CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE FLOWER OF THE INTELLECT

Further strictures must be adduced on the item of the mystic's deprecation of the intellect in favor of intuition. It has received attention in the introductory half of the work. But it is important enough to warrant additional critique. In The Phaedo Plato has a sentence that should be broadcast so widely in the world that the cult of derogation of the intellect should stand forever rebuked and silenced: "For no greater evil can befall us than to become haters of reason."

Radhakrishnan says that what is dogma,--and therefore a conclusion reached by the intellect--to the ordinary man is experience to the pure in heart. On a superficial view this sounds like a profound observation. But would it carry home as a truth to us the implication that the intellect had no part in bringing the spontaneous surge of realizing experience to its overt expression in our lives? Hardly. Radhakrishnan himself elaborates the thesis that Spinoza carried to its final development, that the highest and fullest rapport between the mind of the part, the unit, and that of the whole is productive of the most exalted religious afflations. The richest love of God, he asserts, is an ideal, therefore an intellectual love, precisely as Spinoza so luminously expounded it. So he says that the lofty Hindu religions, as volubly voiced in the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedanta Sutras, substituted for prayer, the more specifically feeling aspect, mystic contemplation of the supreme beauty, truth and goodness. Such an ideal love of God, and such meditation inundate the mind with the cosmic emotion and cause to glow warmly our sense of oneness with the Whole.

Then he says that it is true that religion of this ideal sort seems to those who have not been able to rise to such exaltations and sublimations, and so have never felt their power, to be too "cold," too "intellectual." "Yet", he concludes, "no other religion can be philosophically justified." So, then, if what the "cold intellect" has found logically sound as dogma, becomes the living experience of the pure in heart, this is the endorsement, not the contravention or rebuttal, of the intellect by the intuition. So much loose religious thinking has set the intellect at odds with the mystical emotion. The verdict

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of our philosopher is that the highest and truest feeling comes from the sublimation, not the inhibition, of the intellect.

At another place he clearly expounds that the ideal of intellect is to discover the unity which comprehends both the subject and the object. It is in this conception that philosophy can find the resolution of all its dialectical problems that rise from the apparent disunity of thoughts and things. That there is such a unity, or capability of synthesis, he says, is the working principle of both logic and life. Philosophy must aim to find this point of integration of mind with the creation. But he doubts the capability of the human mind to grasp the synthesis in its completeness and perfection. So, by the track of this reflection he arrives at the same conclusion that besets and mars the general Hindu dialectic: the intellect is powerless to grasp the real. Ergo we must set aside the intellect and make the herculean attempt to jump over it into a terrain beyond, where a totally other mode of experiencing reality will supervene to satisfy our need for the more nourishing food of being, a mode called intuition or mystic illumination.

Radhakrishnan does not go so far as to state this positively. He stands by the intellect as indispensable for the attainment of the high end in view; for he says, "though man's intellectual capacities are not adequate for the comprehension [of the supramental states], still they will have no existence but for it." Still wrestling with the dialectical dilemma, he says that intellect deals with the categories of time and space, cause, force and relation, which involve us in deadlocks and antinomies. "The puzzle cannot be solved by intellect pure and simple. It must confess itself to be bankrupt when ultimate questions arise." We can not solve these problems as long as we remain at the level of intellect. It handles relations and conditions, and has no power to grasp the relationless and unconditioned absolute. When this is said, the door seems to stand open for the victorious entry of the mystical philosophy. But hold! Radhakrishnan follows this with the saving clause that gives intellect the victory after all: "There is nothing on earth existing in space or time which is not an appearance of the absolute." And, as this essay has demonstrated perhaps for the first time concisely in philosophy, the appearance of the absolute in space and time is a true appearance and not a false one. So then the absolute has revealed itself in such form that the intellect can apprehend its real-

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ity! And this ought to wind up the debate with the verdict going to the side of the adequacy of the intellect. It seems likely that a ground for the resolution of the elements that appear to be in conflict is to be discovered in further reflection on Radhakrishnan's statement that "the puzzle can not be solved by intellect pure and simple." This conclusion is supposed to eliminate the intellect in finality from consideration as the instrument for the apprehension of real being. But this may be a mistaken conclusion. It appears possible that what the statement eliminates from eligibility is not necessarily the intellect, but the "pure and simple." It is to be re-called that the Upanishads declare of the Brahman that "with sharp and subtle intellect is he beheld." This is the sum and essence indeed of what Spinoza, Aristotle, Plotinus and even the mystics themselves, in direct word or in effect, have repeatedly declared. The higher altitudes of reality perception are surely not to be attained by intellect that lacks keenness, sharpness, subtlety, the piercing clarity of discernment that has been symbolized in theology and mythology by the metaphor of the eagle's eye. But religious philosophy has not made a proper place for the operation of the intellect sublimated and subtilized by its released powers of eagle-eyed penetration at lofty heights, in spite of what the philosophers just mentioned have done to emphasize this item. Earlier dissertation in this work has contended that intuition is not a power transcending intellect, but just the acutely sharpened powers of the intellect itself, in its more perfected development.

The world is declared in the great religions to be the Logos of God, the expression of his divine ideas in physical matter. And if man's lesser comprehending power is to grasp an ever increasing degree of the logical structure which life has revealed of itself, the faculty by which this meaning is grasped must still and always be a logical one. If the ultimate in the meaning of the universe is a logical structure in creative mind, then its apprehension by the creature mind must be likewise the work of intellect. The perceptive faculty in the creature consciousness must fall in the same category as the constructive faculty exercised by the creator. Mind could hardly be perceived by other than mind. Little mind, mind of small dimension, may have difficulty in matching in its reflections the mighty work of the Great Mind. But mind, intellect it must be to grasp the Logos of the creation. No other faculty can be substituted

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for mind. Mind may be aided by powers of vision and sharpened and deepened by feeling, but its comprehending are still those of intellect. To contend otherwise is like arguing that some other sense or faculty is better for seeing than sight. It should be the final upshot of argumentation on this eternal question that what of reality the intellect of man is predicated as being unable to grasp simply will not be grasped. An alternative to the intellect has always been dragged in by the mystics: that what the intellect can not grasp may be grasped by a higher power, the intuition. Here is located at last the point of error in the mystical philosophy. Instead of predicating simply that man's intellect has definite limits to its capabilities, that it can not as yet do what the intelligence of gods and elohim can do, resort has been made to the alleged transcendent power of another faculty declared to be available to man if only he will push the incompetent and confusing intellect aside. This resort has been, and must now be seen to be, a baseless subterfuge, a straw man in fact.

