledge that all questions and problems whether of thought or of practical living find their resolution in the balance between ideality and factuality. Plato announced this principle in his doctrine of the golden mean, where truth stands at the point of equilibration between the two scales of the balance. What the present essay will attempt to demonstrate is the weight which the competent envisagement of nature can contribute to maintain the proper balance.

The failure to achieve this equilibration consistently in both the ideologies and the practical policies of men and nations throughout the course of history has stamped that history with the impress of abnormality and disaster. Tragedy of one degree or another ensued whenever the balance was too far shifted to one pan of the scales or to the other. St. Paul expressed it forcefully when he said that the interests of the flesh meant death; the interests of the spirit meant life and peace. To immerse dominant and unremitting concern in the flow of outward events with no deeper aim than to reap the harvest of sensual excitation, is to let the spirit languish and droop in virtual starvation. On the other hand, to withdraw the spirit as far as possible from its vital attachment to the world and the flesh is to deprive both elements of the human compound of their mutually salutary influences. Of the two aberrant tendencies it would almost seem as if the persuasion that the soul would receive extreme benefit from the farthest possible detachment from linkage with the body would be the most flagrantly injurious. But it is evident that both parties, the idealists, the monists, the absolutists and spiritualists on the one side, and the materialists and the positivists and naturalists on the other, have never approached the question from the standpoint of a reflection that the most naive reasoning should have propounded at all times. On their side, the naturalists remained stupidly blind and logically impervious to the need of an answer to the question why, with what adequate objective, the consciousness of a cosmocrator would wish to give itself the purely sensuous experience involved in the incarnation of its multiple fragmented elements in matter; and on their side the idealists with equal caecity never thought to demand an explanation as to why, if felicity was at the command of infinite deific being in the higher levels of existence, this power obviously chose to involve itself in the inertia, the darkness and the deadness of material embodiment. These considerations, which must be the backdrop for a clearer outlining of the primal motivation of the incarnational strategy, have not been envisaged in the philosophical purview at least since the ancient day. This default of knowledge has left the entire debate floundering in barren deserts and dangerous morasses over the intellectual and religious landscape. That loss of nerve, that failure of philosophy, that retreat of the spirit from hope of earth to refuge in heaven that supervened on the Platonic era has cast its fatal blight over the life of the Western world for all succeeding centuries. The obscuration of the light of ancient Egypt’s arcane wisdom has left the philosophical mind groping in the shadows and apparitions of truth ever since the early time.

If a final word is ever to be said on the subject of reality versus appearance, it will no doubt be the assertion of what might be called plain common sense, the simple naive reaction of common thought. If a thing exists at all, it must be conceded to have vindicated its title to reality. Anything that yields us experience must have demonstrated its reality. Its fief on the title is established if it simply remains what it asserts itself to be and does not masquerade as something else. Doubt as to its reality arises only when it does not match some characterization of it that we have conceived for it. As a thing in itself, it must have reality in simply being what it is, as Kant conceded. If it chances to fail to fulfil some categorization of it to which we

have assigned it, we accuse it of cheating. It can claim its own reality, but may miss the reality we have demanded of it.

Then as to the issue of reality versus illusion, or mere appearance. Here again even if the nebulous thing called illusion can be clearly entified, the judgment of unreality is not thereby postulated. As said above, a thing need only be what it claims to be or admittedly is, to vindicate its title to reality. Well then, an illusion is something definitely meeting the requirements of its description or definition, so that if it is truly an illusion, it is a real illusion. Our denunciation of it as illusory has only specious truth because we have demanded that, to win our verdict of reality, it be something other than it is, an illusion. As long as it remains true to its actual nature and being, we can not challenge its reality.

A somewhat different situation is met with in the issue of reality versus appearance. Infinite confusion has crept in here because this word appearance is susceptible of carrying two quite divergent connotations. There can be the appearance to our vision of something that does not prove to be identical with what we expected or demanded it to be, and we denote this as a false appearance, in the sense of an apparition and not the veridical substance of it. Then--and this is the point at which philosophy has failed--there is the appearance to our vision of something that was not in the range or focus of vision before. A thing not seen before now comes into view makes its appearance, as we say an actor emerging onto the stage from behind the wings makes his appearance. In the first connotation there is the question as to the reality of what appears; in the second there is no such question. Something as to which there is no question of reality or unreality, that was not in view before, now comes into view. Something wholly real appears to our view.

It is contended here that this is a point of utmost significance in the whole philosophical polemic over the questions under discussion. It hits directly the matter at issue between Plato and Aristotle, the battle between idealism and realism. Plato and his wing of idealists assert that the appearance of the divine ideas in the world of matter and form lacks reality and is false appearance; realists and positivists on the other hand claim that it is not a false, but a true, appearance. That is the issue in its most "realistic" form of statement.

A divine idea that before lurked unseen in the depths of cosmic mind, having been projected into a world of physical existences, now makes its appearance. The divine fiat projected it from out of the world of invisibility into the world of visible existences. In the simplest possible terms, it was unseen before, but is now seen. The only question that leaves the matter of its reality at stake is whether the thing that thus objectively appeared is the same thing that before its visible manifestation in our world was the divine idea. If it was such then, it must be the same thing now that it has appeared. God has simply clothed his divine idea in physical garb and brought it out from behind the wings of the cosmic theater and so it has made its appearance to us. If it is the same idea that the creative mind held as a noumenon, there can nevermore be a question as to its reality as a phenomenon. Certainly as a thought-form it was real to God, as our thoughts are real to us. If he wished us, his children, to know his thoughts, and took into account that we have no clairvoyance to visualize his mental pictures, he took the pains to objectify his ideas in such concrete substance as would make them visible to our sensory faculty. If Plato was quite right about this, it must be concluded that God perpetrated a poor, a muddled, job in converting the images of his thought into material objectivity. His negative did not bring out the form and outlines with sharp distinctness. Kant thought that they were sufficiently clear; Aristotle contended that they were

true to the original archetypes. It can be admitted that they are virtually opaque to merely sensual perception. Something keener than mere eye vision is required in the way of a lens. Almost the main purpose of this study is to elaborate and illuminate what kind of vision it is that man must develop in order to read God’s thoughts after him.

