The Ultimate Canon of Knowledge
by Alvin B Kuhn

Chapters 6 through 10

CHAPTER SIX

THE NATURAL REVELATION

It seems certain that St. Paul had been deeply indoctrinated with the Greek legacy of wisdom from a hoary past. He was educated at the impressionable age of one of the three most important centers of Hellenic philosophy, Tarsus. We should not be surprised to hear the great Apostle echoing the Hermetic maxim in the clearest terms. We find such a succinct declaration of it in his Epistle to the Romans (1:20): "That which may be known of God is manifest. For the invisible things of him from the foundation of the world are clearly seen, being understood from those things which are made." Having, in the aura of Plato’s idealist emphasis, told us that the realities of the unseen world are far greater than those of the visible world, he admonishes the Roman brethren that "so they are without excuse" if they fail to discern the nature of God in his mundane revelation. Whereas philosophy has droned for centuries that the unseen things are the reality behind the visible phenomena, Paul says that the seen things are the reality of the unseen; in Hermetic idiom, the below is the substance of the above. As Hermes had amplified his formula on the Emerald Tablet, the sun is the father of all life and truth for man; the moon is its mother, and the wind carries it in its sweep over the earth.

But we find the acme of clear and ringing proclamation of the great truth in a concise statement in the Talmud of the Jews, which could have come out of the Hermetic spring through Philo, the Jewish philosopher. The ancient Hebrew esoteric Kabalism was in close touch and affinity with Egypt’s esoteric profundity. It states the axiom with the utmost directness and simplicity and therefore with the greatest cogency: "If thou wilt know the invisible, open wide thine eyes on the visible." Perhaps this is the acme of all philosophical instruction given to the human race. It hits us with the inescapable logic of obvious fact: the visible universe is the work of the creator; he puts his mind into his work; study that work and you will know the mind that created it. Aristotle had arrived at that consummative conclusion, which had long before been proclaimed by both Egypt and India, that the divine thought and the objects of that thought in the world are the same.

The great Greek philosopher’s dialectic was based on his predication that the material mode of being was pure potentiality, which could not be converted into reality until infused and enlivened by the energy of spirit, by which transaction it achieved its only title to entification and meaning. It received its gift of reality from an act of mind upon it. Hence neither matter nor spirit could claim the status of real being until matter and mind-form had effected a union in a concrete structure, matter being the passive instrument, mind the active agent. The formless material embodiment thus came to be the concrete substantialization of the ideogram of mind. The act of spirit on matter established an identity between the lower physical and the upper noumenal. The philosopher spoke of the product as a "mixture" of the two modes. He harped constantly on the theme that in the world of inanimate things, and there only, do we find the ideal shapes of the real essences that Plato wished to grasp in their ethereality, those archetypal images of transcendent reality. All bodies are composed of sheer potentiality of matter and actual forms of thought and exist only through this conjunction.

One of the most voluble expressions of the identity between the two poles of being is found in the Zohar, the voluminous text embodying the system of esoteric teaching of the early theosophical Hebrews, the Kabalists. Constantly reiterated is the Hermetic principle: the spiritual above is imaged in the material world below. That which is unmanifest in the immateriality of divine consciousness comes to manifestation in this underworld. It speaks of the undisclosed spiritual reality, which, however, is disclosed here on earth. That which is hidden on high is revealed down here. And the conclusion that necessarily arises out of this knowledge is that for the interests of the soul’s orderly progression in the flesh, the two segments of the human duality must be unified in a synthetic of consciousness and its objects. And, it is worthy of emphasis that the Kabalist thought laid insistent stress upon the law of life that in the tensional relation between spirit above and body below, with the active potency resting with the spirit, the latter remained incapable of the exertion necessary to deploy its aggressive energies in the interest of the passive lower or bodily part, until it was aroused and its powers awakened by the call of the entity below. The higher nature was unable to act for the benefit of the lower until the latter provided the incentive, as well as the conditions, for the exertion of its latent capabilities. All realistic occult science envisaged the soul as bound in dormancy under the coarser sluggish vibrations of the body--poetized as its prison-house and tomb--so that it had to await the higher perfection of the organism for the implementation of its higher purposes. The relevance of this basic insight for all religion and philosophy is tremendous, since it establishes for spiritual cultism the truth that the initiative for spiritual growth must originate with man at his human level. He dare not sit still and expect the gods to descend and raise him up. The god in us stands ever ready to dispense his largesse of blessing and beatitude, but he must wait for man to invite and facilitate the influx. Hence we find the sacred scriptures exhorting us to seek, to knock, to beseech fervently for the beneficence desired. Man below must at least clear the path for deity to reach him, through the jungle of bodily passions and sensualities.

The Zohar quotes R. Judah as commenting: "That which God has made on earth corresponds to that which he has made in heaven, and all things below are symbols of that which is made above." This plain statement virtually summarizes the message of our study. It is Plato extended and actualized by Aristotle. But Plato swings strongly to the Stagirite’s view when he says in the Phaedrus that there is only one way to take care of things beneficently, and that is to give to each the food and motions natural to it, so that in adapting itself to the harmonies and beauties of the natural life it shares here, each soul becomes attuned unto the noumenal thought aboriginal in the universe. He dilates on the beauty which the soul has enjoyed in heaven and longs to regain here. In the Phaedrus he says:

I repeat again that we saw her there shining in company with the

celestial forms; and coming to earth we find her here, too, shining

in clearness through the most transparent apertures of sense.

Despised, dishonored, vituperated as the senses have been by religion as the instruments of Satan himself, Plato reminds us that it is through their ministry that man is to regain his felicitous rapport with God. Plato agrees with the Zohar that, however distorted, shadowy and blurred is our recognition of the ideal forms now embodied in nature, still it is our even unsensing contact with them, our friction with them, that awakens the recollection of that divine enchantment they held for us in the empyrean. It is this encounter of the soul with the existential reproduction of the divine ideas that gives the soul the felicity of its divine reminiscence. The consciousness is one in the subject and the object, and it is the brushing of the one against the other that lights the spark latent in the unconscious. The soul is bound to recover her lost memory of divine things. What seems not to have been sufficiently clarified in this situation is that, instead of a recovery of memory of a more perfectly cognized knowledge of sublime truth experienced in the superconscious felicity of heaven before descent, it must be for the individual ego the first, the pristine, awakening to knowledge that was never as yet roused out of latency and germinal potentiality to self-conscious functioning. Plato’s theory of the soul’s felicitous acquaintance with and enjoyment of the divine ideas in its antecedent life in celestial regions subsumes as a premise for his idealist system a presupposition that seems never to have been subjected to challenge, yet which would appear to be summarily overthrown by very simple and direct logical dialectic. It has ever been a predilection of religious thought to include everything in any way connected with "heaven" in the category of "perfection." Imperfection may be the state of things on earth; but in heaven, all is complete. No consciousness is less than the fulness of perfect beatitude and bliss. No condition of being is in default in any way. Looked at with closer scrutiny, however, the theory, as basic in Plato’s theorization, seems to be almost childishly naive and unsupportable. And to see it so, one has only to hold it up beside the theses which underlie the generally accepted views which rationalize soul’s incarnation and earthly life for souls at all. These acceptances are virtually unanimous to the effect that souls are sent to earth, as Christianity assumes that Jesus was sent to earth to suffer and "die," for training, for experience conducive to growth, for education in the work of cooperating with the Father in his creative activity. But how can a soul that is bathed in the blessedness of heavenly felicity and the transfiguring power of divine ideation be in need of education through coarse experience? If a soul is reveling in the light and beauty of supernal glories unknown to man, from what status of the situation springs the necessity of its being torn away from that beatific life and thrust down into an underworld of darkness, ignorance and the actual dangers of being lost in sensuality and blind waywardness? Why the deprivation of its benign happiness above and its loss of these memories of felicity?

Then what principle of divine logic or divine necessity becomes the ground for the rationalization of the procedure which drags a soul away from its achieved felicity and puts it under the necessity of recovering it? And if it had won beatitude, lost it and won it back, what assurance is there that it may not lose it again? In fact on the basis of the doctrine of reincarnation of souls in many successive bodies on earth, a more or less universal obsession of the religious consciousness of antiquity, the soul would merely repeat the ordeal of losing and making the lifelong effort to recover its heavenly memories each time it descended into body. Unless it is an integral predication in this theory that the soul returns to the empyrean after each life below positively enriched, advanced in evolution, exalted in capacity for larger and more exuberant life, with expanded consciousness, the endless repetition of loss and recovery of blissfulness of the seraphic sort intimated by Plato would be definitely an irrational futility, the subjection of the soul to a treadmill routine of the most stressful sort that would never advance the soul’s interests the least degree.

The confusion and the wreckage of rationality here has been occasioned largely by the attribution of a wrong connotation to this word "perfect," "perfection." By direct etymological root it means "finished," completed, aim achieved and process ended, final stage reached. In applying this meaning to the embryo souls, the progeny of God’s mind, as they are projected from the mind of the Father in the noumenal realms above, one sees at once how impermissible it is to connect the term "perfect" with these fledgelings of divine mind. How can perfection be imputed to them when they have not even begun their climb up the ladder of evolution? They are the "Innocents" of the Christian legend (the fabled victims of Herod’s fear), the "younglings in the egg" of the Egyptian allegory, the Kumaras, or young "virgin" males, "celibate young men" of Hindu myth--young divine souls not yet "married", by incarnation, to their female counterparts, the fleshly human bodies. If the word "perfect" be insisted upon, it could be applied to them in the narrow sense that they are perfect in themselves at their stage; that is, that, even though only in their infancy as spirits, they are "perfect" as such. This argument would rest on the assertion that, as between grown oak and tiny acorn, even the acorn can be perfect--as an acorn, not, of course, as an oak.