Some portion of reality is brought home to consciousness through the senses, through the powers of sensation; another portion or aspect of it is experienced through feeling, the emotions; consciousness is still further oriented to it through mind, the intellect; and mind sharpened to swift perception grasps it by what is called intuition. In the end it is intellect that organizes the work of the several modes of experience into knowledge. So that in finality, if man is to know reality, he must do it through the mind. The argument from the mystic side has been that since the intellect of man is incapable of cognizing ultimate reality, there must be some other faculty that can; and intuition has been predicated as this miracle power. What would have simplified and clarified the entire problem all along is the recognition of the obvious fact that ultimate and absolute reality is something that man will never know. The problem need never to have been involved in the complicated elements of sophistication if this plain fact had been squarely faced. Neither with intellect nor with intuition, nor with any power within his capability can man grasp the absolute. It has been a faux pas from the beginning to risk, nay to plunge into the rash predication that by any faculty at all man can achieve consciousness of absolute and unconditioned being. And it is certainly permissible that this denial be followed by a robust: "who can?" Neither archangels nor solar

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Logoi can comprehend the absolute. The absolute is the incomprehensible, the unknowable, because it is the undetermined and indeterminable, as Aurobindo has said. It is therefore a silly waste of breath to talk of man's full merging into the absolute being or consciously becoming identical with it. And it is likewise illegitimate to postulate a special and non-existent power transcending his existing powers by which the impossible is declared achievable. Using any power or faculty within his reach, man will not become in any but a relative sense one with the absolute, or merge into any final and perpetual static bliss. Life has not planned it that way. Man will progress toward larger life. What that progress will reveal in the way of experience transcending present capability is the romance of the future, and the assurance of its possibility is the great lure that carries life happily onward.

What the gods themselves can not do, it is not reasonable to expect man to do. The idiocy of the pretension that man can scale the uttermost peak of being the whole way up from the level plain of his lowly humanity by some thaumaturgic manipulation of his consciousness can be seen with shocking clarity when one looks at the glaring ambiguity in religion's estimate of man's position and rating in life. Could any spectacle of inconsistency and illogicality be more ironic than that of the double and contrary views which religion holds of man, that at one end of the theology he is esteemed a wretched worm of the dust, a vile creature of sin and selfishness, who can urge no merit in God's sight to justify mercy and salvation, while at the other end he is extolled as a being of such cosmic stature and capability that he can transcend the very Logos of God and in fact consummate absolute perfection? How religion has got itself involved in such a predicament it were surely worth the worldwide effort to ascertain. The blaring absurdity of it all should awaken purblind minds to some corrective thinking that can somehow introduce balance and sanity into the situation.

It must be set down as a true notation that the real delusion involved in religious attitudes springs from the inveterate and apparently incurable propensity on the part of humanity to dream of ultimate perfections and to clutch eagerly and tenaciously at its dream of a final static perpetuity of bliss. This, be it noted, is the one thing that life and nature never demonstrate or put on display. If man is to assume that he can judge of life's true nature and being

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by what he sees life and nature manifesting as outer type of inner intention, he can see that life bestows the blessing of comparative bliss at intervals, at high moments which consummate long periods of development, and generally at the climactic point of its periodic surges and cycles. What he never sees anywhere is a perpetuation of static bliss. Life never makes bliss static; it comes as the topmost breaking into foam of each successive wave of its eternally repeated surges on the shores of material existence. The bliss that caps each wave is not possible unless the unit portion of the vast deep be thrown into wave form by the resistance of the beach. By poetic analogy with this truth-telling form of life's manifestation of its nature, philosophy and religion should be instructed finally that even the bliss that they postulate is wholly a product of the resistance which matter in polarity offers to spirit.

The struggle which man has to undergo at the meeting point of the two opposite poles, his aeonial weighing in the balance between soul and sense, is a hard one. It could well be that his dream tendency is a natural recourse to enable him with some placidity and equanimity to endure the ordeal a bit more steadily. The vision of future bliss and glory is not to be decried as totally without utility. It is perhaps both inevitable and salutary. Paul reminds us that the sufferings of this world are not to be compared with that glory which shall be revealed in us. The error is in failing to use our sufficiently keen intellectual powers to give us a balanced and rational view of the process and its reasonable possibilities. We have let the roseate vista of future glory so obsess our reason and imagination as to unhinge us from the reality of the present and to reduce us to half-intoxicated victims of self-hypnotic delusions of fancy. It could indeed be true that India's predilection to discount and discountenance the intellect, eventuating in an age-long traditional effort to smother it with all kinds of sublimated feeling, or the total suppression of feeling, has been the most potent force in fastening this entrancing delusion on the world.

If it be true, as Radhakrishnan has said, that there is nothing existing here in space and time that is not an appearance of the absolute, mystical philosophy is challenged to show why man's intellect can not catch something--and always more--of the meaning of the manifestation from contemplating what the absolute has revealed of itself. How can the philosophy of negation uphold the

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thesis that man's intellect will necessarily be deceived by studying the manifestation the absolute has made of itself? It would be the natural inference that the absolute manifested itself to enlighten its conscious creature units, not to deceive them. The play of maya was to instruct all creatures, not to delude them. The maya was the show, the epiphany; how could any mind be deceived by looking at it?