Idealists have betrayed the weakness of their contentions throughout the interminable debate by their insistent use of two words in the presentation of their case. These are the adjective mere and the adverb only. Invariably they have spoken of their alleged false appearance of phenomena as "mere appearance," or "only an appearance." In the name of common logic, how can any appearance of objectivity be qualified as mere appearance, or merely an "appearance"? It may be dim or clear, but if it is actual no one has a right to arbitrarily disqualify its actuality by smearing it with the slur of "mere" or "only." The whole debate has been enmired in confusion, but would have been redeemed to rationality and intelligibility if idealists had simply been content to regard phenomena as the appearance of real essences. The entire complexion of the argument would have been changed in the direction of sense and sanity by the omission of "mere" and "only." These two words insinuated the false premises into the syllogism and distorted the comprehensive view of the whole question. Beyond all cavil, the appearance of existential essence is the appearance of real things. If ground for argument remains, it can only be over the question of some alleged falsity in the appearance. But if falsity is alleged and substantiated, it carries implicitly the human verdict that God did not bring his creative ideas out clearly in his cosmic epiphany. Perhaps we can never appreciate adequately the service Aristotle rendered our human culture in his consecrated effort to correct Plato in this crucial item of his "divine philosophy."

Though the scope of our study can not include a survey of the basic principles of a systematic philosophy, it is difficult to elaborate any phase of philosophical truth without a sufficiently synthetic view to fit the particular aspect presented for emphasis into the Gestalt of the picture as a whole. Indeed it is next to impossible to treat luminously of any segment of philosophical truth in severance from the whole context. And certainly our theme of the psychic relation of the soul of man to the world of nature is integrally interwoven with the overall dialectic of God’s purposes in thus committing the seed units of his own psychic being to an involvement in "nature."

To glean some rational understanding of his creative procedure, then, it is necessary to grasp as clearly as may be humanly possible the divine motive back of creation. This of course is almost the basic, the ultimate problem of all philosophy, but much will be gained for enlightenment if the most authoritative envisionment of this segment of philosophy is presented.

Universally the mind of mortals has been haunted and to a degree taunted by the question why God created his universe at all. Religion has continually affirmed that divine Omnipotence was able at all times to dispense for himself the felicity of contemplating the excellence and glory of his own being in his omniscient consciousness. Why, then, did he disturb his static immersion in the peace and bliss of perfect beatitude and exert himself in the prodigious task of populating the area of space with the uncountable hosts of creation? Before this awesome interrogation, the little mind of man stands agape and aghast. In the terms under which we must think of it, he could have chosen to remain in the blessed state of unconditioned being interminably. Yet he chose to end his repose, put bounds to his freedom, and set himself to toil at a task of unthinkable immensity under self-imposed conditions of the most extreme rigidity. This involved not only the exertion of his own tremendous resources of mind and energy, but plunged the hosts of his self-created progeny into the task along

with him. It was in fact through them as his brain cells and his active limbs that he could exert his workmanship in the project. Of infinite and unlimited power and knowledge, he yet put the agencies of his being under limitation. He put himself, so to say, into the harness of physical instrumentalities to bring to pass the marvel of his creative genius. Mutely the mind of man asks--why?

The reflective sagacity of the greatest minds of the race has finally settled upon a determination which is after all a conclusion reached by the simplest and most naive of reasoning processes. If it seems to anthropomorphize omniscient being as a limitlessly magnified personality, and thus to reduce the Almighty to merely expanded human status, it is inevitable if conceptuality is to be expressed in terms meaningful to the human. A truth of the highest revelatory character is embodied in the scriptural statement that God made man in his own image and likeness. It carries the implication that man may, and indeed must, use the principle of analogy with the principles and realities of his own nature as his only available means of adumbrating truth to his understanding. The attempt to utilize principia totally alien to himself would leave him groping in unrelieved darkness. Kant was right in asserting that deep within man’s own interior being and existing a priori reside the norms by which human consciousness can gauge the form and meaning of its experience.

Well then, since the ascription of all power and knowledge to the being of God forbids the mind’s depriving him of total freedom from any external force or compulsion, the uneluctable conclusion is that God engaged in his work of creation through the exercise of his own free will and pleasure. However anthropomorphic it may sound, man’s attempt to analogize the inscrutable motive of the Creator can conceive of no other motive. If man is to adjudge the universal activity by the axiom of like father like son, he must reckon with the traits and characteristics of his own nature to comprehend the nature and behavior of his Father. What does he see in his own life as the pole star of motivation of his every thought and action? He finds his life at every step actuated by a force which overrides all other causes of self-exertion, instinctive and irrational, automatically compelling, and that force he calls pleasure. It is the drive back of all impulsions. When he is most child-like and natural, he will without thought do what he best likes to do. Only when sophistication, due to the hard exigencies of experience, twists his mind to weird tactics of expediency, does he act in contravention of the seductive lure of pleasure. This is his family heritage from his Father, who in doing what delighted him best, bequeathed that same trait to his son.

