CHAPTER FIFTEEN

FIRST THAT WHICH IS NATURAL

The work up to this point has been a fairly scrutinizing survey of the general theses of the idealist-mystical-monistic philosophy. The treatment has been fairly comprehensive and exhaustive, and it has brought the force of considerable high authority in philosophical world thought to bear upon the pertinent issues in support of the severe strictures enunciated against the extravagances of the mystical position. It is felt, however, that the crucial determination involved in the study will wield such potent influence in shaping the future fortunes of humanity, now that the great message of the Orient has reached over to touch and vitally affect the positive and energetic life of the West, that a still more searching inspection of the massive inculcations of Eastern subjective and negative persuasions about our life is eminently in point. The meeting of Hindu thought structures with the Occidental mind is doubtless the most momentous phenomenon manifesting in the world of ideology today, and unquestionably the most crucial issues hinge upon the outcome of the fusion. If left unchallenged by a competent critique, there is the imminent possibility that the invasion of Oriental passivism and pessimism into the psychic life of the West may palsy and cast over its thought area the pall of fatalism and lethalistic resignation. Historic tragedy might all too easily flow from the deadening influences of thought formulas minimizing the value of the physical life and material interests.

A philosophy that frankly stands on a denial of any and all value to the earthly life for man is without hesitation to be considered a deadly menace to all incentive and the will to accomplish notable things for the upliftment of world life. There is abundant warrant, then, to justify as piercing an inspection of the principles at stake as it is possible to give them. The portion of the work so far done can well stand as "introduction" to a further and deeper analysis of pivotal elements of the Hindu philosophy. The treatment so far has been somewhat cursory; the great questions must be more thoroughly canvassed.

As the solid achievements of rationalistic effort gain in validity and the slow but empirically substantial progress is registered in

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psychology, the vast area of wild free pietistic, mystic and emotional religion is by so much curtailed, and the area of "scientific" causation and natural rationale extended. The possibility is not negligible that the tremendous extension of the field of human motivation into one area of the "unconscious" phase of the psyche in man may provide some firm ground for a critique of India's negative and nihilistic attitudes not available before. Even a "snap" judgment on the validity of Hindu philosophies, arrived at by purely external and earthly standards, would seem prima facie to indicate that Hindu thought tears Indian life far away from wholesome relation to the life of the world, the body and nature. It might be said that one can see by merely looking that Indian life is "in the world, but not of it," to an extraordinary degree. Indian thought, seared deep upon the Indian consciousness by ages of uninhibited traditional bent, has made Indian life almost alien to the warm friendly embrace of mother earth and her beneficent influences, which the Egyptians and the Greeks imbibed so deeply and refreshingly. Scorned and trodden under foot by Hindu mentality, mother earth has had her own karmic requital in refusing the abundance of her agricultural bounty to sustain the half-starved Hindu body.

The great issue is whether the Oriental subjectivism and detachment from the concerns of physical existence that is sweeping so surreptitiously into Western religion is salutary or deleterious. It is the obligation of Western studentship to weigh the problem and evaluate its issues by the norms of the best intelligence available. So our work so far may be considered to be a formulation of the principles on which a more exhaustive critique could be based.

A lengthy citation from R. Wilhelm, with Jung's endorsement, presented earlier in the study emphasized the menace of the invasion of Oriental thought in the West. Probably the Occident's best defense against the insidious thrusts of the unearthly metaphysics of India is to be found in the robust use of the mind, the intellect. Perhaps sensing this as an obstacle to its encroachments on the West, the Eastern movement comes directly armed with a weapon to countervail against it,--the negation and disqualification of the mind. For incessantly it cries the incompetence of the mind to lead us into truth. This is what led Wilhelm to say that Eastern philosophy creeps in upon us by the back door of the

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"unconscious." The alleged supramental faculty called intuition is to supplant the mind. In fact it is alleged to supervene only after one has destroyed his mind faculty.

To envisage the peril to Western balance of mind from the Orient, knowledge of a startling fact in the history of Indian thought is itself of the greatest importance. From consideration of it is gained an understanding of the source and nature of the evil influence exerted upon us by a philosophy which in the light of this item is seen to be a melange of misconceptions and distortions of primal wisdom. It is fortunate that the authority for the statement of historical fact is himself one of the two foremost philosophers of India, the eminent Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. But before introducing his pronouncement a background against which his statement will be silhouetted in sharper outline must be set up.

India proudly cites her heritage of the ancient religious books known collectively as the Vedas. They unquestionably are of remote and supremely exalted source of recondite intelligence. They are one of the greatest treasures of a divine or semi-divine authorship vouchsafed to the race of men on the earth in the earlier days of the race's history. They purvey a wisdom so profound, a spirituality so lofty as to seem worthy of veneration by all mankind. Putting on display a knowledge of things cosmic, divine and earthly in an organic synthesis, they sound out a message that seems to transcend the normal range of purely human intelligence. Either beings evolved beyond the human order, or surpassingly evolved men of our own humanity were the authors of these sage documents. They internally carry their own credentials of supernal authenticity, their own ostensible evidence of consummate wisdom.

From the Vedas stem and on them are based the various religious and philosophical systems of India. With impeccable wisdom as their authority, the systems of Hindu religion started out facing the grand opportunity to lead, enlighten and inspire the world. (With a somewhat similar foundation in another deposit of ancient literature, the Hebrews presumed to provide the saving culture for the entire human family.) But alas! the dire fatality that has fallen like a blight upon every high primeval body or movement of exalted religion overtook and overwhelmed the Vedic wisdom of India. It has supervened in the historic course of every noble religion, Chinese, Hindu, Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew,