And perhaps this side-light on the question enables us to see how the confusion has invaded this area of religious conception. The common and uncritical religious mind has always held this vague conception that associates "perfection" and finality with heaven. But heaven is also the place of beginnings, and how can we attribute perfection to beginnings? This failure to distinguish between the mere perfection of condition (at any stage of process) and perfection as completion of cycle, has thrown the religious mind quite off balance in this regard. Lacking any certain knowledge, or at least rational theory, such as that of reincarnation, as to how conscious life achieves continuity, without which a philosophy of life is impossible (since that which ends and disappears can have no history), the massive idea in the general mind is that one earthly span of existence ends the soul’s brief spasm of mortal agony and opens its eternal career to some sort of "spiritual" existence. From many points of view this naive persuasion is insupportable dialectically. Until we have more certain knowledge of the basic terms of the relation between known physical existence and predicated spiritual existence, with such an entity as a soul passing, either once or many times, from one state to the other, we have the premises for neither a criterion of "perfection" nor of reality. Is the experience of souls "real" when they are in embodied residence on earth or in disembodied state in heaven? If it is so in one state and not in the other, by what standard is "reality" judged? If God’s thoughts turn into earthly things, and soul’s heavenly dreams are realized, in whole or part, on earth, how can reality in the one case and unreality in the other be asserted? If the soul has experience in both states, how can reality be imputed to the one experience and denied to the other? Until we have, as said, trustworthy factual data answering these questions, we are philosophizing from practically blind premises. Plato told us much about the soul as a migrant through the regions of being and of history, but he seems to have failed to maintain the equilibrium between the two worlds of existence for the soul entity, inclining to glorify its disembodied existence and experience in the noumenal world to the disparagement of the reality and value of its embodied sojourn or sojourns on earth. His successor Aristotle sought to adjust the balance more equitably. His system seems the more rational.

It therefore seems necessary to subject Plato’s charming theory of reminiscence of lost paradisaical felicity to the stricture that earthly gains in spiritual intuition and vision of divine things are not strictly a recovery of lost genius but more likely the soul’s initial achievement of higher vision. For this is the divine purpose or motive of the Father in pushing his Sons out of heaven’s Eden into the limbo of earth. It is for their education, their chance to convert Edenic potentiality into concrete conscious actuality, as Hermes distinctly says, here on earth. Our chief concern with this phase of the dialectic is the role that nature plays in this process of the soul’s spiritual education through the stresses and the logic of living experience.

If Plato did concede, in the Phaedrus, that "all the great arts require discussion and high speculation about the truths of nature; hence come loftiness of thought and completion of execution," it remained for another poet of lofty thoughts, the English William Wordsworth, about twenty-three hundred years later, to chant in lyric verse perhaps the most exalted panegyric ever sung in tribute to nature’s elevating power. Our work could not well omit his lines from the "Tintern Abbey" poem. Prefacing with the statement that he has felt in nature the presence of a spirit that inspires in him the most elevated thoughts and "rolls through all things," he says that he is therefore

. . . well pleased to recognize

In nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

He expatiates on the theme at greater length, saying that nature can so inform the mind, so impress it with lofty thoughts, that not all the dreary intercourse of daily life can destroy the deep assurance "that all which we behold is full of blessings." Nature, he says, can generate in his consciousness a blessed mood of exalted feeling, so powerful that he is lifted into a veritable trance of ecstasy, in which he is "laid asleep in body" and becomes a living soul, and "sees into the life of things."

Of ancient thinkers following Plato, none has surpassed the Neoplatonist Plotinus in his insight into the relation between soul and sense. An insight into the profound dialectic of his analysis of the mission of the soul in descending from the realms of pure intellectual being into the world where truth, beauty and blessedness are seen only in transient partial glimpses, would be most enlightening. This great visionary of the truths of the soul centers his main thought effort upon the "philosophy" of the soul’s descent into the mundane sphere. Firstly, it was God’s maneuver aimed at effecting the conversion of chaos into a cosmos, by projecting the units of his spiritual mind into the physical universe so that they might leaven the material mass with the interior dynamic of self-conscious intelligence. In this he agrees with Hermes, that the procedure was directed to "the performance of the miracle of the One Thing." Even though suffering the temporary dismantling of its spiritual integrity in scattering its divine bread upon the waters, the soul sent from God bears in its tiny unit an inextinguishable spark of the divine creative fire, and if it does for an initial period permit that spark to be almost snuffed out by the "moist nature" of the sensual instincts, it will become a living center of radiation for the force of the God-mind itself in its quarter of the creation. It bears its portion of the divine formative fire into the heart of matter, there to work its transforming power on matter. God’s second object in sending the souls of his Sons into the world, the philosopher analyses, was the necessity of their education through the experience of wrestling with the opposition of matter under the terms of polarity. If they were, as designed, to become the coadjutors with the Father in his creative enterprise, they had to be placed in relation to matter that would develop masterly control of its atomic energies. They were sent here, as Plotinus says, "for the purpose of developing their own powers and faculties." Most significantly he says: "It is not enough for souls merely to exist; they must show what they are capable of begetting." They are to impregnate the universe with intelligent directive power. The dual divine motive for plunging souls into incarnation is, then, the schooling of their own intelligence toward mastery of their own divine intelligence, and then the use of its mastership in the developing economy of the total creative design.

Plotinus announces in this connection a truth that could be of inestimable value to religious understanding if well digested. In declarations that flout openly the ideas that the soul besmirches its spiritual purity by contamination from earthly bodily sensuality, this philosopher stands almost alone in asserting that the soul "need not regret knowing the nature of evil and vice" in her contact with body and its sensualities. It is this very contact with "evil" that is going to be the stimulus and goad to her education. It needs this adverse condition "for the purpose of developing its own faculties and powers," which would without it lie fallow and stagnant. Soul would not know the nature and extent of her own potential if she did not wrestle with the inertia of matter. To encompass eventual divine poise and tranquility, she must "begin by considering the images stationed at the outer precincts." Remote as these external objects seem to be from their source in divine mind, they still bear the impress of their original thought formation and can thus be a reminder of the eternal truth and beauty.

"This universe," he declares, "is a living organized effective

complex, all comprehensive, displaying an unfathomable wisdom. How,

then, can any one say that it is not a clear image, beautifully

formed, of the intellectual verities? No one seeing the loveliness

lavished in the world of sense. . . could be so dull-witted as not to

be carried by all this to recollection and gripped by reverent awe

. . . Such a one could have neither fathomed this world nor have had

any vision of that other. We must recognize that even in the world

of sense and part, there are things of a loveliness comparable to

that of the celestials, which fill us with veneration for their

Creator and convince us of their origin in the divine forms, which

show how ineffable is the beauty of the Supreme."

Here surely is the ringing asseveration of Thales some seven hundred years before Plotinus, that "the earth is full of gods." So realistically was this sense of the divine animation of the earth that in the imagination of the Greek a deity of some rank, be it Naiad, oread, dryad, mermaid, nymph, faun, gnome or other spirit, lurked in every dell, stream, or grove. It may be conceded that a gross crystallization of the spiritistic concept traduced the idea into a form so crude as to rebuff intelligence and to condition the pagan consciousness for acceptance of the Christian shibboleth "Great Pan is dead" when it reverberated from the lips of the fanatical pietists of the Jesus cult about the first A.D. century. But it must be asked at the same time what chilling winds, blowing over the general consciousness deadened the quick and mercurial sense of the actual presence of deific mind in the natural world. However grotesquely personalized the conception could have become in bucolic mentality, it is from any angle distressing and fatalistic that the pagan spell of a warmer and more directly intimate kinship between man and nature effervesced out of the ancient consciousness. If Christianity may have brought its devotees to a closer awareness of the pervading influence of God in the spiritual area of our life, it did so at the cost of the loss of that enlivening sense of the nearness of the divine presence on the physical side. This loss must be accounted the greater one, since in the balance between the inner spirit and the outer world which a truly beneficent philosophy must inculcate, paganism idealized the deific constitution of nature without derogating, much less nullifying, the function and power of the spiritual forces, whereas on its part Christianity gave all glory and paid all worship to the spiritual element and completely shattered the equilibrium by negativing utterly the physical weight in the dichotomy. The Christian murder of Great Pan cut the currents of a lively and sustaining sympathy between man and nature, so that from that day there set in over the Western world an obtuseness and insensibility toward the natural world, which, ever hardening over the centuries, has led to a ruthless wantonness in the human attitude toward the soil and its vegetation, with widespread devastation of its bounties and its beauties. As between a civilization deeply softened by a profound reverence for the assumed presence of deity in the earth, and one dulled to any such sensitivity, one must give the rating to the pagan over the Christian.

Heraclitus, doubtless in the same tenor of philosophical thought as Thales, declared that "Wisdom is to see true things and to act according to nature, listening to its voice." (Fragment 112). In consequence true religion must spring from the merging of one’s thought with the divine thought, which is a living fire pervading and animating the universe. He states that the Logos is both the divine thought that percolates through all nature and also the human thought in so far as it participates in that single cosmic and eternal movement. This profound sense of the identity of the truly balanced human thought with the living spirit of the universe was the primary and basic foundation of the Greek philosophical system. The perfect harmony of man’s thought with the mind of the Logos, Heraclitus saw, would fulfil all the demands of the moral and spiritual laws of life.

Passing over the abundant witness of medieval philosophy to the kinship of mind and nature, and especially the resurgence of concern with nature that came with the great Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth century--a veritable back-to-nature sweep in all essential elements--a cursory view can be taken of modern testimony bearing on the theme.

It can hardly be denied that one of the most telling blows that cut the chain of ecclesiasticism and dogmatism that had bound the European mind in fetters for fifteen centuries was John Locke’s declaration that there could be nothing in the mind that had not entered through the gateway of the senses. While, to be sure, this startling pronouncement did not commit philosophy to a gross sensualism, it did enforce attention to the relation of idealism to the outer nature.

Spinoza recognized the parallelism between thought and outward things in his notable summarization of the concept: The history and connection of ideas is the same as the history and connection of things. He insists that all things in nature must involve and express the idea of God as their primary raison d’etre. We come to greater knowledge of God in proportion as we understand natural things more clearly. The mind itself becomes one with the eternal Logos to the extent that it seizes upon the primal archai of truth as they are illustrated by natural objects.

The prodigious elaboration of philosophical speculation that was carried on by Medieval scholasticism must not be overlooked in the survey. Its most profound elucidation was the work of the great Aquinas, denominated tersely as "Thomism." What place was given to nature in it?