We have to go back to remoter times to find a people who were sufficiently aware of this principle to have given it a distinctive name. That name was Lila, and it was given by the Hindus. It has been defined as the delight, the pleasure, the recreation, the sport and play of God. Considered in its most exalted state from a religious or spiritual point of view, it is India’s idea of the supreme ecstasy of being--bliss, ananda. Throughout the long and at times painful progress of souls from nescience to glory, it is often submerged, lost, diminished in intensity, or deliberately minimized in value at a given moment with a view to its intensification later on. One renounces a present minor pleasure in the hope of a keener one in prospect. Or one in ignorance or folly violates the terms requisite for its generation and suffers pain instead of pleasure. Nevertheless, through and behind all vicissitude glows the ignis fatuus, the unquenchable fire of the pleasure instinct. It is the electric magic that points the compass of human motive toward the lodestar of that climactic glory that lures man on to his destined home among the gods.

Like man, God, once he had awakened out of his cycle of sleep at the dawn of a new day of conscious activity, refreshed and thrilling with the joy of the

morning, yearned for the vivid exertion of his physical energies. In the rhythmic swing from passivity and dreaming to conscious alertness, he felt the urge and the need for bodily action. He desired the delight in the flexing of his muscles against inertia and opposition. There was work to be done and joy in the anticipation of it. He rejoiced as a strong man to run a race and win a wreath of victory and honor. Life with its challenge and its promise of high rewards lay before him. The thrill of adventure pulsated through his organism; it was the renewal of his youth, the divine compulsion to press forward to life more abundant. His mind teeming with ideas for the building of the cosmos, he was eager to bring his plans to fruition, to throw himself into the work and watch the miracle of his production take shape in finished beauty. And our venerated sacred scriptures do say that after six days of labor he could stand on his hill, survey the work of his hands, and pronounce it good.

The recondite clues that, if apprehended, can lead the mind of man to the basic archai, or principles of understanding by which he can, to the limit of his intellectual capability, rationalize the creation procedure of his cosmic parent, are occultly hidden in the context of the universally operative principle known to physics as polarity. All explanation of phenomena in the creative work must be formulated basically on a knowledge of this principle.

In the night period, or sleeping arc of the cycle of alternating activity and rest, God could not be creative. No man creates (except in the phantasmagoria of dreams) when he is asleep. And no man can create until, in waking state, he can bring the resources of hand on the one side and brain on the other, to cooperate in work. When God is in the sleep state that the Hindus call pralaya, he can not create because these two necessary agencies for work are both in abeyance, because they are then merged back into their primal unity and identity. For purposes of creative exertion, they must be dissociated out of this relationship and set over against each other in a tension of force that makes every activity the result of mutual interaction between them. This tension and opposition is known as polarity. It is the force that brings the universe into manifestation and holds it together. If it was relaxed for an instant, the universe would collapse and disappear. We see minor manifestations of it in gravitation, magnetism, electricity, and the universal evidence of it is seen in the play of the forces of attraction and repulsion. When the two opposing nodes of this tension are in full force, it is seen that one pole is a positively charged energy, the other negatively charged. And when two positively charged objects, or two negatively charged objects, are brought together, they repel each other, while two oppositely charged objects attract each other. When Empedocles, an early Greek philosopher, said that in the world the two forces of Love and Hate contended with each other, he was stating the scientific truth in terms of animism. And when Heraclitus about the same time said that "war is the father of all things," he was not referring to military combat but to this same polar opposition between the positive and negative nodes of the cosmic energy. For it is precisely at the point of engagement between the two potencies that all things are engendered. This great truth is highly revelatory from every angle. It splits the primal unity of being into the operational dichotomy and arrays the two powers against each other in every area of manifestation. For purposes of creation, it is seen to be as necessary as that if a man is to walk he must have two legs instead of but one. God in his unity is condemned to inactivity; if he desires to enjoy the élan of creation, he must bisect his unity so as to bring conscious purposiveness, on the one side, in position to deal with matter on the other. Only when and where the two potencies are locked in "warfare" of their tensional opposition is something new born into existence. Since their union of forces produces new birth, they take title severally to the parenthood of life, the positive dynamic of the polarity being constituted as father, and the negative as mother. Consciousness, mind, spirit on the male side is the

active, aggressive, the generating principle; inertia, matter on the female side is passive, receptive and conservative. By itself consciousness has the business of conceiving, planning and directing the work it designs to accomplish, but it can do nothing to consummate its designs in the world of concrete existence unless it be given necessary tools and materials. Since his own being manifests the dichotomy, both conscious purpose and physical instrumentality are available within the scope of his own constitution. The directing power resides in his mind, his intelligence, his will; the executive agency to accomplish the work is found in his body, the hands primarily. All scriptures speak of the "hand of God" as carrying out the edicts of his creative mind; his hands perform what his mind and will have decreed. His hands have wrought what his mind has thought. By the work of his hands has he formed the world and created the heavens.