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Christian. These faiths emanated from or as the teachings of near-divine intelligence. They express cryptically, allegorically, mystically the highest conceptions and the most sublimated elevations of the human consciousness in understanding and in feeling. But, triste dictu, the effort to disseminate their rich legacy of truth and edification amongst the people at large has in every case brought the same disastrous result. The gallant ship of spiritual truth was dashed to wreckage on the ugly reefs of stolid dullness of intellect and souls as yet barren of any divine susceptibility to elevated mystical values. Every splendid system of truth and moral purity passed through the heavy mill of popular conceptuality and came out as hash unpalatable to any more discriminating digestion. In every age only a few were able to make their way through the rubbish heap of unconscionable beliefs that sprang into vogue through the crude concretization of every spiritual intuition and the ignorant historization of spiritual drama, and recover the lost keys of mystical ennoblement and intellectual understanding. Over the whole area of common thought there reigned the chaos of gross misconception and arrant credulity, enslaving the minds of millions under the force of artificial and grotesque ideas that, consciously or unconsciously, set up neurotic conflict in all psychic experience. Even in our twentieth century and before the titanic world holocausts of war, the psychologist Jung was impelled to say that Europe was a madhouse, the reasons given being the philosophical meaninglessness of life, from which came aimlessness of plan or purpose. It is legitimate and according to fact to assert that the literalized misinterpretation of ancient Scriptures has in large measure derationalized the world mind, more particularly perhaps the extravert West, but very extensively, too, the East. The stupid mechanization of Scriptural meaning was perhaps at its grossest in the West; but the East, moving in the direction away from the physical and worldly side, lost wholesome contact with reality altogether, or dissolved reality into vacuous tenuity. In the one case the ethereal essence of conceptual reality hardened into lifeless realism; in the other it was sublimated to such thinness and volatility that it pretty nearly disappeared like wisps of vapor in the empty area of consciousness. In both cases it contorted life out of harmonious relation with its environment and wasted precious evolutionary time in misdirected human effort.

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Radhakrishnan's strong statement can now be received with the full force of its momentous significance. Also it will be seen to corroborate the analysis of the historical situation just outlined to explain it. Here it is (the italics ours):

"The Upanishads were a sealed book to the people at large. Their teaching was lost in a jumbled chaos of puerile superstitions."

Here, in spiritual India, is the dolorous picture that will be found redrawn in every ancient civilization. It is the disheartening scenario of sublime truth, vouchsafed by divine intelligence, but now traduced by human ignorance to wretched superstition. It is the saddening spectacle of heavenly light obscured to near darkness in the dim chambers of the unenlightened human mind. The glowing wisdom of the Upanishads had been dimmed to the opaque forms of low opinion and impossible credulities of ritual and magic.

But a note of ringing significance is struck by Radhakrishnan when he says that "in the Vedas the vast order and movement of nature engages attention. Their gods represent cosmic forces. In the Upanishads we return to explore the 'depths of the inner world.'"

If this is the truth, there is seen to be in the relation of these two great literary products a principle that perhaps has escaped due recognition. The two productions then stand ostensibly as expressions respectively of the two phases through which life in manifestation itself always passes, the natural and the intellectual or reflective, crowned finally with the spiritual and the intuitional. The childhood period is, as it were, passed in the natural world and at its level; the adult or mature period is spent at the level and in the interests of the mind. Life lays the foundations in nature and later erects on them the building of conscious intelligence and the extended evolution of mind powers. "First that which is natural, then that which is spiritual," is the way St. Paul states it. He emphasizes that the first is not the spiritual, but the natural. The natural is the John Baptist who comes to prepare the way for the advent of mind, the Christos. Jung divides our life into the two periods of thirty-five years each, the first being given to the growth and maturing of the body and the making its place of security in the physical world. The second runs the course of development of purpose in relation to a philosophical understanding of life's whole

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meaning--"years that bring the philosophic mind," as Wordsworth phrases it.

If the Vedas deal more specifically with nature, it is an item of utmost moment. And if the Upanishads take the Vedic material into the realm of the highest spiritual conceptuality, it increases the momentousness of both items. The two aspects indicate that the Vedas proclaimed the universe of nature to be the crystallized structure of the cosmic mind-forms, and the Upanishads were then the abstraction of the principles of being found adumbrated in nature and their application to the rational life of humans. If the order and harmony of nature was, or was to be, paralleled by the order and harmony of human thought, the Vedas were at pains to delineate that order, and the Upanishads to parallel it in human ideation. The Vedas drew the first line of the parallel, the Upanishads ran the other. The first line ran through nature, its parallel ran through mind. Egypt had always portrayed abstract truth over the imagery of nature. It looked outside to find in the natural order the certifying analogue of every mental conception, of every law and principle. A correspondence revealed an identity; a parallel led to the perception of a paralogue. The analogy of reason with nature was discerned, and as man has to proceed from the known, the visible, to the unknown and invisible, his mental unfoldment rested on and began with nature. What he observed and learned from nature in his early contacts with her manifold forms, would be utilized later as the paradigms of his knowledge formulations. The life of the insect, the plant, the action of the elements, the flow of the stream, the dart of lightning and sweep of the rain, the movements of sun and moon, the mysteries of the seed, the flower and fruit, would all enlighten his mind with an insight into life's modes and laws. An isolated phenomenon in field or forest bespoke a universal principle. The universe is proclaiming and demonstrating its norms of procedure on every hand at every moment. Summer's life and winter's death told the same wonder-story from two opposite sides.

That the Vedas likewise rested on nature seems to be inferred from the philosopher's statement. Then came the Upanishads, the mind's adopting and employing the logic of natural verity to architecturalize the structures of thought. The mental realm was governed by the logical counterpart of the physical regime. The spirit-

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ual law was valid in the natural world, the natural law in the spiritual, for it was the same law operating at the two levels. Its operation in the noumenal world would prefigure its operation in the phenomenal. It was invisible in the one, visible in the other.

That nature must embody and manifest the immanence of the divine mind is certified by what is said in the Upanishads. There it is stated that the God of life created matter by his will and deposited in it a seed to become the golden germ out of which he himself was born as the generation in new form of a portion of himself not yet existent and self-conscious. If his spirit and mind were thus the very life-germ of the creation, then the world in process of creation would be the unfolding expression of his cosmic being. So far from being a soulless inanimate automaton of physical forces, nature was the expression of the very mind of the deity who had veiled himself in matter for the purpose of bringing to birth his powers latent in the seed. Study nature and one will read the cosmic mind unfolding its thoughts. Exulting in his powers made actual in nature, the Lord cries: "I am Hiranyagarbha, the Supreme, of Himself become manifest in the form of Hiranyagarbha." In similar exultation the soul of cosmic life in Egypt exclaimed: "I die; and I am born again; and I renew myself; and I grow young each day." Can nature be dumb, or is it we who are dumb to nature, when she is pronouncing in every form and gesture the ineffable word of God? How fatuous for us to turn from it in disdain as being too low for our attention, too dead for our instruction!