The ultimate Thomistic position is a reasonable compromise between the Lockian sensualism and the Platonic idealism, between the world and the mind. It can be succinctly stated in the form: knowledge begins in the senses and is perfected in the intellect. This formula allows for the play of both sides of human nature, and permits both to contribute their influence to the final summation of experience.

Aquinas bridges a wide gap in the dialectic between the unknowable thing-in-itself and pure consciousness, by the device of postulating an intermediate agency inherent in the divine endowment of man, the active power of the imagination. If in abstract dialectic he conceded to Kant that consciousness, as being immaterial, can not become identical with a material object, and therefore can not know it in reality, nevertheless this active agent, the imagination, is able to "desensualize" or psychically disintegrate the physical object, so as to transform it from unknowable object into a mental image or ghost of its reality, clear enough to bring it into man’s conceptual world as an object of knowledge. So if they are to be truly understood, objects must be illumined by the mind.

The great Kant, though not preoccupied with the theme as central in his schematism, gives nature due place in his critique of our mental mechanics. Nature as necessary foundation for true conceptuality is implicit in his famous maxim: "Thoughts which lack content are empty; precepts which lack concepts are blind." Without the power of sense we should be aware of no object; without the power of intellect we could think of no object. From these predications there springs by irrefutable dialectic the necessity that all sound human ratiocination must be the conjunct interfusion of thought and thing. Contending that we could not know the world as thing, yet he could not deny to it its indefeasible factuality, and its substantiality for thought. Nature furnished the raw material for our psychic reinterpretation. It presented something that mind needed to introspect and interpret. Cognition without objects is void, he said, and would be meaningless. There would be nothing for the faculty of thought to work on.

The Prussian thinker speaks volubly of the metaphysics of nature. By this he refers to the superworld of laws, principles, intuitionally conceived structures of logic and meaning which exist a priori in the transcendental area of the human consciousness, to which he has given the name of "categories." Nature yielded its meaning to us when we discerned its phenomena and gauged their significance by the rule of these categories. He fully acknowledged the dependence of our ideation upon "our sensual contact with the objective world, however imperfectly we could know it":

"But the existence of external things is absolutely requisite for

this purpose; so that it follows that internal experience is itself

possible only mediately and through external experience."

It is surely to be wondered if the Konigsburg philosopher ever followed the dialectic of this determination to the limit of its implications. If, as he avers, it be true that our highest intellectual or intuitional cognitions of truth are dependent upon and mediated by our experience of outward things, then it must be concluded that the content, the form and the structure of our conceptions are determined primarily by the shape of these external objects and phenomena. Would this not have instructed him that he might better look outside to find the forms and norms that give shape to our truth concepts rather than search for them in the vacuous upper region of transcendental idealities? Might it not have occurred to him that, inasmuch as those outward things had already been structuralized by divine thought, presumably the same source from which the transcendental a priori forms and molds had emanated, there could be expected to be an identity between the two? Some deep intimation of this identity of inner and outer it was that swept Fichte, then Schelling, and then Hegel on to grandiose conceptions of such a harmony between the two modes of being, spiritual and material, in the universe. It had of course been a recondite perception of the Hindus long before. We do hear him saying:

"All phenomena exist in one nature, and must so exist, inasmuch

as without this a priori unity, no unity of experience, and conse-

quently no determination of objects in experience is possible."

If all things exist in one nature, there can be little debate over the question whether reality for man lies in the subjective realm of idealism or the objective realm of nature. Each wing of the bird of life and mind can carry the body of true existence only if it is balanced by the other. And the unity of experience Kant speaks of is the result of this balance.

Whatever accord with truth our philosophy may claim at present owes an immense debt to the German savant for his revelation of the hollowness of the claims of those who expound a philosophy of extreme and uncompromising transcendental idealism, such as the supra-intellectual absolutistic nihilism in some Hindu systems and in mysticism. That reality is to be achieved by transcending all sense and even thought in a void above them, while consciousness is stilled in a repose that annihilates all sentience, Kant denounces as the abject folly of unreason. Of such thinkers he speaks contemptuously, saying that "they beat their wings in vain against the eternal walls." The air of that region of the void is too thin to buoy up the wings of consciousness.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MIND’S SOURCE IN NATURE

It is perhaps true to say that the concept of the unity of world soul and nature was carried to its highest point of accentuation in the splendid surge of idealist realism in the great romantic movement that swept German thought to its finest flowering following the Kantian stimulus. If Kant had contended that we can not know external things as they are in themselves, reaction to this determination was certainly not in the direction away from nature. It did not indict nature as valueless in the search for knowledge or aid as an incitement to spiritual intuition. In fact Kant’s work spurred a recoil of thought back upon nature, enhancing its function and significance to the highest degree. If nature could not declare its own order of being to us, might it not be able to reveal to us something of that Logoic thought that created it? Could it perhaps be the voice of the Logos, the spokesman for God? Was it not the self-revelation of the creative mind and purpose?

This at any rate was the thrilling concept that gripped the German philosophic mind and carried it to its highest elevation perhaps in the brain of Schelling. It would be an enchanting revel to quote liberally from the flights of this exuberant spirit into the airy region of this alluring philosophy. In his The Philosophy of Nature, he expands the theme of the world as the epiphany of the creative Logos. His axial thesis may be condensed and consummated in one brief citation: "The system of nature is at the same time the system of our mind. Nature is God’s mind made visible, and mind is nature made invisible." This is as forthright a manifesto of the doctrine as could be made. In the creation we see the marvel of the God-mind expressing itself. "Nature," he felicitously says, "is the cosmic process in the bud stage." The poetic mind sees nature, as the stage antecedent and preparatory to the emergence of spirit, standing to spirit as bud to rose.

Another German thinker of eminence was Schiller. His view of nature may be graphically summarized in a sentence from his Philosophical Letters: "The universe is a thought of deity. This ideal thought form overflowed into actuality, and the world born thereof has realized the plan of its Creator."

While Hegel only confirms and further applies Schelling’s theorization, his contribution to its authentic claim to veracity is too great to be omitted from the survey. The historical and the rational natures are in substance one, he asserts. And--a most profound discernment--it is only because life has in the beginning--as Heraclitus argued--split itself into two opposing forces, that it can and must reintegrate itself in the finale. The necessity for the division--the inevitable query of naive logic--is seen in the law of polarity, positive against negative, since without the balance of conscious mind against unconscious matter nothing could be created; and without the expression of his will and purpose in fresh creation God himself would stagnate in non-being. Creation could not take place as long as God remained asleep in his unity. Creation requires a thinking planning creator and matter with which to create; and these two are arrayed in tension against each other only when polarized as opposite forces. Hegel’s elucidation of the dialectical necessity for the dichotomy of spirit and matter is perhaps the most inexpugnable since the day of Plotinus, and it is a contribution vital for all philosophical exposition henceforth.

Hegel in his early writing asserted that the Greeks were masters of their own inner and outer life, and so had no need of theological systems or ecclesiastical institutions. The moral law was instinctive in their consciousness in an natural undisturbed harmony with reason, as their whole life was in complete harmony with nature. (This logic can with equal truth be applied to the ancient Egyptians.) Hegel saw that truth and beauty, and goodness with them, are intellectually represented to man in and by nature. Nature faces us with its undeniable spell of beauty; it must be true; and, except in much Hindu thought, must be good. Spiritual life, he says, objectifies itself to itself, and thus turns back upon itself and swings full circle for the purpose of self-enrichment. Inner life is revealed by a symbolic extrusion of itself in the outer world, and the reflex from the outer transforms it into a vital inner experience. In this experience, soul completes a synthesis of itself with its own objectivity. The active intellectual nature of soul, through the ordeal of separation and reunion of its subjective and objective phases, achieves its perfect self-recognition. In short it could not come to know itself until it has precipitated an objectification of itself outward in matter and can thus observe and study itself. Intellect, he affirms, is not an element or faculty separated from and opposed to spirit, as so much mystical propensity has insisted, but it is a phase or moment of spirit itself. Therefore its determinations, if logically unimpeachable, can not impugn the nature and purposes of the total spiritual being. This is a most important principle, since intellect has been derogated with the charge that through its analytic processes it dissolves the primal unity of life and thought into multiplicity and so distracts and confuses the soul’s pristine "vision of wholes." The rebuttal of this unbalanced judgment is seen in the primary fact that life itself has initially broken away from unity, dispersing its outward movement into infinite plurality, and it thus becomes the business of intellect to analyze the endless diversity in such a way as to discern the jig-saw interrelation of the parts, and so to turn the analysis into the ultimate synthesis. Putting it a little differently, Hegel says that what the intellect separates--rather what life has separated--and objectifies, spirit reunites and resubjectivizes. Human thinking accomplishes this by the logic of reason and its highest expression is intuition, which, like intellect, is an integral element in the unity of total consciousness. This logic, he says, is a logic not only of knowledge, of thought, of the living self, but also of basic being, existence and reality. In this reach of insight into the nature of Geist, or spirit, one commentator well observes, Hegel has achieved the inseparable connection between mind and spirit, between the human and the divine, and it must be rated as a great philosophical feat.

In a notable passage, the German thinker develops as clear a dialectical elucidation of the necessity for the incarnation of souls in mortal bodies as modern speculation has at any time advanced. Plotinus had enunciated this dialectic in masterly fashion in the third century. "To actualize itself," Hegel writes, "to work out the basic identity of ideal and real, mind has to wander through the spheres of Nature, as its great opponent, its own ‘nothing,’ and it has to find its own essence in its opposite," as the latter reflects back to it its own basic forms. Nature reflects the soul’s own divine forms back to it. In heaven it may, as Plato predicates, bathe its consciousness in the eternal verities. But, just as the acorn can not comprehend its oakness, nor the human child its blissful immersion in pure ideality, soul-mind must leave paradise in order to make unconscious ideality consciously real to its slowly-evolving self-awareness, as that is born and matures through battling with the external forms. "The mind," he expounds, "must return from its apostasy as ‘victor over itself,’". Paradoxically to be sure, the soul must leave its home in heaven in its youth and immaturity in order to meet itself returning in its maturity. As the eye can not turn to inspect itself, the soul must see itself pictured in the forms which its parent has projected in nature, which forms are

the likeness of itself. In the static inertness of unified being, consciousness can not become aware of itself, can not objectify itself to itself. It must brace itself ideally against itself materially to become self-conscious. Spirit becomes acquainted with its own selfhood by looking its material opposite in the face. Spirit plunges to its own "death" as spirit when it goes forth to parade in the world of substance, and then stands off and watches itself as it stalks through the worlds. Thus it endures "death" on the cross of matter, but in the reflex it recovers its true selfhood and arises anew from the "dead." "There is neither being nor life without this antagonism, this self-negation, this death."