This mind and hand become the terms of the polarity in this view. And if mind is always of the positive character, masculine, then hand must be on the negative side and feminine. And such has ancient occult perspicacity invariably rendered it. For it is a surprising fact that in most languages, in spite of the word’s ending in masculine terminations (as manus in Latin, mano in Spanish, cheir in Greek), the word for hand is invariably of the feminine gender. But it is in the semantic representations of the basic archai of truth as found in the literature of ancient Egypt that we have the most startling characterization of the hand in the role and function of the feminine node of the creative dichotomy. The cosmocrator god, personalized in one narrative as Tum or Atum, in another as Kepher, is declared to have created his two children, who became the parents of mankind, from the drops of his blood--meaning his seminal essence--which fell upon the earth from his act of self-creation effectuated by rolling his phallus around in his hand. This symbolism earned for him the title of the "masturbating god." We can spare our squeamishness at the baldness of the conception when we reflect that it presents a perfect and most illuminating allegory of the forces of the first stages of creation emanating directly from the body of deity before polarity was established clear out to the periphery of manifested things when, so to say, polarity was interior and not fully externalized. Yet polarity was already in play to the extent that the hand could fill the role of mother principle, negative to active purpose, and by friction with the bodily symbol of generative source, draw forth the productive seed of future life. The two children of Kepher-Atum thus generated to become the parents of humanity were in one version Hu and Sa, but generally Shu and Tefnut, brother and sister. It is quite exciting, incidentally, to know that the Genesis account of the creation of mankind through its first parentage in Adam and Eve bears the marks of derivation from the primary Egyptian symbolic depiction. As in the Kepher-Atum legend, man was compounded of the blood of the gods and the clay of earth. It is most significant to know that this term Adam initially meant "red earth." Poetry and philosophy have delighted to stigmatize the human body as "mortal clay," and religion has unctuously proclaimed the redemption of man to immortality through the injection into his mortal part of the blood of the Son of God. Egyptian symbolism is vindicated.

It is gratuitous to say that the principle of polarity permeates living existence ubiquitously. More simply it can be said that life can not exist on any other terms. Every living entity can boast of having a north and south magnetic pole, the forces playing between them furnishing the dynamo of its being. This pledges the human mind to the idea that all existence is the product of the conjunction of a unit of conscious force with a material body, the latter being the organism in which the union is localized. If this dialectic is in line with truth, it must be concluded that every living creature must be accredited with sentiency and a soul, however tiny, however feeble.

As Lowell vividly expresses it in The Vision of Sir Launfal--

Every clod feels a stir of might,

An instinct within that reaches and towers,

And groping blindly above it for light,

Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.

Faithful to this conception, the arcane ancient philosophy did not hesitate to categorize the stars of the firmament as living entities, the bodies of the greater and the lesser deities, asserting that humans in the long course of their evolution would become the logoi of solar systems. Every atom is an atom in potency, a future god in potentiality. In organization the atom is a miniature solar system, an epitome of the universe, the microcosmic replica of the macrocosm. And everywhere existence rests upon, springs from and is sustained by the principle of polarity. Life endures only so long as the tension between consciousness and its material embodiment can be maintained.

All this being postulated for purposes of reflection and discourse--and both should enhance the probability of its truth--there is one particular manifestation of the universal principle of polarity on which the present discussion is to be focused. That is the polarization subsisting between the mind and consciousness of man and his objective environment, the world of nature. The dissertation will aim to demonstrate that in the terms and in the potentialities of this phase of the universal law the basic archai, Plato’s archetypal ideas of the cosmic mind, are clearly to be discerned by competent intellectual acuteness, and that such competent study of nature will bring to light the ultimate canons of knowledge. If the human mind and nature constitute the two poles of the duality underlying man’s life, then ultimate truth must be expected to be found at the mid-point of contact where the two are equilibrated.

CHAPTER FOUR

THEISM - DEISM - PANTHEISM

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky.

So was it when my life began,

So let it be when I grow old,

Or let me die!

The child is father of the man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each in natural piety.

It seemed felicitous to introduce this pregnant discussion with Wordsworth’s lyric to an aspect of nature’s charm if only because it gives us the phrase "natural piety." Few have worshipped at nature’s shrine so fervently as did Wordsworth. Her revelation to his mind must have constituted for him the heart and soul of his religion. If there was piety in his attitude toward life, it was inspired and conditioned by the influence of his "contemplation of natural objects."

The effort of man to formulate the principles of his religious experience in systems of theology have given us such codes as those of theism, deism, pantheism, naturalism and humanism, prefaced largely by primitive forms of animism. Atheism might be included. Ideas wavered between polytheism and monotheism. It will be instructive to consider the comparative claims of theism, deism, and pantheism, as they reflect man’s thought at its highest competence.

In briefest form of definition, theism affirms that God created the universe over patterns of his cosmic thought and supervises its operation from his point of transcendence somewhere at the summit of creation, either that he wound up the universal mechanism and let it run by the power he injected into it by his initial thrust, or keeps his hand constantly on the levers of control. Deism holds that he deployed his mental and physical energies in the construction of the universe and poured them into the organic structure as the soul of man pours its energies into his body, his mentality and dynamism permeating every portion of the organism at all times. Pantheism stands on much the same ground, but has been accused of claiming that the physical structure of the universe embraces the whole of God’s being, that God is no greater than his universe. Theism repudiates it because it seems to limit God to his physical manifestation in this one act of creation. As man is conceived to be a power above and beyond his body, so theism avers that God is a power above and beyond the universe, if that is considered to be his body. Deism asserts that God is present in the totality of worlds and therefore the question of his transcendence is irrelevant. Confined more particularly to the life of man than to that of the world, humanism postulates that whatever deific power is in evidence in man’s life is comprehended in and exercised by man himself. He is not a puppet to be manipulated by a deus ex cathedra. He contains within himself the potential, if not the immediate power, to advance his own life to its highest possibility. This puts it in sharp antithesis to theism. Theism tends to cut man’s life out of the order of physical nature, in fact in its Christian expression, directly aims to effectuate this severance as the means of man’s final apotheosization. Deism and pantheism would hold any such transformation of his being as the culmination

merely of the course of the natural evolution of which man is an integral portion and a product.