The parallelism of nature and mind underwrites the true Eastern doctrine of the essential unity of subject and object in consciousness. This identity of the noumenal and phenomenal is not a vague hypothesis, but the necessary foundation of all religious thinking, feeling and willing. Nature not only matches man's inner logos, but ministers to his needs and accommodates herself to his habitudes. Her rhythms tally with man's; her day matches his day of working activity; her night lulls him to restorative sleep. Her phases supply him with inspiration and incentive, as she reflects his own moods and ideas. Nature, says Radhakrishnan, summons us to the spiritual reality of life and answers the needs of the soul. Nature is formed, vitalized and moved by the same spirit that is thrusting itself eagerly out to manifestation in man. This oneness of subject and object, their unity in an overshadowing Brahman, has been

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the midrib doctrine of the great religious philosophies. The soul must regain her lost awareness that the outer nature is kin to her.

Mind evolution goes pari passu with body evolution; higher powers of thought must have more highly evolved bodies to channel them. The vast body of the world is the host, so to say, of the world mind. Alexander Pope's famous couplet expresses this conception:

All things consist of one stupendous whole,

Of which the body nature is, and God the soul.

The Hindus called the mind of the universe Hiranyagarbha, the world soul. The total consciousness of all effects is the awareness of Hiranyagarbha. Until the effects of its mentation are outwardly manifest, the operations of this mind are confined to pure consciousness. They emerge to visibility as creation advances. In the early stages all is purely potential, hatching in the egg of thought. The supreme self beyond cause and effect is the Brahman; but when it becomes self-conscious through union with the dynamism latent in matter, it comes out as Ishwara, the sovereign Lord of creation, God.

We find endorsement of the view expressed when we consider Radhakrishnan's statement that the Vedic was a religion that expressed the delight of the human at finding himself in a world full of pleasures. It voiced the natural wonder and joyousness, one might say, the spring-time joyousness of young life in being permitted to live in a veritable Gan Eden, or Garden of Delight. A youthful period of racial life in the world was, as all ethnic tradition remembered and recorded it, an age of childhood's brightness. "Life on earth was simple and sweet innocence." Not yet had come the dull, drab realism and the "heavy and the dreary weight of all this unintelligible world" to end "the glory and the dream" of the still lingering celestial light that had suffused the conscious life of childhood.

But childhood passed and the man found the splendor in the grass and the glory in the flower dying out and fading into the light of common day. Childhood spontaneity of fresh delight being gone, it became the business of mind--before mind it had been feeling--to ponder on the meaning of the world and its own presence in it. The end of the childhood fantasia was the birth of mind and understanding. In proportion as the instinctive delight receded the re-

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sources of the mind were called upon to furnish satisfactions and rationalizations in the face of growing stresses and the seeming barrenness of the struggle. So was born philosophy. And the Upanishads give voice to this side of the religious expression of the human genius in their rationalizations of the world experience. But their basic text, their supreme primer, was the Vedas' kinship with nature. Hence their content and their message was, so to say, the exposition of cosmic truth as reflected in nature.

Radhakrishnan expounds this shift from the happy association of life with nature in the Vedas to the brooding philosophy of the Upanishads as due to the divine discontent that followed upon the vanishing of the primal spontaneous delight of the earlier period. In the wake of the vanished simple sweet innocence (how clearly this matches the Genesis story of man's fall from innocence into sin!) came the spiritual longing of the soul for solider realities than are afforded by the fleeting interests of the world which with the years grow ever more empty and volatile. The somber religious concerns and problems rebuke the light-hearted joyousness and demand answers from the reason, and if not from there, then from "revelation." Discontent with the actual is the necessary precondition of every break with the settled and the traditional, the incentive to every moral change and every spiritual rebirth. "The pessimism of the Upanishads is the condition of all philosophy." Discontent drives man on to exertion to bring about escape from the conditions engendering it. The Upanishads then take up the problems arising out of this situation, in which the soul finds itself in a world that for the most part overwhelms it with the unintelligibility of its thronging events.

It is quite worth noting that Radhakrishnan takes a moment to add a sentence in reference to the pessimism of the Upanishads, stressing that it has not developed to such an extent as to suppress all endeavor and generate inertia. "There was enough faith in life to support all genuine search for truth." This qualification is notable because it is the crucial point that was not kept in view in later development of Hindu philosophy. The note of pessimism sounded dialectically in the Upanishads swelled louder and louder until it fairly drowned out any positive voice in Indian religion, and gave the overall dominant tone of negativism to Hindu thought. Radhakrishnan's reservation was no doubt registered here to fend

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off the specious accusation that, he was aware, could be brought against his land's boasted religious wisdom. The Upanishad philosophy was pessimistic, but, he hastens to ask us to believe, not too pessimistic. And he leaves us to understand that it was only a dialectical pessimism, the necessary basis for the birth of philosophy. And a sound philosophy would dispel the pessimism eventually.

He has support for his elucidations in the books themselves. He cites a writer, Cave, as saying that within the limit of the Upanishads there are few explicit references to the misery of life caught in the ceaseless cycles of birth and death. Its authors save the system from pessimism by the joy they express at the message of redemption proclaimed in the books. They point to the earth life as the pathway to self-perfection. To this end the discipline of Samsara has to be undergone, but it brings great reward. Strenuous as it may be, life furnishes the zest of a battle for the rewards of self-conquest. Samsara is only a succession of opportunities. Life is a stage in spiritual growth to perfection, a step on the road to the infinite. Life is not an empty dream and the world is no delirium of spirit.

The philosopher is thus at pains to emphasize the positive and affirmative position of the Upanishads toward the earthly life, because he knew it was absent in most Hindu cult systems. And his further attempt at apology and exoneration for the dominant negative-pessimistic strain in Indian thought is quite worthy of our notice: "In the later versions of rebirth in Indian thought we miss this ennobling ideal, and birth becomes the result of an error in the soul, and samsara a dragging chain."--which, philosophy then could only think, was to be snapped by an escape obsession of the mind. Can it be missed, as we pass by this point, that here in this distortion of Hindu dialectic was planted the germ of the later Christian theology of the "fall" of man through a similar "error in the soul"?