Making a daring leap ahead in the field of modern speculation toward the conclusion that matter and mind are essentially one, or that matter is stamped with the impress of mind, that the two exist as a dually conditioned monism, Hegel boldly proclaims that, "since the Absolute is intrinsically Thought, the doctrine of thinking must be the doctrine of being." The world would then indeed be the crystallization of the divine Thought. Vigorously expressed is his assertion of the falsity of the position of those, predominantly Oriental philosophies, which seek to eliminate the conflict between the soul and the world by dismantling the apparatus of the sensual, the emotional and even the mental human equipment. In place of this blind effort to kill the influence of the world and man’s modes of experience with it, his preachment is to apply the intellectual faculty to the task of rationalizing the conflict. Conflict is not to be dissolved, but to be understood, and so seen as beneficent, not a miscarriage of divine intent. For its issues are the body of experience which constitute the soul’s education. To destroy the conflict untimely would be to take the child out of school.

In full accord with Hegel’s view, the author of a work, Philosophy and Ideological Conflict, Charles S. Seely, writes that everything in the universe has an opposite, and nothing can exist without its counterpart; one explains anything in terms of its opposite. If one is destroyed, the other disappears with it. Many writers speak in similar vein.

In a work, God in Search of Man, A. J. Heschel says that the German romantic movement, itself owing much of its impetus to the prior Italian Renaissance, "resurrected nature," and the influence lingers to the present. It placed nature in a position of close to ultimate significance. Enthusiasts sought to cultivate a sentimental sympathy with nature. He ends, however, by saying that this worship for the most part brought not the golden rapports so ideally anticipated, but revealed its inadequacies, clearly pointing to the need of something higher than nature to satisfy a deeper hunger of the spirit. A discussion of this disappointment or failure will come in a later phase of our study.

Hegel’s great message in philosophy is, of course, the thesis that the advance of the life movement in the world is the expression of the Absolute Reason. The law according to which all being unfolds is reason, and as divine mind is its dynamo and generator and nature its product, the two, mind and nature, are essentially one and the same power. As Spinoza put it, one is natura naturane, life generating its product, the other natura naturata, the generated product, the one seed, the other fruit. The divine idea, giving form and meaning to the procedure, is the only genuine reality.

As fine a mind as that of the German poet-philosopher Goethe gives his verdict on the theme under discussion. It may be summarized in one sentence: "Everything that happens is a symbol; and it can perfectly reflect the world." This does not assert that the world itself is the total symbol of the divine thought, but it points to this idea.

And in the same theorization, it can be said that the concept launched into formal philosophy by Berkeley, the esse est percipi formula, by transferring the naively sensed outer world into the ego’s inward experience, virtually leads to the necessary identity of the two worlds.

Suggested in the context here is the famous couplet of that prolific artificer of sententious aphorisms, Alexander Pope:

All nature is but Art, unknown to thee;

All chance direction which thou canst not see.

The capitalization of Art hints at the creative Artist and his works.

Echoing Schelling and Hegel, Bosanquet says that the content of mind is the content of nature; and everything in mind is, on the Lockian thesis, drawn from nature. As Pope says that nature is seen but not understood, Bosanquet sets forth the view that what we classify as the spiritual world is this nature--understood. That is to hold that the natural world finds its true inner meaning in our spiritual intimations induced from reflection upon its phenomena. He emphasizes the idea that the highest spiritual realizations are not in an upper world, but are cognate with the existent order.

A singularly lucid exposition of man’s life in its intermediate position between inner consciousness and outer world is the former Harvard philosopher, George Santayana. At the beginning of his admirable work, The Life of Reason, he speaks of the "crushing irrationality of life itself." One face of this irrationality is the basic fact that life is the result of the cosmic procedure that launches souls, or the transcendental principle of conscious selfhood, in earthly bodies, inspires them with passions and subjects them to buffetings from the environing world. This is the prime condition of all observation and inference, and all failure or success must be rated in relation to it. This is to say that this embodiment of souls in mortal flesh is the foundation of life and therefore is the ground of all meaning reference for humans. The first task for both curiosity and intelligence would then seem to be to study and understand this physical environment in which incarnation has consigned the soul entities, this "animated engine" called nature. Clues to the meaning of the soul’s immersion in this kind of a world will obviously have to be sought in the phenomena of this natural order. Imagination and reason must work on nature to descry in its operations the principles of its ecology. So mind primitively knows no mystery that is not rooted in phenomena, and "fancy can build no hope that would not be expressible there." Thought would have no fuel to feed its activity unless the reality of the cosmos presented itself to its notice. If in his study man finds nature exhibiting the evidences of rational procedure, he can begin to formulate a philosophy of his relation to the world. If he does not find these revealing indices in his scrutiny of nature, where else may he look for light on his life?

Human attention, he writes, is riveted on temporal existences, on the fortunes of particular objects, natural or corporeal. There is then a primacy of nature over spirit in social life, and this primacy, in a certain sense, endures to the end, since all spirit must be the spirit of something, and reason could not exist or be conceived at all unless a material organism, personal or social, lay beneath to give thought an occasion and a point of view . . . Things could not be near or far, worse or better, unless a definite life were taken as a standard, a life lodged somewhere in space and time.

The sanity and indefeasible logic of this simple dialectic could have saved the philosophical effort from the endless dispute that has seethed in the kettle of speculation over the Hindu doctrine of maya, the "illusion" of matter and our experience with it. The argument whether the world is real or only an illusory dream has agitated the waters of the philosophical pool at all times. In this, as in so many other matters, the naive conscious reaction to the ego’s contact with the outer world need never have been distrusted or questioned. Santayana is saying that even if sophistication of logic may make the point that our immediate experience with our world is a mere ghost of reality, it is still the actuality of our life, which no logic can invalidate as real experience. For, in brief, if our contact with earth does not yield us reality, there is no other source from which we can have it. If we renounce this world as unreal, we have access to no other world that is real. Our experience here is our one chance to know reality.

And of course Santayana is in agreement with others who recognize that the objects and phenomena extant in the physical world constitute the idioms of the language which eloquently conveys the essence of truth to human intelligence. He well recognizes that the objective processes stand as symbols of cosmic truth and inner reality.

Nature’s works, he elucidates, acquire meaning in the "commentaries" they provoke the mind to make upon them; they seem to bring mind to a kinship with the life expressing itself in them. Mind imputes to nature its own values (as Kant insisted) retroactively or in reflection, but nature plants the first impressions. "The mind spreads and soars in proportion as body feeds on the surrounding world." Consciousness sees nature from the point of view of its own ideal interests and measures the flow of things by its own ideal standards. It translates nature into the categories of its own conception.

The philosopher cites as evidence that nature is the fertile soil out of which springs higher intellection in the fact, previously noted herein, that in Hinduism, "the national religion seems to have been nothing but a poetic naturalism."

Strangely, however, in one place Santayana seems to waver in his general position regarding nature. He says (The Life of Reason, p. 207) that "the phenomena of nature, intelligible, rational, but immensely impressive . . . while they compel attention, they do not after a while enlarge the understanding." Husbandman’s lore, he says, is singularly stagnant. Since the idea that inspired this work is the thesis that nature is the ultimately true enlightener of the understanding, this statement of the philosopher must be scrutinized.

We do not deny the truth of his remark that in common life people’s daily contact with nature does not enlarge the understanding. The aim of this work is in fact to amplify this state of things and to "enlarge our understanding" of its causes, its meaning and its implications. The blindness of people generally to the esoteric message of nature is precisely our theme. It is part of the dreariness of common life that people accept nature as commonplace daily routine, entirely obtuse to her subtle intimations of meaning. This simply attests that the "average" of humanity takes nature as it comes, sinks to a level of familiarity with it, lets custom stale any profounder interest in it, and remains unreflective about it. And, save in rare instances, the husbandman is the last person likely to develop a semantic interest in or understanding of nature. His interest in soil and weather is so grossly utilitarian and practical that poetic sentimentality about them is a remote possibility in his life. Santayana is looking at the wrong people in gauging his view of nature’s instructive potential. Our work aims to demonstrate that nature’s power to enhance our understanding demands the function of the highest, not the average, refinements of the human intelligence. The thinker himself gives evidence of the correctness of our view, for while he drops this comment on the dullness of the general response of thought to nature, he has on his own part pierced deeply into the inner meaning and revelation of truth suggested to his keener mind by reflection on nature. He says it is to nature that man must look for models and goals, for instruments and materials which thought must have as fundaments for thinking at all. He says that nature can be trusted to be true to its word. If he allows that the external world provides the basic material for all thought, and that this material furnishes the very paradigms of truth, he is strictly in line with what he so often forthrightly asserts as to nature’s allegorical and semantic function in our mental life.

We read such sweeping categorical declarations that "Mind grows self-perpetuating only by its expression in matter." Again: "The ideal is a constant emanation from the natural and has no other possibilities,"; we have to accept the "appearance" of things--so much belabored and stigmatized as mere "illusion"--as the best medium of our knowledge of things. Realities become knowable by virtue of their ability to present themselves to us in these appearances. "In no region can the spirit find itself so much at home as among natural causes." The reflective mind can find no ground for doubting that the principles which it sees illustrated by nature are in close harmony with the canons of rational thinking. Nature furnishes thousands of intimations of such a kinship.