The origin of divergence of opinion and the confusion in which the entire debate has been thus involved are chiefly due to the misinterpretation and misconceptions introduced by Christian theology into the purview. It was due to an unbalanced application of the relation of the two constitutive elements of our nature, the natural element on our bodily side and the spiritual element on the side of soul. When Christian mentality lost sight of the principle of polarity, it mistook the functional beneficence of the warfare of opposites for an overt hostility of the negative pole to the positive and heaped upon matter and the flesh the stigma of enmity to the god, whether in man or in transcendence.

A study of Christian history discloses the portentous fact that the concept of the "malignancy of matter," coming into the movement from Hinduism through Zoroastrianism, became an influence overwhelmingly dominating the theology and the ethic. It bred the monstrous cult of asceticism, whose driving motivation was the idea that the instincts of the flesh must be crushed down in the interests of the spirit. Instead of holding the body in salutary relation to the soul, as nature’s means of giving the dual parental function of the two their chance to bring to birth the true Christ child in the physical body as its womb and cradle, Christianity tore the two natures violently apart and set the bodily pole in enmity against its positive twin. The opposition of function, all beneficent, was mistaken for the opposition of evil against good, or God.

The tragic consequence of this staggering default of insight are incalculable, but in all conscience overwhelming to any intelligence that discerns it. It lay the Christian mind open to the obsession of a psychological influence that has been nothing less than devastating to sanity, inflicting upon the psyche a trauma that has produced morbidity and crushed to a degree the natural instinct for human happiness. John Dewey has pronounced this supposititious enmity between man natural and man spiritual, rather between man total and his God, as the most deadly dichotomy in the mental life of mankind. George Santayana has re-echoed the accusation in forceful language. Nietzsche cursed it in the most vitriolic terms he could find. Surely the most naive intuition of reason should have averted the debacle from the simplest intimation that God would not thrust his children out of heaven and lodge them in fleshly bodies which would at the same time become the instruments of their ruin. Yet this fatuous misconception is almost fundamental in Christian systematism. By confronting the soul with the necessity of deploying its divine potential through the effort to maintain its balance with the inertia of matter, God did house these child-souls of his own being in mortal bodies. They could not become gods in their own right unless they became masters of the physical forces over which, as gods, they would have to rule. Mastery could be achieved only by a long struggle--Jacob wrestling all night with the angel--with the polar opposition of matter, which should never have been mistaken for an evil element, when it was in fact the spirit’s own twin.

One of the most lamentable consequences of this debacle has been that the dominance of the Christian influence has tended to inhibit the spontaneous interest of mind in nature and has therefore delayed for centuries the exercise of mind in its instinctive bent to divine the secrets and the message which nature might have imparted to Western intelligence so much earlier. Obsessed religiously with the persuasion that nature was an evil influence, inevitably there was never that intense motive to fathom her depths of meaning that natural piety would have inspired. The theological contempt for nature discouraged the consecration and enthusiasm that are the requirements for felicitous adventure in such an enterprise. The advance of Occidental culture has been immeasurably

retarded in consequence.

Never in the corpus of our revered scriptural tradition bequeathed to us from a sagacious antiquity has there been wanting the forthright averment that the life and mind of the creator pervades and animates his fabricated universe to its remotest range and its inmost heart. In no part or particle of its extent or its essence is it bereft of God’s life-giving presence. "The earth is full of the glory of the Lord," sings the psalmist of old. "The world is full of gods," echoes Thales of early Greece. "God is present in all his parts, in every moss and cobweb," chants the American Emerson. What Wordsworth meant by his "natural piety" was just the worshipful recognition of this ubiquitous pervasion of the body and life of nature by the energy and mind of God. And if this unction of divinity could be felt as present and at work in the outer world of nature, far more assuredly was it to be recognized as the leaven of divinely exalted spirit fermenting in the consciousness of man. "There is no part of me that is without god," solemnly asserts the character representing the divine element in our human nature in the Egyptian pantheon. Likewise the sacred writings of the Hindus repeat the declaration of the sovereign Lord that, although he remains total and undiminished in the core of his being above and beyond the range of his physical embodiment in the world, nevertheless he constantly impregnates the universe with a portion of his omnipotence. The creation is steeped in the essence of being, is saturated with the life of God.

Since this conviction was so general an acceptance of philosophical thought, it was bound to give rise to the question whether there could be a parallel between the order of nature and the processes and character of human thought. Gerald Massey, an English Egyptologist of the late nineteenth century, in his penetrating analyses of the Egyptian religious conceptions, wisely observes that there is a near identity of connotation in the words think and thing. For things in the objective world, if they and their world was to have meaning at all, must have been the product of a thinking process somehow under or behind it. It seemed obviously logical to assume that, as before stated, the mind of God must first have thought what his hands later wrought. Things must have been designed and must bear the impress of their primal thought patterns.

There thus emerged upon the open field of philosophical reflection the basic question: Does the universe express the operation of mind? Is it the product of intelligence and also an intelligence working purposively? Again two schools of thought arose to take issue over this problem, as was the case over the question whether reality was purely noumenal or purely material. Those who predicated the presence of providential design in the structure and order of the universe pointed to a thousand striking, even astonishing, evidences that mind had ordered the processes of nature for obvious and beneficent ends. But the mechanists countered with the contention that the appearance of purposiveness in the natural order was a fabrication of the mind of the observer and was imposed gratuitously upon nature, an importation from outside the physical order, not a revelation from it itself. It is simply, they said, the insistence of our minds in reading design into the course of natural phenomena. Is the world itself a logical structure and process? Or do we, as Kant so strongly asserted, comprehend it according to the patterns of our formal logic? Was it God in the beginning or is it we now who infused logic into the system of nature? It is a momentous question, and its issues are serious for the world of human understanding. Religionists, idealists, moralists, fervently cling to the positive asseveration of the presence and operation of providential design in the life of the world; materialists as obstinately refuse to read purpose and direction into the order.