But even this attempt to claim for Indian thought at least a half-optimistic attitude backfires, when he says that in so far as Hindu thinkers look upon the world as an evil and a lie, they are pessimistic; but they are optimistic in that they feel that there is a way of escape from the false existence into the realm of beatific non-consciousness. For if optimism can be generated only by the hope of escape from an evil condition, it is itself only another mode or

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aspect of negative thought, or pessimism. It is simply pessimism tinctured with the hope that it may have an end. It can live only in the future; it can not optimize the present. Never is there a positive assertion that the world is the locale of an experience itself good, to be embraced by the soul in full confidence of its beneficence both now and later, and wholly blessed for the creature living in it. Always the world is an evil and a lie. If the only possible assertable good of a thing is that, if evil, it may be escaped, the very good of escape from it leaves its evil character unredeemed. The only predicable good about chills and fever is that one has a chance to come out of their grip. They still remain chills and fever.

That the pessimistic strain and the negative view of life are an incrustation of later popular misconceptions and distortions and not an expressed attitude of the Upanishads it is permissible to affirm. For there is hardly any suggestion in the Upanishads that the entire universe of changing drama is a baseless fabric of fancy, a mere phantasmagorical show or a world of shadows. The artistic and poetic souls of the Upanishads authors lived always in the world of nature and never cared to fly out of it. The Upanishads do not teach that life is a nightmare and the world a barren nothing. Rather they are pulsing and throbbing with the rhythm of the world harmony. The world is God's revelation of himself. His joy assumes all these forms of expression.

"But there is a popular view which identifies the Upanishad doctrine with an abstract monism which reduces the rich life of this world into an empty dream."

Again there is the testimony that later ignorant misreading of the profound sense of the Upanishads was responsible for the popular view as to the non-reality of the earthly experience and the world itself. As this fact gains in certainty it strengthens the realization that what has become accepted generally as the fundamental doctrine of the supreme spiritual philosophy purveyed to the West by India is not basic primeval Hindu philosophy at all, but grossly warped perversions of a more rational and less negative system of truth. It is not India's true and illuminating message, but a wretched caricature of it, that the motherland of spirituality has preached with so much persuasion of its superiority over all other systems the world over. The Upanishads are not back of the senseless

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Hindu repudiation of the reality of the world and of the value of the soul's sojourns in it.

And how can we longer miss the positively terrific imputations that lurk in Radhakrishnan's brief sentence? What more damaging verdict could be brought against any system of religious belief than that its very cardinal doctrine comes out in the end as an abstraction of thought which reduces the rich life of this world to an empty dream? Nothing in our critique of Hinduism and mystical religion in general can rate as more vicious denunciation of Oriental thought than this admission of India's own great philosopher. And India has never resented this nihilistic outcome of its systematism; it has in fact accepted it, and not only that, but has hailed it as its crowning achievement, and continues to urge it as its supreme peak of beneficence. It is India above all others that has pronounced this world's rich life an empty dream. Max Mueller assures us that India alone has taken this stand in human thinking. He rates it as a staggering fact in world history. It is perhaps not too wild a surmise to assert that if our world experience is in any considerable measure an empty dream, it is Hindu philosophy that has made it so.

Radhakrishnan's further dissertation on the point strengthens the positive view. Development of the one into the many gives rise to name and form, variety and diversity in world objects. There is no suggestion, he affirms again, that these numberless modifications are unreal. They have, he concedes, no reality apart from the eternal Brahman. But in Brahman they achieve reality. In the Upanishads the progression from the One into the many means the individualization of the One in each unit. This is the central principle in the creation. Things and persons are the ultimate modes of the existence of the One God. They are not real if detached from their integration in the One. Things that appear to stand in their own separateness are nevertheless integral in Brahman. Their separateness is only apparent and superficial. Pervaded and animated as they are by the being of Brahman, they share ultimate reality.

Nowhere are the Upanishads found to assert also that the Infinite excludes the finite. In holding that Brahman is the only reality, they do not shut out the things of the world, for they are rooted in Brahman and partake of his reality. "The finite is in the infinite. This Atman is the entire universe," says the Chandogya Upani-

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shad. "God is present in the vile dust and the small mote." The affirmation of the real involves the affirmation of all its parts, all that is based on it or is permeated by it. If the reality of the subordinate modifications of the one life is not absolute, it is at least real in the relative sense, as all things below the absolute are relatively, but none the less wholly real. Things here may not manifest the highest reality, and no one claims they do; they manifest their particular mode and degree of reality.

If in postulating a monistic universe we ignore difference, we reduce the absolute to a non-entity. We do not improve the case of the absolute by repudiating the relative. The eternal need not make null and void the temporal. We can not negative the reality of the temporal, the finite, of man and his world just because we deal with universals. For these subsist in the eternal Real. To deny the particular and the contingent is to falsify the necessary and the universal. The Upanishads support the doctrine of unreality only in the sense that there is a pervading reality which embraces all things from God to clod. "That Atman is in the hearts of all living creatures from Brahma to a post." The different grades of individuality are all fragmented aspects of one Absolute. The things of the world may be but partial representations of the perfect being of God, but they are not on that account illusory semblances of it. They are real as far as they go in the time development toward fuller showing forth of reality, toward a more adequate expression of the wholeness of their being. Until they reach the ultimate point of that development we must characterize them as relatively real. These things represent real being at work. "There is no suggestion in the Upanishads that the objects which lie around us on every side in infinite space, to which by virtue of our bodily frames we all belong, are only apparitions."

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ON THE BRINK OF THE VOID

The doctrine of illusion has rested on the specious logic of the thesis that since the absolute is beyond our ken, the things of objectivity must stand outside the absolute. This is not the position of the Upanishads. That assumes all existences in the absolute. They are modes of its being and manifestation. Reality puts itself on display in the temporal flow of created life. The mistake of the illusion dogma is that it repudiates the very evidence which the absolute has presented of its universal presence and its activity. We can ask no more of any power that would advance its credentials to real being than that it demonstrates its ability to create something tangible and substantial. What a reversal of common sense it is for us to look at the mighty creation of infinite being and shake our heads in doubt or denial of its reality! We put ourselves in the same category of stupidity as the farmer who denied the existence of the giraffe at the circus while beholding one for the first time.

Then Radhakrishnan has penned a sentence that, with the authority of the Upanishads to validate its dynamic truth, should forever stop the cry of "illusion" and end the preachment that we must inhibit the world if we would contact reality: "If we seek the real in some eternal and timeless void, we find it not." Here is the announcement of the absurdity and futility of the doctrine that would end by having us destroy ourselves and our world to seek timeless and objectless reality. To repudiate relative reality because it is not reality absolute is the veriest folly. This is equivalent to the asininity of refusing to accept half a million dollars because nothing less than a million is real money. And it is time the hard fact were faced that if we presumably could annihilate the objectivity of our world and ourselves and our intellects, there would be nothing to take its place. To destroy that form of reality which we can experience with the thought that a better one will then have a chance to supervene, will be to destroy all possible reality along with ourselves. We must make actual the grade of reality we are conditioned and equipped to register here and now, for we have, as yet, access to no other.