The more intense and even poetical becomes a man’s sense of his spiritual state, the more clearly will he realize his utter dependence on nature and discern the identity of the animating drive in his life and hers. Nature is a region where mental form, the spirit ideal, breeds an existence to express itself. Mind is the entelechy, the goal aimed at, of an organic body. Nature at its human station is destined to give birth to divine mind. Every theme or motive in the life of reason expresses some instinct rooted in the body, which is a natural instrument. "Reason cries aloud for reunion with the material world." This single sentence should be recognized as one of the most important truths ever uttered. Mystical enthusiasts drop the world in order to grasp reality. This he calls "an exquisite suicide." Nature is like a new mythology; the purely fictitious idea has a certain likeness to nature, finding itself mirrored in her forms and habitudes. Nature helps mind to maintain an equilibrium with reality, its perennial forms serving to dissipate the shadows and fogs of haunting fancies and illusions that besiege consciousness when drawn too far away from actuality. So long as the will or the instinct is in large measure blind, unenlightened by intelligence, the life of reason is still swathed in ignominy, "and the animal barks in the midst of human discourse." The individual will is lost for the most part in frivolous pleasures and less worthy spurs to action. Nature banishes illusions and provides an exit out of psychic distortions and aberrancies; illusions dissolve in the presence of nature’s obvious insistence on the real. So wisdom basically consists in recasting natural impulses in the furnace of experience.

And how splendidly he grants to natural life its salutary role when he says that . . . "Were it not for what we know in the outer world and of our place in it, we should be incapable of attaching any meaning to subjectivity. The flux of things would then go on in their own medium, not in our minds, and no suspicion of illusion or of qualification by mind would attach to any event in nature . . . It is our reliance on the world’s material coherence that marks our awakening, and that constitutes our discovery that we exist as minds. Mind is an expression, weighted with emotion, of natural relations among bodies . . . There is nothing stable or interesting to contemplate except objects relevant to action, the natural world and the mind’s ideals."

And Santayana, in a side glance at Greek thought, pays a notable tribute to the benignant influence of nature when he remarks that "if no single phenomenon had been explained correctly by any philosopher from Thales to Lucretius, yet by their frank and studious contemplation of nature they would have liberated the human soul." This liberation would have come from the realization that but two things existed in the world, nature and mind, the latter the power of consciousness, the former something to be conscious of. And it is possible that our Harvard savant, with perhaps as keen faculty to picture the forms of abstract thought as any philosopher has ever displayed, has caught the truth of a relation between these two constituents of life that none other has so clearly delineated. For he has taken a most radical position on this relation. He has in fact gone clear to the extreme view that, so far from spirit’s being the absolute antithesis of matter, a thing alien and without dependence on matter, it is in truth as much a product of matter’s creativity as any material object. It is simply the ripe fruit on nature’s tree. In short, spirit, consciousness, mind are in and belong as much to the world of nature as does a tree itself. The automative springs of unreflective action, which we call instinct, we have agreed to think of as located in and a product of our animal nature. But mind, thought, intuition, spirit we have segregated off from the domain of nature and claim that they come down to us from some supernatural order of essence even existent prior to nature. No, declares Santayana; these essences that we like to think of as "higher" than instinct are just as truly the production of nature and its forces as is instinct. Spiritual intuition is only instinct evolved into sharper perception, more sensitive appreciations, more luminous and numinous insights. The entire range of life is not a process that proceeds under the banner of nature, then at some point switches to the banner of spirit, but is an unbroken continuity of the same order. And if the early stages of the movement involve the preview and anticipation of the later and higher stages, how can it be denied that the process and the motivation are spiritual throughout? If, as in the case of the acorn, the spiritual end product is implicit in the beginning, then again the whole order must be considered spiritual. It is all one process, but the human mind in its limited view, contrasting initial and rudimentary status with developed manifestation, insists on a division and difference between the two moments. It names the seed stage as one order of being and the fruit stage as another.

Santayana would subsume both stages under the one category. He asserts that the entire life of reason was generated and controlled by the animal life of man in the bosom of nature. Blind impulse of instinct, leading to now happy, now unhappy outcomes, stirred thought alive and so unfolded the powers of cognition, reason, moral and spiritual consciousness. If it turns actually spiritual in the end, it must have been similarly so in the beginning. So, the philosopher insists, it matters little whether you extend the concept of the natural right on to the spiritual consummation, or pull back the spiritual to cover the primary grades. Santayana will be charged here with an illegitimate redefinition of the term natural that extends its meaning to make it include the spiritual, and even by inference makes the spiritual side include the natural. By so doing he may be accused also of making both deism and pantheism the true religion. He says intuition is pathetically animal.

He confesses that he does not know what matter is--in itself. But, in a rigorous critique of the vaunting claims of "metaphysical idealists" as to the primacy and sole reality of spirit, he finds that, if spirit is the reality behind all appearances, then this spirit is precisely what he calls matter, since it is the living energies inherent in matter that drive the life movement forward. And he adds that he finds this concept of the world process much more interesting and beautiful than the mystical rhapsodies of the idealists, and much more likely to be true. Further he says that our loftiest intuitions of mystical rapport with the being of God depend on nature and matter for their foundation and generation. By its grand sweeping harmonies, it is nature itself that gives wings to the soul. This view, he says, is supported by the popular definition of "spiritual," because intuition, when it thoroughly introspects animal experience, transmutes it into pure flame of conscious illumination and renders it religious or poetical, which is as competent an estimate of the meaning of "spiritual" as the popular mind can ever reach. He declares that most metaphysics are simply imagined experiences, flouting the possibility that true experience of real essences could go on in a void, without any material foundations. This position put him at sharp variance from most Hindu spiritual systems, which he does characterize as baseless vaporings of feeling and chimerical infatuations. Love itself, he says, is a brilliant illustration of a principle universally discernible: that the human reason lives by its power to turn the friction of material forces into the light of ideal verities. The intuitions which we take to be the afflations of spirit flow out from the experience of the ego with the crude forces of the world and take form under the felt pressure of nature, but definitely require the existence of nature to generate them.

Incarnation, the presence of souls in physical embodiment on a planet, is by no means an anomaly. The spirit is no intruder on earth, but is here by proper assignment in the order of cosmos. It is not a fall, not a miscarriage of divine ordinance. Then the philosopher dares to give utterance to a statement that throws the imputation of the grossest possible error in the face of orthodox Christian theology, when he says that it is a fatuous and unfounded prejudice to suppose that spirit is contaminated by its contact with the body of flesh. The very opposite of this doctrinal axiom is true; the immersion of soul in the flesh is intrinsically beneficent from every point of view, as it is only through the device that spirit-soul is itself generated. Every brush of the latent essence of spirit against the objective confrontation of the outer world produces its bit of friction which warms potential soul quality into life. Every impulse of man or beast fans the flame of spirit one degree higher. Ideas that have no deep roots in the world are unrealizable and cause psychic indigestion. His climactic indictment of spiritual mysticism as wild libertinism of the imagination is voiced in his statement that if you cut your lines of attachment with the animal bases of your life, you run mad. When the soul cuts her umbilical cord with her Mother Nature, she risks detachment from the sources of her 

CHAPTER EIGHT

Devastating as Santayana’s strictures would seem to be to the transcendental subjectivism of India’s religious philosophies, it is to an Indian thinker that we turn now to find another strong pleader of the case for the truth. No survey of the place and role of matter and the objective world in the life of the spirit dare overlook the contribution to this theme made by the man widely reputed to be India’s greatest and most illumined modern philosopher, Sri Aurobindo Ghosh. His splendid two-volume work, The Life Divine, and other literary productions, reveal the shining light of a mind capable of objectifying before it the essences of abstract conception and examining them with the most lucid transparency. All the more notable and quotable are his insights into the panorama of truth because his authoritative voice sounds a clarion call for a rectification of falsely oriented trends and goals in centuries of Hindu philosophical systematism. He sends out epochal appeal for Hindu thought to forsake its insistent bent on straining to attain the assumed ecstasies of unconditioned being in nirvanic entrancement above the range of human sentience and to turn back to earth and strive for wisdom and enlightenment from the very ground of earth and nature. The significance of a movement indigenous to India itself, that will turn the Hindu religious aspiration from the detachments of spiritual yoga back to lowly earth, can not be overrated in the world today. But this work is so extensive that even the briefest synopsis of it must run to some length.

A starting point may be found in his exposition that man’s life is clearly the impact on his consciousness of two apparent realities, a duad of worlds, one of material objects in a domain external to himself, and another of consciousness or spirit. Aiming to correct so much Hindu thinking that essays to find blessedness in the spiritual area by negating and suppressing sensual experience with the objective world, he strikes ringing blows for the truth of the conception that the beneficent outcome of human endeavor is the consummation of a living experience that reaches fruitage through the union of the elements and forces of the two spheres of being, the spiritual and the physical. Flying directly in the face of that enormous body of Hindu speculation, which not only ignores earth and its values as essential to the glorification of consciousness, but thinks that more enriched and exalted being for man is to be achieved by suppressing, nay, killing, out agencies by which human life is attached to the world, the senses, the emotions and the mind itself. Aurobindo declares in the most positive terms that the higher divinity latent in us can never realize its potential until it makes a complete union with the actualities of earthly sensual experience, and not in remote areas of the void "above" all existential consciousness in utter abstraction and entrancement, but right here in the world of sense and objectivity. This radical revision of time-honored Hindu persuasion by India’s leading modern thinker constitutes a virtual revolution in ancient Aryavarta’s mystical religionism that is destined to lift its people at last out of their passivistic lethargy and awaken them to face the realities of objective existence with other peoples in a world of this kind. He describes both the spiritual and the materialistic views of existence and concludes that both disfigure the truth. To regard all physical experience as an illusion and a dream; or on the other hand, to hold our sensual contact with the world as the only reality, and all ideal recognitions as even a far thinner dream, is a mistake either way, a falsification of the true position. For spirit to deny the reality of matter and its reaction to it, or for material consciousness to negate the spiritual factuality, is equally an imbalance. Each view simply bespeaks the inability of the one cast of mind to recognize the validity of its opposing view.

But, asserts this wonderfully astute and clear-sighted philosopher, we can see the truth which both views disfigure. In almost a direct reversal of the predominant religious philosophy of his land, he says that, on the side of the spirit, no mystical experience "is entirely valid until it has possessed itself of our physical consciousness and manifested on the lowest levels in harmony with its manifestations on the higher summits."

It is equally true that form in the spiritual Platonic archetypal sense and matter, each asserting itself as a self-existent reality, is an illusion of ignorance. Form and matter can be valid only as the shape and substance of manifestation for the incorporeal and immaterial. They are in their nature an act of divine consciousness, in their aim the representation of a status of spirit.