Preponderantly, however, philosophers have inclined to explain the world as the product of a universal mind-intelligence, directed to benign purpose. Naive mentality when not corrupted by sophistication has been generally impressed, almost subconsciously, by the evidence of omnipresent intelligent direction and set purpose. Erudite philosophers labored at the task of arraying the evidence for design in terms more scientifically substantiated.

The negative position does not lack a formidable body of supporting data on its side. Instead of finding nature a universally kindly and tender mother of all species, carefully shielding all her teeming hordes of living creatures for their happiness and their comfort, close study of her methods reveals the most shocking and terrifying disregard for her multitudinous progeny. Like God slaughtering the enemies of his children Israel in the Old Testament by the thousands, she ruthlessly slays her families in prodigious slaughter. She permits one species to live by consuming another as food, only to be consumed as food in turn by a more powerful ravager. She is inconceivably prodigal of seed production for renewal of life, but enormously and pitilessly wasteful of it. Millions of seeds perish that perchance one may find rootage and survive. Materialists cite these and other facts in refutation of the claims of beneficent design.

But in spite of such considerations, theorists in the main incline to hold to the predication of purpose in the scheme of things. The ruthlessness of nature is itself cited as evidence of a methodology in the process that is designed to promote the advance of life more rapidly. And there is an inclination also to mitigate for our sensitivity of feeling the repulsiveness of the internecine slaughter among the lower species by the reflection that nature herself has means of anesthetizing the pain of death for the orders preyed upon by the stronger. A whale at one gulp consumes a thousand smaller sea creatures, and it is not likely that her dinner comes at the tab of a thousand agonies. That nature sacrifices lower orders for the advantage of higher ones does not rule out beneficent design, especially when investigation views the whole process of evolving life in a longer perspective.

Then again it has to be asked whether we can legitimately expect nature to demonstrate her aims exactly in accordance with tests we would impose as definite evidence of design. After all, are we capable of passing judgment upon her work and her ways? She is demonstrably far wiser than we, her children. Our scriptures pointedly remind us that for us the ways of God are past finding out. "High as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my thoughts above your thoughts," the deity admonishes us. So philosophy has proceeded with great caution toward a positive conclusion as to the teleological intent of nature.

Yet it seems permissible that we may go at least as far as the assumption that she is bent on doing what, by close observation, we see that she obviously is doing. We would certainly seem forbidden to judge that she has made the millions of vast and tiny adaptations that spell advantage to all creatures without having intended to win that advantage for them. Our little minds are staggered by the special little inventions, stratagems, provisions, arrangements, even distinct organs, which we find operative in the lives of virtually every one of millions of both her mammoth and minuscule living hordes. The study of natural history confronts us with such sensational evidence of planned schemes, even to the extent of one creature setting a bait outside or inside a trap to catch another creature for its food--the pitcher plant, the Venus fly-trap, the spider, the doodle-bug, numberless similar devices--that we are forced to concede that there truly seems to be no nook or corner in the whole natural realm where intelligence is not visibly at work. A thousand instances are observed, in which, when a species was subjected to some change in the condition of its

environment, it met the crisis by a new stratagem, much the same as we humans are now countering the threat of atomic missile with an anti-missile. So multitudinous are these instances of at least rudimentary intelligence throughout the entire realm of living nature, that it is difficult to imagine how the old materialist theory which grounded itself on the chance jumbling of the atomic billiard-ball particles as the origin of world phenomena ever could be held by thinking men. It has been discarded generally, yet incredibly it has some supporters still.

Several considerations would seem to refute it finally and absolutely. It set itself adamantly against the concession of intelligence in the order and processes in nature. Even Darwin’s formulas, natural selection and the survival of the fittest, seemed to make evolution intelligible without postulating the presence and operation of mind. The atomic billiard balls or marbles simply were opportunists and seized upon every chance circumstance that appeared to be favorable to betterment or offered advantage. But this one word, advantage, along with favorable and betterment, or similar terms, would seem in itself alone to strike the death-knell of the materialist hypothesis. For such terms are meaningless in relation to something that lacks consciousness and some modicum of intelligence. Conditions around a stone, we must insist, can mean nothing in the way of advantage or disadvantage to it. A billiard ball would not know what would constitute "betterment" for it. How could one situation be more "favorable" to it than another? Without conscious sensitivity, it could take no advantage of things and conditions that chance presented. Thus the materialist thesis was guilty of postulating, as a basic premise of its reasoning, the fact of purposiveness as evidently present in the present outcome of natural processes, while denying it in the operation. That is, if things worked out, as obviously they have done, to the advantage of life in virtually every quarter of its developed status, so that it is possible to speak of a gain, a better status, a higher development at all in a later stage of the process over an earlier stage, how is it logically permissible to introduce the concept of advantage as displayed in the present or the end product when it was categorically excluded from the process at the beginning? The materialist position thus surreptitiously introduces such considerations as advantage, favorableness, improvement, at some undetermined point along the way, in spite of having excluded them rigidly from the start. How could an order of activity that lacked any capability to determine advantage from disadvantage gain the power to do so at any time? That is the fatal flaw in the old materialistic contention. The controversy must end with the realization that purposiveness could never arise out of purposelessness. How could mindlessness develop the patent and multitudinous evidences of mind action? There must have been intelligence present in all natural operation from the start and throughout the course, or there could be none present now. Blank and blind unconsciousness could appreciate no advantage. If "chance" movements in the flux of things presented situations that could be turned to advantage, there had to be intelligence present to recognize and appreciate the good fortune. Thus we can go with the ancient sages who declared that the universe was pervaded and animated and ordered by mind. Without the capability to respond to the challenge of conditions, there could be no such thing as evolution or even growth; and without mind, there could not even be a response. If matter was not initially permeated by potential mind, it could generate it at no later stage. Modern refinements of the evolution theory have established the principle that no process is capable of unfolding anything as end product that was not germinally in it from the beginning. If matter was not rudimentarily pregnant with mind from the start, it could never have developed it.