Yet the debate runs on and on, and Radhakrishnan has to call in the intuition to redeem man from the imperfection of his intellect. "It is when thought becomes perfected in intuition that we catch the vision of the real. The mystics the world over have recognized this fact." But it is to be noted that the philosopher does not say here that the vision of reality comes when we have supplanted intellect with intuition, but when it becomes perfected in intuition. This quite definitely supports the position taken in this essay. Intuition is simply the perfection of the intellect; therefore it is still in the province of intellection and not some alien power far transcending it.

It is the failure to have grasped this relation of intuition to intellect that has given a false slant to a vast body of reflection on this point in philosophy. When book after book talks of a power higher than the intellect and asserts that this power is posited in the Upanishads, it throws the mind off balance by a false reading of the word higher. Yoga practice attempts to unfold this superior sense. By it man transcends the distractions of the intellect and solves the riddles that harry the reason. The problems raised by the intellect solve themselves the moment we transcend the reason and start to live the religious life of renunciation. The Upanishads ask us therefore to lay aside our pride of intellect and approach facts with the fresh outlook of the child. So runs Radhakrishnan's elaboration of the theme. "Let a Brahman renounce learning and become a little child."

The eminent psychologist, Jung, has done much to clarify the character of the incipient divinity in man by means of the paradigm of "the child." The god in us is a child stage of divinity set to grow to adulthood. Being in its childhood stage, it has undoubted affinities and correspondences with the psychology of the human child; supreme purity and motive, trust in life, confidence in good. The analogy carries far and suggests profound truth. But religionists

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make an illegitimate and disingenuous use of it. To assume, on the wording of the Scriptures, that the child has risen above the intelligence of the adult in overriding the perfection of the intellectual potential, and knows and feels the unity of all truth in an all-embracing synthesis of understanding, as by implication the astute philosopher does not, is to preach the silliest fol-de-rol. This is true even when the "child" figure is used only as poetic allegory. It is when the ego has developed to its utmost perfection the capability of its intellect to clarify understanding and united this insight with the regained innocence of the child mind, that the perfection of knowledge of reality comes to man,--as far as it can ever come to him.

Radhakrishnan makes a logical approach to the problem of the competency of the intellect in saying that nature has life concealed within it, and that when life develops its conscious potential with the perfection of the intellect, the mission of nature is fulfilled. This must indeed be so, for nature is the mother of life, and her destiny is fulfilled with the birth and rearing of her child. As nature bears and rears life, life in turn bears and rears consciousness. And when life generates and empowers consciousness its mission is fulfilled. "The destiny of consciousness is fulfilled when intellect becomes manifest." Then, it might be said, with one more step to go, the destiny of intellect is fulfilled when it has perfected its powers in swift intuition. This last indefinable and elusive quality or faculty of consciousness is described by Radhakrishnan as "neither thought nor will nor feeling, but yet the goal of thought, the end of will and the perfection of feeling." As has been expounded earlier herein, the mistake that has brought confusion into the counsels of the mystical philosophy has been the regarding of intuition as a form of knowing wholly above and separate from intellect, when it is just the magical sweep of the highest intellectual power itself.

Again the affirmation of freedom won by mystical magic comes up for review. On this Radhakrishnan commits himself to a statement which is expected to be taken as a paradox, but is in reality a plain self-contradiction. He asseverates that the free can do what they choose with perfect impunity, "but this freedom is not 'the madness of license.'" The mystic becomes a law unto himself, and the lord of himself and of the world in which he lives. Laws and

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regulations are necessary for those who do not by invincible rectitude conform to the dictates of conscience and the promptings of that great fulfiller of law--love. But this in fact merely says that the free can do as they choose, since they have come to choose that which does not violate the principles of the higher law. They are not free after all; they have fully learned their lesson. They have finally brought their will to full conformity with the prescribed rules that lead to the only freedom man has, the freedom to find happiness in conforming to the laws of life. There is no freedom save under law, conformity to which brings happiness through the perfect harmonization of the will of the unit with that of the whole. Man labors under the delusion that he is free to obey law or violate it, taking the consequences on either side. He finds that he is not free to violate it very long at any stage. All talk of the mystic being a law unto himself, not subject to the laws to which the non-mystic is bound, is a dangerous bandying of words. No law is escaped; the developed mystic simply avoids the harsher ordeals of conflict with the law to which most are still in heavier bondage by having learned the blessedness of conformity and obedience. Even then he does not escape the firm grip of the law; he only escapes its stern retributive hand. He reaps its rewards in far fuller measure than its punishments.

In the utter abstract sense of the words, even more than the rebel he is bound by the law, for he has fully conformed to it, completely surrendered, while the rebel still asserts his "freedom" to flout it. The rebel retains still a measure of license, if not of freedom; the "liberated" soul has given up all thought of license for full obedience. He does not escape the law; he escapes the evil consequences of violating it, which the stupidly rebellious still invoke upon themselves. He is in supremely happy case as compared with "the kicker against the pricks." But it is not strictly true to assert, in the height of mystical flare, that the mere exaltations of consciousness bring escape from all law. It is only true to say that the fulfilling of all law brings the exalted states. The Scriptures are not saying that love liberates the lower from all law; they do say that in the majestic sweep of the power of love he fulfills all law.