This is thrillingly prophetic of a new epoch opening for Hindu reflection. What the philosopher is daringly saying to his countrymen is that in the play of life’s polarization between positive spirit and negative matter, neither segment can exist and function apart from its tie-in with the other, and if the tension magnetically holding them together could be broken, all manifested existence would dissolve back into primordial non-being. If there is to be conscious existence at all, it must be under the terms of polarization of spirit and matter.

In the most lucid forms of expression, he expounds that if the Absolute, Brahman, wishes to enjoy the delightful exercise of his energies in creative activity, it must engage its forces in the task of working in the area of the relative, the conditioned and the phenomenal. Its own self-awareness can only be awakened by this tension set up between the two opposites in its whole being; its only possibility of finding genuine delight in creative expression lies in this self-exertion and self-revelation of itself to itself. Speaking with the authority of self-evident truth, he oracularly says that in the progressive advance of God’s self-manifestation, if we, as participants of this experience, cast aside or belittle the physical life that is our basis and status at the lower level, and then in reaching the mental and spiritual heights we discard and stifle the vital forces that have brought us this far up the line--if in our infatuation with the spiritual we reject the lower energies of the mental and the physical, we limit and stifle the fullness and free movement of God’s manifestation of his own being in and through us. However high we climb toward the shining summit, "we climb ill if we forget our base." This is magnificent beyond all acclaim; here is the sanity, the truth, the light that may lift not only Hindu religion, but religion, generally out of murky shadows into the daylight of real knowledge. And majestically he swings into the full orbit of the implications of this bright discernment:

Not to abandon the lower to itself, but to transform it in the light of the higher to which we have attained is the true divinity of nature. Brahman is integral and unifies many states of consciousness at a time; we also, manifesting the nature of Brahman, should become integrated and all-embracing.

What does this imply? Nothing less than for our integration and ultimate perfection we dare not ignore or neglect the physical foundations of our life, since only by maintaining a balance with them can spirit realize its own capabilities. One must ask what it could have meant for the stability and happiness of the world if religious ideologies everywhere had been sanified by the decisive knowledge that, as he says, "we do not need to give up the bodily life to attain to the intellectual and the spiritual," nor do we have to give up the intellectual and the spiritual interests to blot out all lower grades of conscious experience in order to gain the nirvanic release--moksha--into the imagined unconditioned world. The revelation of so brilliant a light of truth by one of India’s own spokesmen should open that nation’s eyes to a realization of the semi-darkness in which its idea of achieving spiritual bliss by suffocating the life of the body has enwrapped it for doleful centuries.

If there are spiritual powers transcending the levels of world life, they embrace the universe, they are one with it, and are not excluded from any part of it, nor is any part of it excluded from their overall presence. The world of form and conditioned manifestation is permeated by the entire immanence of the timeless, formless and unconditioned real being of Brahman. The harmony of the two segments is the condition of all life that aims to be basically divine.

One must wonder if the religious mind of our day is able to grasp the staggering truth of Aurobindo’s sledge-hammer logic when he says that if those aspiring spirits who, by persistent zeal may attain the state of liberation, may pass beyond the world of the senses and the mind into nirvanic repose in an upper void, thus by their very illumination abandon their obligation to human society and so remove themselves from the human scene, "the world would be condemned to remain eternally the scene of unredeemed darkness, death and suffering. And such a world can only be a ruthless ordeal or a mechanical illusion." The thought here is that if for their own selfish grasping at the alleged bliss of liberation these higher and more advanced souls take themselves out of human society, instead of remaining in touch with it and thus contributing their uplifting influence to their lesser developed fellows, the world would never rise above the status of the mediocre, the blind and the ignorant. If the alumni do not continue to help the undergraduates, how can the latter advance?

We glean a new understanding of our own nature when he says: "In the conscious individual Prakriti matter turns back to perceive Purusha spirit; the world seeks after the Self; God, having entirely become Nature, Nature seeks to become progressively God." And can orthodox Christian theology escape the stigma of ignorance and error when reading Aurobindo’s flat declaration that the confusion and darkness into which the soul falls in consequence of its plunge into initial nescience for the sake of incarnation "are not the punishment of a fall, but the condition of a progress." The status of existence the soul takes on here "are the elements of the work he has to fulfill; the price he has to pay for the crown he hopes to win; the narrow way by which nature escapes out of matter into consciousness; they are at once her ransom and her stock." How far more benignantly could Christianity bless its devotees if it did not first strike down the innate will to good and the inherent sense of the dignity of the soul by the doctrine of man’s primal affliction and corruption through the sin of his first progenitor!

Invidious as it may be to emphasize it, the rebuke his forthright utterances of inerrant wisdom administers to idealists, spiritualists and mystics, or those who preach the gospel of the soul’s need to tramp nature and its elemental energies ruthlessly underfoot, decrying the alleged evil of the soul’s subservience to them, can not be ignored. The overt rebuttal of these fallacies comes clear with the philosopher’s interpretation of the ever-baffling problem of the good and evil of life. Against India’s insistent claim that by sheer negation of his sensory and even intellectual contact with life man should seek release from all limitation by dissolving the duality of consciousness and matter, he explodes the devastating bomb of the reminder that, if we could be successful in dismantling the duality and the opposition that we stupidly (according to Buddhism) maintain by our ignorant desire for sentience, we would presumably eliminate the conflict, but along with it we would achieve also the unforeseen consequence of eliminating our own existence in the cosmic movement! We hold our existence here only by virtue of the tension between positive and negative force in polarity.

It would seem that there at long last is the end to the whole doleful chant of religious and philosophical derogation of the bane of humanity’s physical sensual life on earth. It would seem to be the decisive refutation of India’s lament over the duress of bodily life and the claimed necessity of escaping its oppressions.

The apotheosization of man is not to be delayed until all sense life is abolished and soul floats ecstatically on wings of bliss above the world consciousness. We exist on earth by what is in the mind and the body. If to attain to the glories of the One Existence-Consciousness-Bliss (the triadic unity of being), we must abolish the operations of body, life and mind, then a divine life here is impossible. The world is the playground of pure ideation, expressing itself through the agencies of the body’s equipment. The process is not a maya, an unreal play of deceptive forces, but the real play of conscious being. The spectacle seems to us to lack unified or integrated purpose and harmony; but this is because we see its multiple diffusion into infinite complexity and diversity. But since it is the essential condition of advance for unit soul entities from initial nescience to divine integration that they should achieve their ultimate glory through just this experience in matter, the beneficence of the whole scheme becomes apparent.

It can not be hidden that there is forthright rebuke in Aurobindo’s vigorous dialectic to all pious insistence on the illusory character of mortal life, the vanity and evil of the world, on the one side, and on the other, the fatuous idea that by some psychological stratagem we may escape its full incidence and cut a short road to consummate blessedness. The philosopher says that this problem is wholly one of relative values. We are equally in error if we expect quick attainment of perfection through the path of unchecked sensual life, or if we look for a magical flowering of being through a strangling inhibition of sensuous existence. Here rings out the voice of true wisdom on this eternally controverted point in philosophy: "A relative good linked always to its opposite is all that here we can seek." If we govern our thought and conduct of life by this knowledge, we can apply the Vedanta teaching to the fulfillment of the life objectives, without beating down our basic natural forces in the fantastic and futile effort to escape their actuality. Purusha, the infinite spirit of the universe, is the active cause of all movement in the world of Prakriti, the universal matter. The ego in the human person is a limited unit, monad, or spiritual atom, functioning at a certain place and stage in the universal process. The office of this tiny entity is to give the life of God, of which it is a fragment, its chance to impregnate the whole universe with its active power. Its life here implements the creator’s desire to revel in Lila, his delight in creation. It is the distribution of the joy of creation from the One out among the many. "I have come that ye may have life more abundantly." In the phraseology of the Greeks, "The gods distribute divinity," and these souls are the seeds of a prospective divine harvest in the autumn of the cycle. Prakriti, the outer matter, mothers them into stem, bud, blossom and fruit. Toward this fruitage of infinite delight the whole creation moves, as St. Paul affirms. "This," says Aurobindo, "is the supreme birth which material nature holds in herself; of these she strives to be delivered." There is nothing to be evolved out of matter which is not already seminally in it.

To correct the blindness of sense, the errors of ignorance and the initial stupor of mind evolution counts on experience to develop the faculty of reason as the means by which man may secure and harmonize his position of balance amidst the forces of his environment. The books of Egyptian wisdom speak of the first god Atum long seeking a place of stability and solid ground on which he might take his stand amidst the primeval chaos. Matter, crystallized into substantial form, provided that platform amid the void. Nature is the ground-base of the universe and the preparatory stage for the later epiphany of spirit. Extension is not a delusion; duration is not an illusion, as is sometimes argued. Through the dissemination of its infinite units of soul force throughout the visible universe, Purusha is moving towards its goal of purpose and its delight in the activity of creation. Aurobindo again positively refutes much negative Hindu philosophy in declaring that the movement toward becoming is the only Being. (Certain systems assert that all becoming is illusory, unreal.) The world advance is the ecstatic dance of Shiva; its sole motive is the absolute joy of the god in the dance. If the infinite mind, being able to become active or remain quiescent, to throw itself into forms or retain the forms within itself; if it indulges itself in the delight of exertion for recreation, it can be for only one reason--for Lila, the divine joy in creation.

The world, then, is the free play of the cosmic mind, self-impelled to cast itself into the infinite forms, and avid of conscious experience. Aurobindo speaks of this Lila as the spontaneous child’s play, the poet’s pure joy in beautiful expression, the actor’s joy in reproducing living moments, the inventor’s thrill of discovery, the builder’s happiness in construction, the eternal exuberance of the soul of things, everlastingly young, irrepressibly romantic, perpetually shaping and reshaping things for the sheer bliss of self-expression. The God himself is the play, the player and the playground. These three elements in the world process, Maya, Prakriti and Lila, contradictory as they may outwardly seem to superficial view, are yet complementary and necessary to a total integral view of life. If we can see this underlying interrelation of harmony of the three, we are able to discount the apparent jangling of their interlacing movements.