Then in larger view, it is convincingly evidenced that the course of evolution reveals certain patterns which bespeak the play of intelligence and design. As hinted a moment ago, are we not permitted to assume that what we clearly see

life is doing in nature is what it aimed to do? A person may build better than he knows or intended, but hardly nature. Can we not give nature credit with knowing what she is doing? It is beyond all reason to think that the ever-astonishing marvel of adaptability, order and beauty in the external world could have been the chance occurrence of mindlessness. The materialist thesis asks us to believe that if you knock billiard balls around long enough, they will get mad and begin to think. If materialism is to be accepted, it must be on such idiotic terms.

In dealing with the atomistic theory in his special form of monadology, the German philosopher Leibnitz saw the irrationality involved in the thing in its baldest state and was led to endow the single units of existence with an intelligence potential. His theory pointed more or less directly to the concept now being entertained that the monads carrying the life force are themselves units of an energy that may be itself the energy of mind, and not matter--in the old conception--at all. The monads, he said, looked out through a window in its structure, and seeing what was going on about it, used its inherent intelligence to determine how it should act in the jumble of things. By thus acting in response to conditions around it, it developed potential awareness into conscious faculty, first through sheer feeling, sensation, then through the faint flicker of thought in response. Thus out of primeval chaos came cosmos. Life, mind, purpose could never have emerged from prima materia to which was denied the conscious potential. If life and mind are born of matter, it could not have been from "dead" matter, but from living matter. Well did the scriptures admonish us to go to the ant, consider her ways and be wise. For as we watch the economy of life in a nest of ants or a community of bees, we see these tiny creatures demonstrating a perfectly amazing schematic program and pattern of behavior. How can we avoid concluding that there is cosmos in the total world when we see that there is rudimentary intelligence in every constituent element of it?

With the presence of mind in the universe accepted as a necessity conclusion of reason, reflection inevitably spurs philosophical thought to pose the question whether there is a kinship, parallelism or identity between the order and harmony of mind action in nature and the order and harmony of thought in the mind of man. The task of dealing with this question takes us into the heart of our theme.

CHAPTER FIVE

KINSHIP OF MIND WITH NATURE

Deeply involved in the thought effort of philosophy generally, the relation of the mind of man to the mind power clearly evidenced in the phenomenal course of nature has absorbed the interest of thinkers at all times. Are the two akin and how closely? If the operations of both seem to show identity, are they the products of the same source? Do they work on the same principles? And how was a harmony of this sort established in the first place? If the harmony is ascertained to be quite close and complete, would it not go far to indicate that man and the natural world were alike products of the same generic power?

It was again the German Leibnitz who ventured to solve the matter by asserting that such a harmony had been established by God, the creator of both man and nature, in the beginning. He declared that such a harmony was pre-established, a natural result of the creational fiat, whose work included nature and then man in the same organic production. It seemed reasonable to suppose that man, presumably the highest branch on the tree of natural life, would have brought to its highest state of development and brilliance that same consciousness which had functioned but dimly in the first stages of biological evolution. If this was the proper view, the mind powers in man at his present stage would in effect be the same as those that function in the world of nature now, with only the difference that they have by now unfolded their incipient potential to vastly greater perfection.

On this thesis it would be legitimate to say that the relation of the two minds, that of nature and that of man, is even closer than that of a parallelism or a harmony, being essentially that of identity, with the difference being only that of degree of unfoldment of primal capability. Greek philosophy cherished this view of the relationship, because Greek thought held man to be indigenous to the natural order. But when Christianity carried the revolt against paganism to extreme limits, it tore man out of his context in the life of nature, and opened out a vast theological gulf between the two minds, making mutual exchange impossible and obliterating traces of the kinship. In fact it set the Christian mind apart in bitterest hostility to the mind of nature. The dire effects have been historically observed, though never adequately estimated.

But the instinctive affinity between man and nature is so deeply grounded in reality that the ostracism of the concept from the domain of religion could by no means inhibit the spontaneous play of the genius of man in sensitive response to its intimations. If not discerned consciously at the intellectual level, it was sensed, now vaguely, now distinctly, through the channels of philosophical reflection, artistic and esthetic sensitivity and above all by poetic fancy and imagination. It is hardly too strong an assertion to say that it has been the deepest soul of poetry. It has been a veritable fount of inspiration for the loftiest exaltations of the poetic genius, the motif of the highest soarings of the human spirit into realms of man’s realization of his kinship with the whole of life and mind. It might be said with truth that throughout the history of poetry, it was the minds that had sunk their roots deepest into the world of nature that rose to the greatest heights of vision and intuition. It was as if a mirage reflecting the earth and its scenic phenomena could now and again be discerned in the skies of abstract contemplation. It seldom ceased to haunt, to captivate, to elevate the truth-seeking mind. It seemed to generate almost a mental clairvoyance of metaphysical verities.

It took minds aloft to visions of truth in moments of psychic illumination. Hardly less brilliantly has it worked in the domain of philosophical reflection than in the field of poetry. It has stimulated the contemplative mind to the most luminous discernments of truth and insights into reality that have ever lighted up the area of our human intelligence, as glimpses of this unity of the mind and nature have fleshed into view.