It is in the spirit of this "freedom" that the Hindu thinker goes so far as to say that the highest religion of the Upanishads is free from dogmas, traditions, forms, miracles and appurtenances

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such as still hang upon the skirts of other religions. It has then, is the inference, the highest claim to acceptance as the one completely eligible religion for humanity. The argument is advanced that it leaves the spirit of man free to find God and unite with him under the terms of the actual conditions ineluctably to be met to effectuate this result, terms imposed by God and life, not those prescribed by human priestcraft in the religions. But it is a cheap and easy way to the claim of superiority merely to say, as any religion might--and in fact nearly all do--that the particular religion offers complete freedom, while others bind their devotees to certain prescribed observances, doctrines, beliefs. If all offered complete freedom and all their followers acted with complete freedom, there would be insufficient distinction between them to justify even different names. The human being is in no position to accept total freedom. He is hemmed in on every side by restraints and compulsions, and finds that his welfare, security, health, and happiness depend on knowing the specific terms on which this benison is to be won. He can make use of total freedom only by a selection of acts based on specific knowledge. Every choice, every act of freedom brings back to him its consequences. The best religion is not one that proclaims total freedom for the individual, but one that will most dynamically enlighten and inspire him with both the knowledge and the incentive to pursue the thing that life requires of its creatures as conducive to their greatest beneficence. To cry the shibboleth of freedom without at the same time offering the knowledge to use it aright, is to beat on a tinkling cymbal.

But, avers Radhakrishnan, the Upanishads do not regard the absolute, when attained by man, as a total abstraction, for if it is, when the liberated soul merges into it, it would only be a lapse into a void. But this is indeed the outcome which the claims and theories of mystical presupposition force upon thought by the terms of their definition of the absolute. Radhakrishnan's argument is that Brahman dare not be made a void, an abyss, because then union with him would be a sinking into a blank. This is the position taken and maintained throughout this essay. The Hindu philosopher, standing upon Upanishadic bases, rejects the void character of Brahman so that the soul may have conscious enjoyment of the ineffable rapture when finally absorbed in mystical union with him.

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Even so it is still necessary that the creature character of the individual soul be abolished if union with Brahman is to be enjoyed. The creature must transcend or abolish himself as such, for one encumbered with creaturehood can not enter the bosom of Brahman. Flesh and blood shall not enter the divine kingdom.

"The highest state is that of rapture and ecstasy, a condition of ananda, when the creature as creature is abolished, but becomes one with the creator, or more accurately realizes his oneness with him."

This is high-sounding, what the dictionary used to call grandiloquent. But on all the conditions predicated by the mystical persuasions, by the time the creature has transmuted himself into fitness to achieve the rapture and the ananda, he will have divested himself of humanity altogether, and possess neither sense, feeling, mind nor consciousness to enjoy anything. For to fulfill the conditions laid down by mystic theory, he will have dissolved all relation with a concrete individual conscious existence. Under the law of polarity, considering the dissolution of the tension that comes with the final neutralization, the great asserted apotheosis of the spirit through its transcendence of all conditioning eventuates not in a glorious expansion of consciousness, but in the extinction of all consciousness. With the dissolution of the tension of the polarity the individual consciousness goes out like a light. And with that outcome all the grandiose philosophy of Nirvanic bliss likewise goes out in sheer impossibility. For it rests on the claimed condition of consciousness under terms which insure the destruction of consciousness. It is fairly well analogized by the legend of the canny farmer who to reduce the cost of feeding his horse by degrees fed him less hay and oats and more sawdust. Just when he had him safely subsisting on sawdust he died. In the case of the mystic's claim that consciousness can be withdrawn from under the conditions of existence in the world to enjoy the full ananda of unconditioned being, the individual so unconditioned vanishes. If the human as human is to enjoy ananda he must be kept somehow in the human sphere; and Radhakrishnan attempts to do this and avers that the Upanishads do likewise. But to hold man in the human area, where life is conditioned and never can be absolute, all the grandiloquent verbiage that promises the absolution of the human consciousness from the impeding baggage of sense and mind

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as the necessary condition for "liberation," has to be rejected as so much pious froth and jargon.

It is as clear as anything logical can be that the state of unconditioned being which is asserted as the attainable mystical possibility is "sawdust" on which no human can subsist without perishing as a human. This being evident, the mystical theory has been forced to go the limit and postulate the annihilation of the human, calling it a metamorphosis into the divine. It is claimed that it is not fair or logically possible to apply the norms and standards of our waking human experience to either the world of our dream consciousness or to the predicated superhuman, supramental world into which the "liberated" soul is said to enter. This may be granted as likely so. Yet the mystical possibilities of such apotheosis are held before humans and declared possible--easily and immediately possible in the preachments of some expositors--for humans at their present status in evolution. What this essay contends for is that the proclamation of the human's escape, as human, from the conditioned world into the unconditioned is a wild and fantastic chimera, utterly impossible. What state of consciousness the egos of present humans may enter into when they shall have transcended the human order for some higher dimension of being is not of necessity a part of the discussion. The debate, however, is vitally affected by consideration of the obvious fact that the human being can not be translated, like Enoch and Elijah, into the world of unconditioned being and have the experience as a human. What grade of conscious experience he may have in the regions above humanity is another question, matter for speculation on the distant future. We are not able to forecast our experience as gods.

The condition postulated as the basis of all mystical sublimation is a state of unconscious consciousness to which, as is admitted, only negative terms can be applied. All we can say is that it is not this and not that, or any known state or grade of consciousness that we can describe.

"It is impossible for us finite beings to define the character of the ideal reality; though the Upanishads are quite emphatic that it is not a blank . . . . Strictly speaking we can not say anything of it."

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CHAPTER TWENTY

PILGRIM IN THE INFINITE

It seems necessary to enter a protest against the mystical flair for the endless use of such phrases as "union with the absolute," "man's realization of God," "merging into the infinite" and the like. They can be misleading and mischievous. Their meaning can never be more than relatively true, and their validity depends upon knowing the degree of relativity involved. In the way in which they are bandied about in mystical parlance, they invariably infer or presuppose the achievement by the human of an ultimate and permanent state of being at the absolute level. All these idealistic shibboleths carry the suggestion that man can rise to the level of God, become equal with God, merge into the being of God and be established there forever, one with God.