All that the Upanishads urge, continues the philosopher, is that the process of unfoldment in time finds its basis and signi-

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ficance in the absolute, which is timeless, but seeks to give itself the experience of reality by projecting its energies out into time and space. This conception, he says, is necessary if we are to predicate progress. But the full monistic-idealist view deletes the conception or the need of progress. It relapses into the absolute and the unconditioned, of which progress can not be predicated, since all exists in perfection at any given moment, in the eternal now. But in the sane relativistic view the endless succession of events, as the phases of creation, that die in passing in turn into succeeding phases, would be a meaningless string of unrelated items of dead fact if they were not considered to be the integral elements in a total movement conceived and processed by an all-embracing unity of absolute being. Mere motion and succession need not necessarily constitute an evolution, if events are not integrated in some total scheme embracing all in oneness. Change does not inevitably spell progress, although it is evident that in the actual universe the flow of events does constitute progress. It becomes progress if back of all change is a permanent reality out of which, and back into which all things flow. The absolute guarantees that the world process is not chaotic, not meaningless, but ordered to an end. We must postulate teleology. The immanence of the absolute in the process makes it an interpretable phenomenon and assures us of its reality. We are not chasing butterflies we can never catch. We are not being deluded and allured into a vain and futile pursuit. "In a sense the real is expressed at every moment of its history." The flux of events would not be history if it did not create reality. This is the vital, the crucial realization that philosophy needs to promulgate. Philosophy has too long and too insistently preached the doctrine of the unreality of the world and of ourselves. It is psychologically disastrous to greet our world with any other conception than that it is a real world, adapted to us as real beings. That which is and that which is to be are identical, being but two aspects of the same reality. This view throws the Upanishad teaching into complete harmony. It does not have to deny itself. It does not support the doctrine of world illusion. Hopkins is cited as asking: "Is there anything in the early Upanishads to show that the authors believed in the objective world being an illusion? Nothing at all."

Matter, the bete noir of idealist conception, could not develop life or consciousness if it did not carry the potentialities of them in

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its constitution. No amount of contact and repercussions--the mechanistic theory of materialism--could extort life out of mere matter. The most exalted capabilities of consciousness, supreme knowledge and bliss, could not emerge out of evolution unless they had existed before and were replanted germinally in it for new growth. Nothing could be produced in the end which was not potentially present at the start. Even modern physical and biological science has found that in the "Darwinian" concept of evolution only that unfolds to manifestation which was implicit in the life cycle at the beginning. In the beginning God created the world. The destined end was marked from the beginning. In the time sense the world is not the product of a creation, but of an evolution. If we use the term creation, we must understand it in this sense. The process only brings out what is already present in it in germ. In this reference the ancients denominated the life potential in all creation as seminal essence.

The philosopher admonishes us that so long as we imagine the world to be the product of something else than the absolute we are lost. The Upanishads expressly protest against the existence of a factor in world causation separate from Atman. It is not conceivable in logic that the world should have a creator, and alongside of him another efficient power working with or against him. To this absurd conclusion some of the illusion philosophies as well as the crude Christian concept of Satan and his hosts--have practically been driven in their postulation of an evil power that produced the mayavic or illusionary world of false being.

The thought is developed that the world is real to us because we are not as yet perfected selves. This seems to contradict common naive logic, which would think that not our imperfection, but our perfection, would open our faculties to the perception of the real. What is meant, however, is that if we had attained perfect development we would see the world as unreal, as non-being, as mere appearance. But being yet imperfect in our development, we mistakenly imagine that what we see is real being.

The important thing in this juggling of hypotheses is that beyond all doubt the things of our world, as received by our senses and mind power, are real to us. If, as the Kantian schematism heavily accentuated, "the world is what our conceptual faculty makes it to be for us," if it is our re-creation, if not our actual creation, the

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reality of the world would be contingent upon us, upon our power to translate the world to consciousness. It would be only as real as we can make it, only as real as we are. Reality would then be a coefficient of our growth, developing pari passu with our development, waiting on our growth for actualization, begging us to give it substance. This would reduce reality, an assumedly absolute quantity, to a relative status, subject to conditioning. This ends up in a contradiction of terms.

It would appear that what is needed is a new and more specific definition of "reality." As it is universally employed in philosophical analysis, it stands for a predicated state of unconditioned being. As such it is not, and can not be, experienced by any mortal. It is wholly in the ideal category. All empirical consciousness fails to glimpse it. It is an ideal mirage floating forever ahead of all conscious achievement, in the brains of metaphysical speculators. As consciousness is the final criterion of real being (an entity without consciousness hardly being creditable with real being), it would seem that whatever registers as conscious experience in the life of any creature is entitled to the ascription of reality. In this view it has often been urged that a dream is real, though it does not carry the validity with which our waking experience interprets its content. A mirage is real, a reflection is real, a photograph is real, if we do not let them impose on our credulity. If man's world is not real, real to him, by what other road shall he travel to find reality? There is no other. Yet idealist philosophy rabidly asserts that his contact with the world by his prescribed modus of cognition is precisely the obstacle in his approach to reality, which can be opened to him when it is removed.

One school of thought has posited an antagonism between man's present capability of cognizing perfect being, now admittedly imperfect and undeveloped in man, and the ideal perfection of his powers. This simply sets up an imaginary hostility between a present state of imperfection and the final perfect state. This is to set a sapling at odds with its own later tree stage, to pit the child against the man. It is possible, but silly, to regard primary states as opposed to maturity. To be sure, one's immaturity is an obstacle to the consummation of maturity, but only in a crotchety way of twisting an argument. The child is father of the man, but not his hindrance. So it can be said that the earth is the mother of man, but not, as idealist thought has ever made it, his enemy.