The world is conscious divine idea throwing itself into mutable forms of its own plastic substance. The world expresses a premeditated truth and obeys a predetermined will; it is an initial emergence, in conscious self-knowledge, of that which lay in unconscious inactivity. The outer forms have been created, not outside, but in and as a part of the working of the divine Idea. And it is a caustic stricture on great Plato’s asseveration, and that of a thousand philosophers, when Aurobindo says that

"there is neither reason to suppose that there can not be any real play of the higher divine consciousness in a world of forms, nor that forms and their immediate supports, mental consciousness, knowledge of vital force and formal substance, must necessarily distort that which they represent. It is possible, even probable, that mind, body and life are to be found in their pure forms in the divine truth itself, are there in fact as subordinate activities of this consciousness and part of the complete instrumentation by which the Supreme Force always works. Mind, life and body must then be capable of divinity."

Might not, then, the denunciation, the evil stigmatization by theology and philosophy down the centuries have been a most disastrous perversion of sane understanding in the run of human life?

Amid all the seeming random jumbling of the multiple individual expressions and embodiments of the pure spirit in the world, it is sensible to presume that all the separate units, each seeking its fitting place and office in the melange of energic forces, is carrying out the supreme will of the unitary Being.

The purely formal abstraction of thought that asserts our inability to know things in themselves has virtually no practical value since, whether they are things in themselves or mere appearances of more real things, our minds are obliged to deal with them as ostensibly real things, at any rate, real enough for us. The natural order, as it is a production of the Supreme Mind, must be viewed as generating not perversions and falsehoods, but the varied objectifications of universal truth.

Aurobindo directly affirms the daring theorization of the most advanced scientific minds that, "as we have already discovered that matter is only substance-form of Force, so we shall discover that material Force is only energy-form of Mind." And it is an epochal revelation he makes in putting forth the theory that "Material Force is in fact a sub-conscious operation of the Will."

We may say, therefore, that it is a sub-conscious Mind or Intelligence, which, manifesting Force as its driving power, is executive Nature, its Prakriti, has created this material world.

What, then, is Life, the philosopher asks, and what relation does it bear to Supermind? By what necessity of truth or illusion does it come into being? Ringing down the ages is the cry of religionists that life is an evil, a delusion, a delirium, from which we must flee into the repose of eternal Being. But how is it conceivable that the Eternal has wantonly inflicted this evil, this drunken stupor or insanity upon--himself, since we are units of his being and he thus partakes of our experience? Clearly it must be rationalized as some impulse of the being of God to try out his powers by engaging his energies in the recreational exercise of his strength that would otherwise, in the static condition of non-polarized being, languish in inanition and stagnation. As sharing the nature of the whole unity, the individual entity, the soul, finds itself subject to two principles: the necessity or the will of the separated ego to act and survive in its identity; and the pressures imposed on it by nature, by which it must seek its way of advance along with the other units of being.

Purusha and Prakriti, being one in supramental harmony, are here a two-aspected single truth or being: "There can be no disequilibrium or predominance of the one over the other. The one Consciousness-Force, having dispersed itself into its millions of forms, and each having the right to fulfill itself, the world becomes the scene of a multitudinous activity, with the key to the jigsaw puzzle of the proper harmonious relations lacking, due to avidya, or primary ignorance. But what to the minds still steeped in avidya seem to be contraries, negations and evil eventualities are to the Overmind complementaries and balances, checks, safeguards, securities and compensations, what the Hindus call karma. All untoward fortunes of the separate egos, all errors, blunders, miscarriages, are all necessary and ultimately, if not immediately, salutary as leading to self-discovery. For the soul to expect the achievement of pure unconditioned beatitude and imperishable existence here is by itself a contradiction of truth and reason. The vicissitudes and contrarieties of life, which the reason refuses to ascribe to an arbitrary fiat of the Creator, find their rationalization as inevitable phenomena of a higher consciousness, emerging, like a moth from the cocoon, with struggle and difficulty, out of its binding encasement in the physical.

Aurobindo is in accord with Heraclitus in affirming that the whole drama of the alternate cyclical action of life in throwing itself out of equilibrium and then restoring the balance is the basis of all phenomena and the principle of all understanding. The outer is no negation of the inner, the below of the above. The lower and external is one term, one formula of the above and eternal existence. If the two are locked in absolute harmony in the unity, life is imprisoned in quiescence; it remains static and inert. To achieve movement toward her goals, she must throw herself out of equilibrium. When one of her endless cycles comes to its end, she returns to an interval of rest. The two phases are not alien to each other, he insists. An apparent duality is created in order that there may be a free action of nature working itself out with the support of the spirit, and also a free and masterful action of the spirit controlling and working out nature. In her hegemony of the process, spirit maintains its liberty to advance deeper into the heart of nature to construct her living forms, or to withdraw and dissolve the forms when they become too binding and unwieldy. Purusha and Prakriti go always together, and the status of nature at any time discloses the action and aims of the spirit. In each step of the progressive gradations of nature spirit takes a poise of its own proper to the stage: in mind-nature it becomes mental being; in life-nature it becomes vital being; in matter-nature, it becomes physical being; in supermind, it becomes the being of knowledge; and in the supreme spiritual state, it becomes being of pure existence and bliss. Nature as it is known to us is a limited expression of that Super-Nature. What nature does is really done by spirit, acting through it. If spirit draws back from its working in nature, the whole operation relapses into quiescence, and its silence we also cease to be. If we are to share its adventure and its advance, we must enter into the tension and the conflict by which it throws itself into action. So all the "evils" that ensue upon the fission of unitary life into duality have their beneficent function in the order. Perhaps this is the most crucial and necessary axiom of truth that philosophy has to learn. The things called evil can be no mere mistake of the divine spirit-force and without relevant meaning. It must be justified as purposeful even if it remains to us an insoluble mystery.

Taking issue with Plato, Aurobindo holds that, although to us world objects remain shadowy symbols of the reality they adumbrate, nevertheless they represent reality itself, not illusion. This statement rings the theme-note of our essay. Our aim is to vindicate nature against the obloquy of reporting truth falsely, or even dimly or in distortion. The imperfection is in our feeble powers of reading, not in nature’s reporting. Clear, legible, articulate, she prints her manuscripts for us in all her forms. Without the objects she presents for our minds to work on, our conceptions would remain as formless as the void it would wander in. Mind can only discover what nature has presented to view, can grasp only the truth that nature pictures. If God’s version of truth as he has portrayed it in nature can not be received explicitly, from what other source may we expect to gain a vision of it? The real maya or illusion is not in the natural forms, but in the mind’s propensity to conceive or project forms created by its own inventiveness, but which do not agree with the truth extant or potential in nature. So much of mystical afflation thus becomes a real illusion, a sad and wasteful quixotic tilting at windmills of phantasy. Aurobindo draws out this thought to its ultimate status, that the untrue and unreal can give no true vision of reality.

And the philosopher registers a subtle and most significant discernment that stands in sharp refutation of the maya doctrine, in his logical perception of the self-contradiction implicit in the Buddhist philosophy which maintains that ignorant desire for sentient existence is the woeful cause of the soul’s involvement in mortal body. For if ignorance is the cause of our existence, then the knowledge that would be considered the supreme value would extinguish our existence. We have here a strange answer to the Hamlet soliloquy, in the self-negating proposition that the highest value for existent being is its extinction. The only good thing about a toothache is its cessation, we may think. But to regard the extinction of sentient experience as its sole blessedness is to have placed life in the category of the toothache. Aurobindo is here subjecting to a sharp critique the doctrines of Buddhism, Jainism and some other Hindu systems that classify life as an evil that is to be avoided at all costs.

But how a non-existent being can have a preference or make a choice of values, or conceive of any values at all, does not appear. Yet much Hindu thought before Aurobindo rests predominantly upon this very presumption. Aurobindo quotes the Upanishads as stating that Brahm exerts his energies in both the light and the dark sides of his being, for the promotion of life’s progress to immortality. To attempt to escape the really beneficent pressures due to the ignorance, and to live in the superconscious cessation of the experience of samsara is to shut oneself up in a featureless consciousness of unity and in ignorance of the manifested Brahman and "is itself a blind darkness." The final outcome of reasoning here is the realization that the divine consciousness is not shut up in either compartment of its dual nature, "but holds the immutable One and the mutable many in one eternal, all-relating, all-uniting self-knowledge."

He rebukes the so-general depreciation of the mental faculty as being obstructive of the divine in us, with the rebuttal that the function of reason in distinguishing the multiple aspects of truth, and thus appearing to break up the unity of life, is for the very purpose of coordinating and integrating the manifold in its unity. The point of consummate value here is the knowledge that the highest mystical apprehension of the unity of all being possible to man is as nothing for light and knowledge when compared with the perception of the same unity as the cohesive, coordinated, organic unity of the total when this is seen as the marvel of the fitness of all the parts to each other and to the grandeur of the whole. The one sees unity without distinctive parts, but the other sees it through the vision of the organic structural unity of all the constituent parts. It would seem that the view of the many blending in a marvelous harmony of interrelations, as a sheer intellectual achievement, is a far more moving and mystically thrilling experience than any view of unity that extinguished all diversity in blank homogeneity. A view that dissolves all differences leaves the mind trying to make something out of a meaningless emptiness, which can in no way bestir the soul to the exaltation of wonder, love and praise. It deprives mind of all points d’appui on which to take meaningful hold of the world. Aurobindo’s demonstration that the mind can gain no leverage by which to exercise its directive rulership in life in a vacuity and indeterminateness is revolutionary, not only for the philosophies of his own land, but for the entire field of philosophical speculation, or of that segment of it which argues the desirability of inhibiting the world of conditioned being to reify the consciousness of unconditioned being--if such a consciousness were possible.

In concluding the survey of this outstanding thinker’s contribution, it could not be missed that he makes nature the very foundation of his schematic philosophy. Nature, he shows, is the epiphany of the mind of the creator. To seek for knowledge of truth and reality without consulting the record of it inscribed by Brahman himself on the face of nature is one of the most disastrous forms of the avidya.