This again is a case in which mystical thought doth protest too much. Its untenable elements are the height and the finality of the achievement. Man will never rise as high as that, nor can any rise of his or any attainment be a final one. Progress in evolution is a ladder on which there is always a higher rung. If it had a top rung, it would be the construction of a finite being, whereas it is the product of an infinite being. It is the output of being that knows no bounds,--except those it voluntarily puts on itself. One of the names assigned to it of old was to apeiron (Greek), the Boundless. It is the unknowable, the measureless, the infinite. It is not going to stop working at a point of finality and rest forever thereafter. "My father worketh hitherto, and I work," said the Son in an ancient drama. And the Father will continue to work. Infinite reads "not an end." But man, who lives in the swirl of the days, the years, the cycles, the aeons, in the rhythm of which the Boundless chooses to deploy its energies, is accustomed to thinking of an end, for he experiences beginning and end in every cycle. In his ignorance he knows only the cycle in which his movement is at the time involved. He knows it has its end, and unless he has gained a glimpse of nature's endless continuity of process, its repetition of cycles, he counts it the end of his existence lived in the period.

But if being is eternal and infinite, the run and succession of the cycles must be infinite. Being intimates this to man's intelli-

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gence by putting on display endless successions of smaller cycles within the compass of larger ones. Man certainly must organize his conception of the order and modality of infinite being over the patterns which he observes in the visible modes of being's manifestation. Two of these modes at least are evident beyond cavil: the endless repetition of cycles of birth, growth, decay and death for creature life; and the inclusion of a round of (seven) minor cycles in the constitution of larger ones. Man can not miss observing that the ongoing movement of the world order is systematic. Seven turns of a smaller wheel turn a larger wheel once; seven revolutions of that one turn a larger one once. The planets turn in a solar system; solar systems turn in a galaxy; galaxies turn in a super-galaxy; and those in a super-super-galaxy, if we may take the word of the astronomers. The day cycles constitute a year, and the years count a great year of 25,868 years of the precession cycle. Sub-atoms constitute atoms; atoms constitute molecules; molecules constitute cells; cells constitute organs; organs constitute bodies, bodies races and so on up to angelic hosts. Larger entities are necessarily composed of many smaller. An organism is a meaningful combination of many diverse components. And life is everywhere organic. No cycle runs its course in independence of its inclusion in a larger cycle and even the relation of that cycle to others antecedent and consequent; and all are integral elements of the Whole.

Therefore man's predication of final is forever a false one, a prostitution of his divine prerogative of knowledge. The dream of man's merging in the absolute is as fatuous as the stupid case of a man going around the house searching for his hat when he has it on his head all the while. If man is not "merged" in the absolute of life now he will never be in that happy condition. We mouth the great and momentous phrase: "In him we live and move and have our being," and immediately turn to argue whether we may at some distant epoch become one with infinite being. How can we live without being one with the total of being? To argue otherwise is to claim that we can live, can be, and yet have no part in being; that we have to destroy our present participation in life in order to come into the range of real being. There is nowhere else that man's life can be save in the absolute; certainly it cannot be outside it. Man therefore partakes of the infinite and absolute being, but he

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does so by progression through an endless gradation of states determined by infinite modes of self-limitation imposed upon itself by infinite life,--as ancient wisdom asserts, for its own delight.

The mystical scheme takes no account whatever of the actuality or the significance of the cyclical order of the universal creation. It blinks it utterly. Monism pays no heed to particularity, diversification of function, graduation of powers, gamuts of stages of progress, but wipes all these out in one vast uniformity. It brashly asserts that the soul of man need not consider itself bound under any necessity of progressing through cycles of development to higher being. The admission of all such paraphernalia is the proof of its ignorance and its bondage. It asserts that the spirit can break the chain at any time and step out of the time order into timelessness. In refutation of such arrant claim all that need be said is that nowhere in the universe can there be found a single item of fact or phenomena that would lend the faintest substance to it as a practicable feat. It is not done in this universe. One is warranted in saying that it will not be done. The creature will not disrupt the universal order. If he rashly attempts it with serious resolution, he will break, not the order, but himself. Mystical presumption is at least aware of this possibility; for it consistently advises that to break out of the ring-pass-not of conditioned being in the time flux, man will have to destroy himself as man.

A few of the great philosophers, notably Hegel and Kant, have noted the insatiate bent of monist and idealist thinking to affirm the attainment of finalities, perfections and ultimates, and to their credit be it said, have rebuked it. Hegel called all such "universal abstractions" "shams." Kant declared that they had only a slight regulative value for thought. They had no practical, but only theoretical value for man. They found only a very minor place in his speculative thinking. One is permitted to dream about absolute perfection and "final" bliss, but always and forever conscious activity lay, and must lie, in worlds of relativity and comparative "imperfection." It should sanify the thought and cheer the spirit if it could once be realized that in full truth life is cast at all times in the very heart of absolute being, which it is the incalculably joyous privilege of the unit soul to partake of progressively to infinite extent. To project the unit of consciousness out of this progression into a static mode of being in which total being is won in timeless-

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ness, has ever been the baseless dream of idealist mystic romanticism. The incidence of some hyperfervid afflations of supersensible dream experience in trance states has given ardent devotees the ground of claims to the possibility of "union with the infinite." How empty, unsubstantial and futile these extravaganzas of hypnotization really are is at last coming to be discerned by psychologists and thinkers of less maudlin sensibilities but more balanced intelligence. The human's salvation is to be effectuated by himself at his human status and with his human equipment, and not by dehumanizing himself. For in his human equipment is the seed of his divinity. If he destroy his humanity he ends the possibility of mothering that divinity to its maturity. He will not grasp total divinity at one fell swoop. And he will never "save" himself otherwise than relatively and partially, piecemeal, as it were. Never will he be divinized in finality. What he likes to think of in mystical illusion as his perpetual blessedness is just a paralysis of his present consciousness. His "salvation" is a continuing process, never ended. As he dies every day unto an "old nature," and is reborn every day anew, his "salvation" is recurrent with each day's sun. Doubtless the consummate hallucination with which humanity has deluded itself is the almost universal religious belief that at death we step from this life into a state of bliss that lasts forever. Mystical philosophy goes beyond that in folly by asserting that we can step into this eternal bliss without waiting for death, or evolution.