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It is evident, of course, that the forms of reality that man has not yet made actual in his consciousness, the illimitable ranges of reality that are still transcendent to him, will, as they are actualized in progressive expansion of cognitive power, furnish the ground of fuller and more authentic rationalization of the cosmic experience, the cosmic unity. So Radhakrishnan says that the transcendent reality is the ground or explanation of the struggle between spirit and matter, and that since this ultimate reality is beyond man's reach, his present experience is inadequate to explain it. He must perforce continue to see in part; he can not yet comprehend the perfect unity of all. The whole world is conceived as possessing an identity or community of purpose, which, if it could be apprehended, would elucidate the total run of constant change. The Brahman, encompassing the total, is the sole and whole explanation of the world, being both its material and its efficient (as also its formal and final) cause. The entities of the world and their doings are knots in the rope of development, links in the unrolling chain, which runs from inchoate matter at the start to conscious bliss at the end. "That created itself by itself," says the Tait. Upanishad. "He creates the world, then enters it," says the Brih. Upanishad. The Atman pervades the creation as the salt pervades the ocean. As the spider his filament, the Atman unfolds the long thread of manifest existence out of the immense body of his infinite being. But Atman and his creation are not different. The world is his manifestation. The Upanishads are decisive as to the principle that Brahman is the sole source of life in all that lives, the one thread binding the whole manifold of existence into a single unity.

The designed end of existence is present throughout the entire run and from the beginning. It is possible for the human mind to grasp the force of this as a reality of life by considering such a matter as romantic courtship leading to marriage and reproduction. Every step of the way is motivated by the final consummation in marital union, held as the contemplated entelechy. That ultimate reality pervades the present as conscious objective. The objective may not even be consciously conceived. Modern psychology indeed finds that it is a great "collective unconscious" motivation. It is in us as seed of reality, and its influence, though not deployed in full, nevertheless stirs within us. Everything in the world is thus of the essence of the ultimate reality and points, no matter how far

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off, to it, as the first shy glance of youth and maiden point to the connubial felicity at the end. Development means the manifestation of the potentiality, as Plotinus said. "Who indeed could live, who breathe, should not this Ananda be in Akasha?" (Tait. Upan.) Ananda is the beginning and end of the world. It could say "I am the Alpha and the Omega." It is the primal and eternal, hence the final cause. It is the fruit as well as the seed, for the seed is in fact the fruit; the two emerge simultaneously. Even matter conceals in itself the highest Ananda. The course of development is a transition from potential to actual of that which now comes, now goes, but ever is. Matter, says the philosopher, has more potentiality in it than life, but the life will increase. The Upanishads refuse to array God and matter against each other,--except as ends of the polarity. The polarity does not spell dualism, does not disintegrate unity, and the Vedas stand for the unity of all the world. The unity contains the polar duality within itself. Matter itself is a god, it is affirmed.

In the Isa Upanishad the worship of Brahman in both its manifest and unmanifest states is urged. The Upanishads do not offer us for our worship an abstract monism. It is a monism both abstract and concrete that is to receive our homage. Brahman is infinite not in the sense that it excludes the finite, but that it is the inclusive reality of all the finites. It is the timeless reality of all things that come to being in time. The word Brahman means growth, and hence it is necessary to predicate growth to that which is already the total of all things in being and to be. Astronomy tells us that the universe is expanding. The elan of all being, then, is the irresistible drive for larger and richer consciousness, for fuller and sweeter existence. The ultimate realization of life at its highest is called by the Hindu systems the triple unity of sat-chit-ananda,--existence-consciousness-bliss. "Knowledge, power and action are of its nature." This is the great trinity of life. Its triple nature makes it to embrace all force of being, all unity of essence, all meaning of action.

Radhakrishnan meets the traditional argument of the mystics that by erasing the consciousness of body and mind we clear the field of the cluttering rubbish for the downpour of supermind and true reality. Prefacing that we can not deny the reality of the absolute simply because knowledge and experience of it are inaccessible to us (except in our partial measure), he expounds that our knowl-

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edge of things is made possible by their being conditioned to meet the terms of our appreciative capacities. This conditioning relates subject and object in the polarity. If the tension which sets the conditions were relaxed, the terms by which our knowledge of the things is conditioned would be eradicated and we would be facing a blank. To be free from the law of contingency and dependence, free from relativity and hence made absolute, a power dissolving all empirical cognition would be required. We have no such power. (In spite of that the monists and unity-criers keep on chanting it as a possibility.) Says Radhakrishnan, every existence is a mediation of two opposites, and as for us in this world it is not possible to separate being and non-being, to eliminate the objective and have the pure subjective left for supreme enjoyment. That project is the absurd predication the monists are guilty of. If we try to isolate the one from the other to break their "opposition," we will find that both melt back into the unmanifest. They dissolve with the dissolution of their "hostility." We then have nothing. It is fortunate for us that we fail and must always fail in this insane effort. But even the mental assumption of its possibility, nugatory as it is, can work sad havoc in the psychological domain.

Hence it is illogical to deny reality to existent things, for they are the forms which reality takes when its aspects are to become the objects of knowledge. Radhakrishnan assents to their being denominated unreal, but refuses to deny their existence. He must however, be using the term unreal in a relative and technical sense, for one can naively ask how a thing can exist if it is not real. He means, of course, philosophically real. The view that holds that the mind is a lens that can dissolve the world into an unreal dream and that recks not of any reality in the flux, reduces the world of knowledge to a mere appearance of a reality that is all the time transcendently real. Without the positing of that reality which, while lying beyond our grasp at the moment, yet is transfused through all events, experience would become a string of unrelated events in consciousness that could never be integrated to become knowledge. The words know, knowledge derive, it seems certain, from the ancient Egyptian name of the original symbol of the cross, the crux ansata, which they made the hieroglyph for life itself, the ankh. It has the basic meaning of union or tie. Life can exist only where the two nodes of the polarity, spirit and matter, are tied to-

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gether in union, so to say, ankhed. Knowledge is itself the ankhing together of the two polar ends, namely consciousness and an object to be known. There is in this symbol and its connotations sufficient ground of truth to overthrow the egregious presumptions of the mystical theorizations. For it establishes that there can be no knowledge in consciousness independent of its relation to an object, which possibility is the astonishing contention of those who want to tear the soul away from all objectivity.

This conclusion then brings us to what may be considered the supreme decisive negative judgment which Radhakrishnan, with abundant Upanishad support, pronounces against the outlandish claims that the soul can consummate its divinity in the vacuum of this absolute.