Vision at such high altitude seldom failed to engender the assurance that the truth sensed by thought and truth mirrored in nature were one and the same; that there was no one code of verity for the world and another, disparate and heterogeneous, for the human mind. If the two were the products of the same generic system, their affinity could hardly be doubted. The same tree could not bear two different kinds of fruit. But the fruit might be observed at different stages of its growth, as bud, as blossom, as green core, as luscious ripe perfection. And the sapience of arcane ancient philosophy had averred that it had subsisted in the womb of time and being first as sheer consciousness, as archetypal idea, then was thrust out into existential manifestation in the external world. And the outcome of this predication could be nothing less than the momentous revelation that, if the germinal noumenal form and the one extruded out into the world were two stages or aspects of the same thing, then there could be no question of their "harmony," since in ultimate essence they were one and the same thing.

But, sadly enough, this recognition has not been taken beyond the stage of haunting, enticing, momentarily illuminating envisioning in the mirror of mystical sensibility. It has never been grasped with keen intellectual discernment, never apprehended in the vast sweep of its significance, never recognized as the one ineluctable ground-base of all truth, the one final canon of veritude. It has never been brought down bodily out of the skies of poetic afflation to be organized into a full-fledged authentic science, dually and impregnably buttressed by the most invincible logic of mind on the one side, and the unassailable evidence of living nature on the other. The sporadic glimpses and flashes of the relation never could gather substantiality enough to furnish the material for that complete polarization of the two sides in a consummative synthesis. Never had the vision of the unity, integrity and continuity of the accord between the objective and subjective sides of the equation been steadily enough held in the philosophic purview to solidify the sense of its overwhelming and indisputable certitude. Some thinkers have come close to the achievement, possibly including Aristotle, Plotinus, Schelling and Hegel, the Egyptologist Gerald Massey, Swedenborg, Emerson and perhaps many obscure "philosophers of homespun wisdom." The poetic genius has always been edging toward it. Intimations of its force, even when not intellectually recognized, suffused the idyllic imagination of poets and mystics with shadowy gleams of its presence. Where else could lively fancy go, if it would strikingly portray the loftiest sensings of mind and soul and give expression to the elations of the spirit over the beauty and the glory of the world, if not to the beauty and the wonder of the miracle that God had put on display in the world without? Many minds had felt the reality of the relationship and had stated it as a basic principle of truth again and again. But never has it been formally organized, its fundamental principles systematically formulated and applied, and their overall authority and universal validity established, to be enthroned in the world of mind as the sovereign monarch of truth. It has been left a more or less scintillating mirage of philosophy and poetry, never organically constituted as the science of final understanding, the seal of all intuition and revelation, the vindication of faith and the sanction of all spiritual religion. It so brightens the lens of vision that the picture of truth and reality, dim and indistinct before, leaps at once from obscurity into clarity.

A survey of the place and influence of this concept in world philosophy can hardly fail to be a profitable and engaging undertaking. The testimony bearing on it from noted thinkers is too vast to be marshaled in more than token quantity. The deeper reflection has gone into the investigation, the clearer and more cogent has become the conviction that the human mental processes started from nature, began with and departed from the external physical world and proceeded thence toward the realm of pure ideation and abstraction. Kant made a heroic effort to open up a world of transcendence, in which thought could unfold its own principia completely detached from and uninfluenced by concrete objectivity. He called it the world of the reine Vernunft, "pure" reason. The mind, he affirmed, formulated the rules by which the phenomena of the world could be rated, judged and made meaningful. It, so to say, threw a harness upon the objective scenario of things so that they could be drawn into the realm of understanding. But while the form and scheme of understanding was to be provided by these "categories" of our mind, the substance of the understanding was always provided by nature. How things were to be understood was the function of the faculty provided by the God-given genius of man; what was to be understood was offered by nature. The resultant interaction of the two elements involved the question whether the harness must be constructed to fit the shape of things in the outer world, or the external things so ordered as to settle commodiously into the harness. The history of philosophy reveals the valiant efforts of one vigorous mind after another to construct the harness that would completely and snugly give the mind the power to draw the perfect truth out of the things of the world. Objectivity proved to be a stubborn reality, recalcitrant to theory; and by and large it has been found that the subjective harness has to conform to the shape of outer things often in defiance of the rules of logic.

It is a fact of great significance, though not accorded its due recognition even in Indian thought, that the basic literature of one of the profoundest religio-philosophical systems in the world--the Hindu--stands grounded in nature. The great Vedas of India consist largely of mantrams and formulas that hold religious cultism in immediate relation to nature. Clearly the motif of this epic document sought to express its message of an integral affinity subsisting between the human mind and the outer world. If cult rites and ceremonial forms, as here obviously, were designed to associate man in a closeness of kinship with the external reality, the cult practice must have been inspired by a deep insight into this fundamental interdependence. It was as if man must still be nursed in the lap of the great mother who gave him birth and blessed him with her ministrations. It is questionable whether the best acumen of the Hindu mind has at any later time grasped the key significance of the nature lore of the Vedas. For the later development of the systematism founded on them has soared to so high a pitch of detachment and abstraction from the interests of earth and body that it has severed all direct linkage with its natural ground and has lost itself in transcendental sublimations of consciousness. The central drive of Hindu thought affected to disdain earth altogether, seeking release from mundane duress in the heavens of contentless and unconditioned being.

There is happily increasing evidence, however, that the greatest of modern Hindu thinkers, notably Sri Aurobindo and Radhakrishnan, have sought to amend this bent of India’s philosophy and restore its pristine connection with nature. Both have insisted that Indian speculation never really sundered its connection with its rootage in the earth. The primary teaching was that the universe is impregnated with divine mind and that man’s association with nature is the salutary source of hi