Sense and sanity breathe in several paragraphs in Radhakrishnan's analysis. We find him saying that the world expression brings out the rational nature of the whole. The soul's commitment to the flesh provides the mechanism by which spirit works ahead to higher state. What appears to be the iron law of dead mechanical necessity in the world of nature is the modality through which spirit will master the proper terms for the expression of its freedom. Freedom and karma are two aspects of the same reality. Karma is the modality of freedom. If God is immanent in the cosmos, his spirit resides in the machine. This would warrant one in saying, then, that the forms of ancient animism in religion were grounded in essential truth, however far they may have swung away into distortions.

Again the Hindu thinker writes that with the finite we can never reach the absolute, however near we may come to it. Pro-

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gress is a ceaseless growth or perpetual approximation. Samsara, or experience, he says, is intended to discipline the spirit. And he asserts that the Upanishads protest against the transfer of creative functions to mere matter if the latter is considered divorced from God. If matter is God's mode of expression, it can not be divorced from him. We are immersed in reality at all times; but it is reality for us, and its measure and quality depend upon the degree to which we can respond to its impacts by the quality of our apperceptions. Philosophic truth and understanding do not come to the feebleminded. Error is just the intrusion of inexperience and the imperfection of the instrument into the soul's grasp of the reality that confronts it. Radhakrishnan utters a great truth needing constant reiteration: "we must be saved from the malformation and miscarriage of our minds." It is to be noted that he does not say we are to be saved from the function of our minds, but from its imperfect functioning. And he is vigorous in saying that our minds rebel against the drive of dogmatic religion to smother the intellectual curiosity of people. Systematic religion has ever feared, and not entirely without some justification, the granting of full privilege to curiosity. It is all too likely to cause followers to roam too far afield or even to desert the fold. A free mind in religion becomes impatient with all formal authority and revolts against discipline and conformity. And again the philosopher testifies to the untenability of the teaching that the human spirit can retire into the contentless void declared to lie open to man's experience in ecstasies far above the world consciousness. A pure spirit, an abstract absolute, with nothing to struggle against, an actionless spiritual energy, a motionless being, all this is mere nothing. And he declares Jainism to be following a mirage in predicating such a possibility. The two opposing tendencies, spiritual and material, are in no sense (except in poetic dramatism) hostile. They are well adapted to each other, to promote the progress of the whole. The struggle of opposites to effect a happy balance is present in all grades of reality.

He gives forceful expression to the evil consequences of irrational thought. And it is a mighty pronouncement he makes in saying that "anarchy in thought leads to anarchy in morals." If we have not recognized this as having terrific practical consequences, it is time we do. Much damage, he adds, has been done to

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the moral nature of man by a superstitious belief in God. Many "good" men do devil's work, in the persuasion that it is divinely sanctioned. It is difficult to overestimate the gross bulk of evil caused in the world by the confusion of morality and religion,--one might add also, from the confusion of Scriptural allegory with alleged history and literal factuality; from the worship of a symbol instead of the idea conception it represents.

There is nothing beside the universal Self, the Atman. Yet, the discussion unfolds, there are the many. And the verdict is that if there is nothing but the One, and yet there are the many, logic would have to say that the One must be the many, and the many the One. There are many parts and organs to a human being; yet he is the one being. The universe is both a unit being differentiated and distributed into many portions, and many things organically unified in one composite being.

Again the confusion into which the debate has been thrown by the ill-defined use of the terms real and unreal becomes evident when the philosopher plunges into the dilemma which arises when we say that the so-called philosophical unreal world of becoming is actual; "though we do not know why." Obviously it is actual because it is the immediate form of reality to which we are equipped to respond and to cognize. It is actual because it registers its reality to us.

Again there is a plunge into the sophistry of technical epistemology when he says that there is a real, but we can not know it. And he adds that what we do know is not real. Its reality breaks down and disappears under test. A strange statement is that which declares that thought gives us knowledge of reality; but it is knowledge, not reality. We must call in something beyond thought and knowledge to give us reality. "If we want to grasp the real we must give up thought."

The tragic aspect of this is, as this work has adduced eminent authority in corroboration, that if we give up thought we have nothing left, at least nothing of higher capability, to give us reality. If we have not done astute thinking we will never develop the great and luminous faculty of intuition. Thought is the root and stem of intuition, and if the root and stem are neglected, how can the flower come forth? We have no right to give up thought, for that is to condemn us to perpetual ignorance; and in fact there is no way

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by which it can be given up, except by our inhibiting it by trance, or by self-destruction, both of which methods the Hindu philosophy offers us as practical procedures. It is admitted that "what thought reveals is not opposed to reality, but is revelatory of it." If the full implications of this admission are followed out, it condemns the mystical theses of Hindu thought and concedes the case for the reality that those theses deny. If thought gives us knowledge of reality, even if not reality itself, and what it reveals is not opposed to reality, we ought to conclude that thought is performing a great and beneficent function and cease disparaging it in comparison to intuition. It registers no failure of fucntion on the part of thought to say that it gives us knowledge of reality but not reality itself. We have no right to expect it to do things out of its province, and its function is well performed when it gives us knowledge. Evidently Hindu philosophy holds that knowledge of a thing is not the limit of our possibility of acquaintance with it; that beyond knowing it we must feel it, intuit it, experience it in some sort or way of realizing it that thought fails to give us. It thinks that knowledge does not bring us into sufficiently close contact with reality. Some "higher" faculty is necessary for that.