The scholar elaborates on the debate in the Brih. Upan. between Prajapati and Indra. Prajapati is quoted as saying, "When the sun is set, when the moon has set, and when the fire is put out, the self alone is his light." But, comments Radhakrishnan, Indra formulated a rebuttal of this position. He felt that this self, when freed from all bodily experience, and left standing in a contentless world, is itself only a barren fiction. Indra was considering that if it was the soul's tie with the objective world that caused its sun, moon and divine fire to flare up, its own light would be extinguished when the fuel for the burning was cut off. It might retain the potentiality of generating light within itself, but the fuel for its generation would not be present, and its light would be darkness. Prajapati argues that if the self is not what it knows, feels and reacts upon, or if it is divorced from that, and thus emptied of its content, we must ask what remains. Nothing, said Indra. Bradley is quoted (Ethical Studies, 52): "To be free from everything is to be nothing." In his Appearance and Reality (89) he points out:

"The Ego that pretends to be anything either before or beyond its concrete physical filling is a gross fiction and a mere monster, and for no purpose admissible."

This would be true on the basis of the knowledge that the soul and its possible content can have no entification apart from their polarization with each other, and that both disappear when the polar tension between them is dissolved. The ego, as all profound ancient philosophy made plain, is born only out of the tension set up for consciousness with its polar opposite, matter. It arises only when coupled with its opposite and disappears with it.

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Radhakrishnan takes up the discussion from this point and builds on this foundation. He says that on this view, in dreamless sleep there is no self at all. (One would have to specify, no self in consciousness or in function, since the self does remain over the hiatus.) Then he says that which, if well considered, would do more to sanify all religious understanding than perhaps any other single utterance of the literature of religion: "Indra has the courage to declare it [that the soul does not exist when it has no content]: 'It is indeed destroyed.'" This has an important lesson which is again and again forgotten in Indian thought: "To deny the life without is to destroy the God within."

No human mind has perspicacity sufficient to realize in any fulness what the clear envisagement of this clarion pronouncement could do to end the chimerical hallucination that had beguiled millions of souls into disastrous belief that they could escape the rigors of life by a sheer mental inhibition of the reality of their existence. The renewed power springing from the renaissance of this great truth could launch a new Reformation in general religion dwarfing any movement in the historic centuries. It could mark a great epoch in human enlightenment. It could immeasurably brighten world life.

Radhakrishnan elaborates:

"Those who think that we reach the highest point attainable in pure subjectivity must turn to the dialogue of Indra and Prajapati. The condition freed from the limits imposed upon the organism, from time and space, from the existence of objects, is simply annihilation, according to Indra. This contentless Ego, this abstract Cogito of Descartes, this formal unity of Kant, this objectless subject supposed to stand behind, unrelated to all empirical consciousness, is an impossibility. Philosophical reflection, as well as psychological analysis leads to this result. Prajapati shows that the whole world is the one process of the self-realization of the absolute thought."

The world is a development of the absolute spirit, which, being reality itself, must further evolve real being, or at any rate wills so to do. Nature is a system of spontaneity or self-evolving antinomy, since it is the energizing of the absolute. In this process the first stage gives rise to the two factors of a self-conscious God and a passive potentiality of matter, standing in relation to each other. The self-expression made possible by the process becomes the essence of the absolute activity, for this self-realization is the law of

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life. It carries all possible actualization of good with it. The energy thus straining to actualize itself can exert sufficient force to bring itself to being. A philosophy that would preach the practical realization of the highest potential of being by inhibition of any portion of the process by which life is exerting itself to reach its goal, so far from opening the door to its better consummation by removing an obstacle, would simply tie life's hands from doing any work at all.

The philosophy of the authors of the Upanishads is not at all a monism; on the contrary it is in Hindu terms an Advaitism, which reads "not a twoness." By no means denying the duality, or polarity, of the two facets, spirit and matter, it still is not either exclusively a pure monism or a factual dualism. In the same way that the God of all being is described as a trinity, one in three and three in one, he is also describable as a duality, or two in one and one in two. He is not God and an opposite, but himself in two related modes of his own oneness. The two halves still compose his one self. He is adwaita, not two things, but one thing in two aspects of itself. Brahman underlies, includes and eventually reunifies both sides. Radhakrishnan declares that the two aspects could be dissolved back into the one "only in a figurative sense."

The empirical form of conscious experience is that which emerges to view at the point exactly intermediate between the two poles of awareness and its objects. It measures and registers the progress made from non-being through becoming. Buddha, avers the scholar, is convinced of the futility of the logic which attempts to deal with objects of sense or of thought as though they were fixed and static entities instead of phases in an eternal progression toward realization. His silence on the absolute indicates that the eternal substance is not in his view available for knowledge or for the explanation of phenomena. Experience is all that is open to our cognition, and the unconditioned lies beyond the experience. It is a waste of effort to strain fruitlessly to grasp what always eludes us.

It is impossible for us, to be sure, to think of changes constantly taking place without postulating a permanent something behind it, in relation to which the changes could alone have meaning. The changes must be ordered by that something and presumably in its own interests. They come under law, which governs their nature and their order. We contact the reality back of the ordered process by being thrown ourselves into the stream and there experiencing

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the elan, the movement and at least something of its purpose from our immediate participation in it. It is certainly not a useless and vain detachment of ourselves from reality either immediate or ultimate. It is the bountiful opportunity given us to share in the fulness of blessed life which it opens out to us.

In dissertating on Buddhism Radhakrishnan expounds that the law of universal causation, with its corollary of the eternal continuity of becoming, is the chief contribution of this great Asiatic system of Indian thought. Existence is not static being, but transformation. It takes consciousness through a series of successive stages. The religion stresses as challenge to man the impermanency of things in the flux. So the Buddha, like the Upanishads, impresses with the realization that in this world of unresting change and eternal becoming, "there is no firm resting place for man." And Buddha also declares that truth emerges from between the two sides, the two extremes, and is always the golden mean. The identity of such teachings with the Greek philosophy must be evident. Heraclitus and Plato echo these fundamentals of understanding. The law of change could hardly be impressed on human realization more lucidly than is done by Heraclitus when he says that life is a living fire, its ceaseless burning being the agent of the endless transformation that enables the cosmic mind to implement its planned constructions.

In the Majihima Nikaya (Vol. I, 29) the philosophy that urges escape uses the dangerous character of fire to add force to its theses. It suggests that one in a fire should not delay to discuss whether it is good or evil, but had best rush to escape it. But this is a gross begging of the question; it puts the conclusion in the premises; it plays false with the true conditions and rationale of the fire, its nature and purpose. To be sure, all life is dangerous. But to present the fire of life as only dangerous, ignoring its beneficent agency, is logically dangerous, besides being untrue. Bosanquet observes that all the reality of truth that is lived out with thoroughness has its dangers.