But knowledge gained by thought performs the inestimable service of enabling us to relate ourselves to experience by acquainting us with the actualities and the laws of life, so that we may harmoniously conform our lives to the order of which we are a part, and non-conformity with which subjects us to pain and wretchedness. It enables us to relate ourselves to the actual order with such complete affinity that the utmost of the beneficence which that ordained relationship can impart to us to expand our being is appropriable by us. By means of effectuating this harmonious relationship, thought puts us in such favorable position that the other "higher" modes of realizing the beatitude of life are rendered possible and operable, certainly more than if knowledge were lacking. In fact thought gives us knowledge of how to establish the possible conditions for this higher apprehension.

It is asking more of knowledge than is legitimate if we expect it to yield us the whole experience of perfect being. But surely it is the chief agent for giving us ever fuller realization of the heights and depths of real being possible to us. We could never attain these fuller realizations without it.

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Radhakrishnan has the fairness to say that the Upanishads do not maintain that intellect is a useless guide. (Many Hindu cult philosophers do.) The account of reality given by it is not false. (Many claim the opposite.) It fails, he says, only when it attempts to grasp the real in its fulness. Everywhere else it succeeds. What the intellect investigates is not the unreal, though neither is it the absolutely real. The real and the passing are complementary elements based on the one identity. Intellect need not be negated, but has only to be supplemented. And at last he says that a philosophy based on intuition is not necessarily opposed to reason and understanding. And finally the great admission is scored, when he says that the results of mystic intuition require to be subjected to logical analysis in the end.

"And it is only by this process of mutual cooperation and suplementation that one can live a sober life. The results of intellect will be dull and empty, unfinished and fragmentary, without the help of intuition; while intuitional insight will be blind and dumb, dark and strange, without intellectual confirmation . . . . Only be the comradeship of scientific knowledge and intuitive experience can we grow into true insight."

So it leaks out finally that in the realm of the predicated absolute perfection of life, high above the intellect, this "intuitional insight will be blind and dumb, dark and strange," and must in the end subject its findings and envisionings to the court of the intellect for judgment as to their true worth and validity. All this is what we are building up our brief to venture and declare on our own unrecognized authority. Now Radhakrishnan has said it for us. But can we not see--can the mystics not see--that if this is so, it disproves and overthrows every claim, every position which the negative philosophy has supported in asserting that the great consummative power of intuition can only perform its high function, in fact can only come to the perfection of its function when the intellect has been "killed out"?

This upper region into which mystical prepossessions invite us it not necessarily blind, dumb, dark and strange; but it will be prevented from being such only by our training it to distinguish between fact and fancy in the selection of its images by the sharp and subtle acuity of the intellect. If we crush and stamp out this power of the mind at the misguided behest of fanciful theory, we

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destroy the instrument which life, at the cost of an immense timeborn development, has provided for us to make unerring choice of the ideal forms that are to fill the upper vacuum. As Radhakrishnan has said, the ideal of the intellect is to achieve the unity that comprehends both subject and object. And from the knowledge that the mind is able to grasp as it interrelates the elements of truth, come the proper images and conceptions with which the blank field of the superconscious can be populated.

And always the catastrophic blunder that mystical persuasion has committed lies in its assertion that the unifying power of the intellect can construct these forms of absolute truth in complete disseverance from the world of objectivity. Perhaps it is truer to say that it presupposes the self-discovery of these forms of absolute verity without the use of the intellect at all. Mystical ideology would first dispossess and dismantle the intellect; then wait for the intuition to speak its piece, already prepared from the foundation of the creation. The nub of the refutation of this theorization is the revelation that the so-called intuition is nothing separate, above, independently transcending the intellect, but the flashing insight of the intellect itself in its surpassing genius. So far from being a faculty that supervenes in the high sphere of consciousness when the intellect is suppressed, it can never supervene at all if the intellect has not first worked in the area of experience and out of the exercise evolved the near-magical power to act with incredible immediacy and accuracy in swift cognitions. Without the long slow training of the intellect in preparatory stages there never would be any intuition.

A point of much importance is Radhakrishnan's statement that in the view of Indian thinkers knowledge and will are so closely related that no distinction is made between them, so that in fact they are both expressed by the one term cetana. If this is true, then the rank and function of the intellect are irrefutably established as of supreme importance, in no wise meriting belittlement. People act, and must do so, on what they know or fail to know. One wills to act because one knows something, knows how the will can have its desired object. To give a man knowledge is to give him the reasons for acting in specific ways. As fast as it is gained, knowledge lifts its possessor from fitful, distracted, wildly-aimed action, to action directed toward the high ends of beauty, truth and goodness.

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Without knowledge there could be no integration of life at all, no coordination of activity toward designed ends. Without knowledge the individual human would drift as aimlessly as a chip on the current, swept along or stopped by the accidents of the movement. And mystical presumption urges that to consummate our blessedness we must discard all knowledge, inhibit the use of the mind by which we obtain knowledge and enter what is asserted to be the temple of absolute being in a state of complete mental nakedness. If it be in any wise true that, as said, when knowledge is attained suffering is at an end, intellect, the builder of knowledge, must be recognized as the veritable savior and redeemer of the race. To deny it is crass ineptitude, a fatal blight on human understanding.

The peculiar argument advanced by idealist theory that the intellect may give us knowledge of reality, but fail to give us reality itself, must be further examined. For it poses in strong light the necessity of determining the relation of the two things, knowledge and reality. Is reality to be achieved by the human by coming to know it, or by some other mode? Can we have reality without knowing it? Is there a cognitive power transcending knowing, by which we apprehend reality? All the predications of Hindu philosophy seem to rest on the affirmation of the existence of a power or faculty transcending the knowing function of the mind. But, as Radhakrishnan has said, such a superior faculty could work to no advantage for humanity if its phenomena were not integrated with, or supplemented by the knowing function of the intellect. These observations give this transcendency of the higher power a transcendency that after all does not transcend. It still must call upon the lower. For the final effectuality of its operation it must depend upon the intellect.