As all the creation below the absolute is necessarily in the realm of the relative, even the supreme Lord, Ishwara, requires in his constitution an element on the negative side of the polarity, otherwise he would remain a sheer abstraction.

The one eternal spirit expresses, impresses, unifies and enjoys the varied life of the world, with all its paradoxes and passions,

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loyalties and devotions, truths and contradictions. But for the souls here, unaware of or unintelligent about the organic unity of all the multiple elements, unable to balance present woe against future happiness, it is easy to grow weary of the conflict and succumb to distraction and panic of mind. The great universal need, therefore, is the knowledge of the underlying harmony toward which, as in woven design, the diversity is working. From such knowledge it would be possible to draw courage for the battle, and even joy in its adversities, there being always the certitude that the potential benignance will emerge from the struggle of the discordant elements. The product of blessedness issues out of the oppositions, as the wine issues from the crushing of the grape. Reality is not attained by the achievement of a condition of static rest in a world beyond experience. Rather it is achieved by the maintenance of a poise between two opposing forces at the point of neutralization.

Even in the atom this principle is manifest in the discovery of the particle intermediate between the proton and the electron, the meson and the neutron. Reality, as Heraclitus said, is born out of unrest. The tension between the finite and the infinite, which is in evidence throughout the universe, comes to its expressive phase in the human consciousness. The body of man, or more specifically the soul animating it, is the battleground of this Armageddon conflict.

While it is true that life is thus a hard struggle, wherein the soul has to maintain its poise between the two contrary pulls, it is not ordained irrevocably that life should be an ordeal of unrelieved suffering. The pain and travail arise from the imperfection due to initial ignorance. Suffering can be avoided by the exercise of intelligence hitched to resolute will, and this intelligence and will are developed as experience enforces its object lessons. These two guiding lights are indeed what philosophy is primarily intended to enkindle in us. Out of every tense exigency comes the birth of new intelligence adequate to balance a disturbed harmony and lighten the wings of the soul. Life is not intended for sheer rollicking hilarity; yet neither is it meant to be a vale of tears. The true poise of the soul, intermediate between the two extremes, is intrinsic delight generated by intellectual assurance of the good purpose underlying all. A deep-seated delight, which must have philosophical undergirding, ever marks true advance in evolution.

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The great question of the reality of evil can be resolved in the understanding that it is not real in the final sense, since it is bound to be transmuted into good; but it is quite real in that it inflicts suffering and demands often heroic effort to live out its inflictions. The actualization of the power of spirit is not a smooth, even, automatic process. Some pain is inevitable, until the soul learns. Perfection is worth what it costs. The good and the pleasant or the delightful are not always conjoined. Evil is not directly punished with hardship, nor is good immediately rewarded with benefit or delight. Lower tendencies which for a long time appear pleasant, have eventually to be checked. Every gain for spirit is at the cost of a setback to nature. "It is good for me that I have been afflicted," says the Psalmist. Suffering is the great educator of the spirit, which, too, has to learn. The gist of all this is in the great fact that it is resistence that compels the soul to exert its whole strength, from which exertion comes growth. Life ineluctably takes the soul through its divine birth pangs. The law of karma is in the spiritual realm what gravitation is in the physical. It maintains the balance and the conservation of moral energy. Man's spirit is greater than the law of karma and empowers him to come out victorious. The discipline of the spirit arises out of the balance between freedom and necessity.

The conception of Ishwara is the highest attainment of the religious consciousness, says Radhakrishnan. But Ishwara is the intellectual principle, the Logos of the creation, and would remain unmanifest if he did not immerse himself in nature and become Hiranyagarbha. In the language of the Latin scholastics of the Middle Ages, he must transform himself from the form of natura naturans (nature animating) to that of natura naturata (nature animated). In the latter form he has set up or brought out distinctions within his own nature, so that he might seem not to be the one supreme Lord, but many powers. However, the distinctions are capable of being transformed by clear insight into a unity of the highest reality. Ishwara's transformation of himself from the unmanifest state of noumenal activity into the visible world of creation in many forms is compared to the bursting forth of the innumerable forms of life coming to bud, blossom and fruit in the springtime.

It is obvious that the ultimate reality is not thought alone, or knowledge alone or love and beauty, but the living unity of essence

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and existence, consciousness made concrete, one might say. It is also obvious that, as it is expressed, objective knowledge of the subjective world is impossible. The function of the subjective is to know and to feel; of the objective is to be known. Yet every object is an appearance of an aspect of the absolute, and by being interpreted by the powers of mind the nature of the absolute can to that degree be intuited. It is paradoxically true that while the unit parts of creation can never know the absolute, they are themselves parts of that absolute, and to the extent to which they gain knowledge of themselves, they know the absolute. It was this realization that inspired the founders of the Greek Mysteries to inscribe over the doors of the temples of initiation the shibboleth: "Man, know thyself--and thou wilt know all things." Man must come to know that he is the universe in miniature, potentially the universe itself.

It is a necessary element of human intelligence to know that life, carrying man on its tides, oscillates between nature and spirit and so is subject to both freedom and necessity. The attempt to suppress either term in the period when it predominates in the rhythm must be disastrous. The two phases are alternately thrown out of balanced relation to each other, and again restore the equilibrium, as Heraclitus stated. He said that life does nothing but alternately divide itself and again reunite the division. Jainism asserts that it avoids both idealism and materialism by recognizing the correlativity of mind and matter. It protests that it does not concern itself about transcendental being, but only about being as realized in experience. It appears to occupy a sane position in holding that while spirit and matter stand opposed to each other in the polarity, they are not opposed to the unity which is a synthesis of the opposites. The world is a concrete whole, of which pure being and pure matter are the constituent essences. The struggle of opposites is present in all degrees of reality. Where there is no struggle of opposites, there is no life, and without life there would be no question of reality or non-reality. The resolution of opposites brings the harmony of the absolute. Jainism tends to regard reality as truly, not falsely, expressed in the concrete worlds, and not to be found in a state beyond our experience. A pure spirit, an abstract absolute, with nothing to struggle against, an actionless spiritual energy, is in the Jain view sheer nothing.

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