Over such a question as that of determining whether--or how--the human being may experience reality without the intellectual procedure of knowing it, the mind developed in mortals at the present stage can involve itself in practically inextricable entanglement. After all it is probably a matter of nothing more than the more precise delimitation of the meaning of words. The word mind, for instance may be used to cover in its sense all that the mystics designate with their word intuition and the claimed states of transcendent consciousness. Likewise it would have to be determined whether the term knowledge can be used to cover

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not only mental apprehensions, but all states of conscious awareness of experience declared to transcend the purely mental function. And again, how shall reality itself be defined? Mystic theory asserts that the experience coming through sense, emotion and mind (the latter in its very narrowly delimited sense) do not possess reality, but that the experiences ensuing upon the crushing out of these three modes does possess reality. But never have the proponents of this position laid down any code of determinants by which one can know which of his experiences is real and which is not. Is such a code possible? From every appreciable point of view, it would seem not.

And again all debate hinges on the distinction, which seems never to be sharply delineated, between the reality of objects, or the universe itself, and the reality of the consciousness that apprehends the objects and the universe. Kant very deftly wove the two together in one formula: the reality of the object is a determination in the consciousness that surveys the object. He interwove the objective with the subjective. But often the debate uses the term reality with reference to the one side, excluding the other, and loosely confuses the issue. With pertinence to the issues of the controversy as they are raised in Hindu philosophy, since the debate hinges on the reality or non-reality of man's subjective states almost entirely, it seems that it should be possible to agree that any conscious experience is a real experience, or real as an experience. As intimated earlier, for a thing to be at all, it must be real, whether as object or experience. But the mystics insist in identifying reality with only the one--and they call it the final--grade of consciousness, namely the totally unconditioned.

Some portions of Albert Schweitzer's Indian Thought and Its Development are pertinent here and call for comment. He writes (p. 38) that

"One must never forget that the Brahmanic doctrine is not to be understood as if union with the Brahman can result from reflection by the light of reason. Many passages of the Upanishads indeed give this impression. But the real belief of the Brahmans is that man does not attain to union with the Brahman by means of any achievement of his natural power of gaining knowledge, but solely by quitting the world of the senses in a state of ecstasy and thus learning the reality of pure Being."

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Here is indication, if it were needed, that we have not been wrestling with a straw man labeled Hindu philosophy, but with the real postulates of that philosophy. We have not caricatured it to render it more easily vulnerable. Here is the evidence that Indian systems disdain all man's "natural power of gaining knowledge." Earthly knowledge will in no wise equip man to take conscoius stock of ultimate reality; on the contrary it will stand as a barrier between him and reality. It must therefore be swept out of the way.

What Schweitzer writes (p. 37) follows as natural corollary to the passage above:

"So in the Upanishads we find a whole series of saying in which complete renunciation of the world is recommended and praised as the only sensible attitude. The true Brahmins . . . . were those who desired neither sons nor property, but were only concerned with the Eternal and had therefore given up everything and gone forth into the world as beggars . . . . But to become one with the Brahman not only demands renunciation of the world, but in addition the concentration of the spirit on the Supra-sensuous. Detailed instructions on how to practice this concentration are given in the Upanishads. The repetition of the sacred sound 'Om' plays a great part in such exercises in self-submergence. What is aimed at in this Yoga practice is ecstasy, the physical experience of union with pure Being."

True to the analysis we find here the doctrine of the renunciation of the world and a focusing of the whole of consciousness upon a state of inner intentness that shuts out the world altogether. But of particular interest and significance for the purposes of the present critique is what is said as to the repetition of the sacred sound "Om" to induce "self-submergence." Mr. A. P. Sinnett, a college-mate of the poet Alfred Tennyson at Cambridge University, says that Tennyson declared he had been able to hypnotize himself by repeating his own name a certain number of times. A point which this essay has been at pains to demonstrate and which must be regarded as of no slight moment, is the establishment of the preposterous miscalculation in the mystic's rash identification of the human states superinduced by trance with "union with the absolute," "union with Brahman," and similar extravagant hyperbolic assumptions thus expressed. It ought long ago to have been seen--and to give us sanity on such things is one of the great

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purposes of the evolutionary development of the intellect--that if the total purpose, end, supreme and final consummation of absolute being is a matter that can be achieved by insignificant creatures such as humans on a minor planet by a bit of hypnotic manipulation of consciousness, a mere jugglery of psychic legerdemain, we face an anticlimax so staggering in its defeat of our faith and our hopes of real grandeur of being that we must regard the whole enterprise of religion as an insensate hoax, delusion and folly. We make of the grand apotheosis of humanity a mountebank's trick. It is at any rate by now apparent, in consequence of the phenomena of hypnotism, that an immense volume of religious experience that has been extolled as the human's near attainment of equality with God, has been nothing but the unanalyzed exploitation of hysteria and hypnotism. Consummations that must be worthy of man's age-long expectations must be the product of ages of growth, not the result of weird and bizarre toying with the magic of a moment. But India cares not for the idea or the process of growth, condemns the nature in whose body spiritual growth must have its roots and utterly disregards the need of time for the perfection of conscious life. India disagrees flatly with all that the processes of life manifest as to cosmic purpose and the means and methods of its universal achievement, and hotly seeks some way of obliterating it all from consciousness. Since it finds itself thwarted in its effort to obliterate the external world, it flies to the only possible alternative,--the destructoin of consciousness. Albert Schweitzer summarizes the whole history of Indian philosophy in the statement that the one dominant motive of that philosophy has been "world and life negation," which, however, finding itself baffled both physically and logically at nearly every turn, has had to make concessions to "world and life affirmation." And even when it is forced to concede a modicum of value to life, it does so on the premises that such value is realized in the education of the ego as to the practical modes of escaping life's burden in the speediest possible manner. It will be for the judgment of historians and the verdict of humanity to discover how extensively and disastrously this preachment of life negation has blighted the happiness of the human race.

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