CHAPTER NINE

To present the testimony of another great figure of modern literary distinction as to the message of truth in nature, we are taken from the province of philosophy into that of psychology. It might at first sight be regarded as unlikely that psychology would find itself as closely related to the meaning of nature as philosophy or religion. In the investigations of the eminent Swiss psychologist, Dr. Carl G. Jung, however, the relation between psychology and nature constitutes a revelation of the deepest import. This should not be surprising, since the influence of nature must reach man through the channels of the sensibilities and the mind, as directly in the life of the psyche as in the intellect specifically. A sketch of Jung’s findings and discernments must lamentably be all too brief.

He strikes the keynote of our theme in the sententious statement that "there is in material things a certain truth not seen by the outward eye, but perceived by the mind alone. Of this the philosophers had experience and found its virtue to be such that it worked miracles."

We may presume that these were miracles of luminous insight and understanding rather than a physical magic.

Saying that Christianity is based on a psychological process which demythologized the Christ-myth of our inherent potential of divinity into the legend of a human personality raised to the supreme spiritual coefficient, he asks: "What is the use of a religion without a mythos, since religion means, if anything at all, precisely that function which links us back to the eternal myth?" And he it is who in our modern day has gone farther than any one else in revealing that the mind’s only approach to the inner meaning and power of this eternal myth is through the mediation of the "divine archetypes," and these are all supplied by nature.

Jung’s insights into the necessity of dualization of itself in order to become self-conscious are clearly discerning of this great fundamental truth and are set forth with the sharpest distinctness. All in all, they are most enlightening. The epochal break of soul force out of the initial nescience and automatism of subconscious nature into full self-consciousness he calls the process of individuation. This is the actual creation of the human soul, endowing it with awareness of its animal body and its ideally conscious natures as well as with the sense of freedom to utilize these powers. It is the birthing of souls. Then the psychologist unfolds the same basic discernment which Aurobindo has so solidly affirmed: that if the individuation process, so long antecedently pursuing its course as unconsciously as does the acorn in becoming the oak, or the child an adult, is to metamorphose into self-awareness, it is only to be achieved through the polarization of the potential powers of conscious awareness with the unconscious forms of truth objectified in nature. The higher octaves of human consciousness, to which it is legitimate to assign the term of "divine," are designed to be awakened into cognition of their function by being confronted with the images of truth concretized in natural forms. This situation sets the conditions of the problem of the ultimate reconciliation of the "pairs of opposites," which becomes the problem of, in psychological terms, "integration." Asserting that this task is not made possible by the sheer agency of logic, he says that for its successful resolution the psyche is dependent upon the intuitional spur of symbols, which make the irrational union of opposites possible. These symbols "are produced spontaneously by the unconscious and are amplified by the conscious mind." But, one must ask, whence does the unconscious mind derive "spontaneously" these intelligence-provoking symbols that are the foundation stones of all truth and all reality? Certainly the unconscious can not pick them up from any area outside of, unrelated and alien to its experience. It must therefore entify them out of the context of its experience with the actual world, with nature. Jung may not have stated this conclusion in any formal and explicit proposition, but it is deducible in his system from many forthright statements of the dependence of the mind or psyche on natural objects.

"The parallelism between symbols is astonishing to any one who knows both the psychology of the unconscious and alchemy." This statement could perhaps better have been phrased to point out, not the parallelism between symbols, which are multitudinous and all-various, but that between symbols and the mental concepts and the eternal verities which they adumbrate.

But Jung says that the difference between the "natural" individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the same process continued under the conscious control of the matured ego generated by it, is tremendous. In the first phase consciousness does not intervene; the development proceeds space instinctively. In the second phase, the darkness of unconsciousness becomes illumined by the first gleams of conscious intelligence, which continue to grow ever brighter as advance through experience goes on. The light shines in the darkness, and this time the darkness begins to comprehend what the light reveals. What is of climactic importance is that the human psyche, living amid the ubiquitous crowd of nature’s symbols, comes to comprehend the light cryptically concealed behind nature’s array of symbols. This esoteric language of the symbols, however, Jung and others assert, is not to be read simply with the physical eye, but can and will be descried by the sharpened vision of the intellect. Using alchemical symbols, he says that the filius solis et lunae, that is, the mental product of the union of spiritual truth in embryo, symbolized by the sun, and the forces of the physical body symbolized by the moon, or the individualized soul born of the union of these two ingredients, is in its development the integration of the union of opposites. It is, he concludes, the alpha and the omega of the process.

Since, now, through the psyche we establish the fact that God acts upon us, and we know by now that we are in turn acted upon by the unconscious, must we assume that God and the unconscious are two different entities, or two aspects of the one God force? Empirically, he says, it is established with a high degree of probability that there is in the unconscious an archetype of holiness, which manifests itself "spontaneously" in dreams and other forms of heightened impressionability. It does seem probable, he thinks, that there is an instinctually acting divine archetype in the unconscious. This is manifestly an important conclusion, and if it had to be arrived at by the most involved processes of empirical investigation, it only confirms what naive thought might have presupposed. This would be the idea that if God is the author of our being, his presence and power would be as active in the unconscious as well as in the conscious areas of our experience. It is reassuring, however, to know that methodical scientific procedures give certitude to the simpler and more direct intimations of the naive view. If Jung has on logical or clinical grounds buttressed the religious faith of mankind that the mind and spirit of God are at work in the unconscious background or underground of our life, he becomes to that extent a benefactor of the race. His life work is a study of the most revealing and significant result of unconscious elements in play in the field of psychological causation. It is not without some sense of fear that we come into the knowledge that our lives are mysteriously influenced by forces of intelligence operating outside the range of our own consciousness and control. Can we be sure that these forces are beneficent at all times? If it is logical to assume that evolution is laboring to expand and intensify the powers of consciousness from dim darkness to clear and revealing awareness, how can it be that the forces in play in the lower limbo of unconsciousness appear to have more immediate control over our lives than those of our conscious experience, for which alone we could assume our karmic responsibility? Does this mean that we are puppets on the acting stage of life, being manipulated by strings in the hands of unknown managers off in the wings? Could it be after all that we are not beings of free will, shaping our own destiny according to our wise or unwise direction? Can we count on these unknown forces that haunt us out of an unseen world to deal with us beneficently, justly, to give us at least our due? Can they be influenced in any way by the action of our conscious lives?

Jung’s entire production, the content and substance of his comprehensive deliverance of discovery and knowledge, constitutes so far the most rationally valid answer to these questions. As Darwin sought answers to the questions implicit in the evolution theory, so Jung searched over the wide field of psychic manifestation, studied all available phenomena and by methods partly inductive and partly deductive, arrived at a high degree of certitude as to basic principles of a psychic science. By endless study of the symbolic structure and meaning of dreams, by researches into the general science of semantics, by exhaustive reading in the field of ancient mythology, religion, anthropology, and by the cultivation in his own mental equipment of a keen scent for the tracing of analogies between symbolic forms and abstract principles of truth, this exceptional genius has left his world well equipped to answer the challenge of the discovery of the "unconscious."

On the whole his findings and determinations offer reasonably satisfactory evidence that the influences affecting us from the side of the unconscious are of a beneficent character, not discernibly hostile to our well-being in any arbitrary or whimsical fashion. The magician that appears to be watching and guiding us in the shadows of the subconscious seems to be a good fairy and not an impish demon.

It is beyond question that Jung was tremendously impressed by a phenomenon which he became cognizant of as he pursued his investigations over a wide terrain in mythology, religion, and even such an exceptional interest as alchemy. This was his observation, if it was not a fresh discovery, that in all these varied ramifications of the psychological interest, virtually but one code of symbols composed the language by which ideological conceptions and values were embodied or expressed. This was significant enough, but when to this realization he was able to add the further discernment that essentially this same universal code of symbols was also the medium of the representation of thought images which the unconscious mind cast up to the conscious in the dreams of his clinical patients, the psychologist felt that he had established a valid basis for the formulation of a fairly definite science of the psyche. By the accumulation and comparative study of data thus amassed, he was able to develop a certain degree of mastery of a universal language of symbolism. And he was able to use and apply this knowledge with more exactitude and more edifying results than any one before him. His lucid interpretation, in particular, of the symbols employed in medieval alchemy is a quite extraordinary achievement. His exposition of the cosmic significance of the number four is likewise a remarkable feat of introspection.

However dark and mysterious lay this realm of the unconscious in the hidden area of our life, it was a long step toward an insight into whatever intelligence was there at work in our behalf to have so fully decoded the language by which that intelligence conveyed its messages to our conscious area. The more clearly its peculiar language was understood, the more specifically could the nature of that subliminal mind be apprehended. And if indeed it was the mind of God or his Logos speaking to his earthly children from out of the deeps of our unconsciousness, it was a prodigious truth that had at last dawned on our human intelligence. If there was a specific language, or lexicon of symbols, by which God, lurking in our subconscious, communicated his ideas and meanings to us, mastership of this recondite code was at once elevated to the place of highest concern in this life of ours. If, as the sacred scriptures seem to hint, God in early times spoke in some direct fashion to "holy men of old," but did so no longer, we could still catch the burden of his message if we learned how to make articulate this ubiquitous mute vernacular of deity.

If symbols then embodied the substance of the message of the Logos, they were certified beyond doubt as the essence of truth. They were the letters of the divine Word, the alphabet of the language of verity. It must be inferred then that they bore somehow the similitude of the divine ideas themselves. Indeed were they not to be facsimiles of those ideographs of the creative mind? To represent an idea, a noumenal form, the symbol must present some likeness to it, else it would wholly lack suggestive purport.

The link between Jung’s great work in semanticism and nature was then the symbol, what he liked to call the archetype. He could not avoid turning to nature, because the whole vocabulary of the symbolic language was drawn from that source. Nature, with her correlative ramification in mathematics, geometry, physics, as well as man’s constructive manipulation of these elements in imagination, furnished the entire dictionary of potential meaning representation. Of these elements were constructed by the subtlest human powers of dramatization the material substance of myth, allegory, drama, fable, parable, number graphology and finally astrological pictography, all designed to fabricate constructions dramatizing noumenal forms of truth in one way or another. Covering the whole field of ancient cultural and literary expression, this semantic methodology gave form to every mode of religious representation, whether in books, where allegory was the invariable norm of writing, in architecture of temple, pyramid, image or icon, in ceremonial and ritual, in festival celebration, in social custom, even in governmental structures.

A universal persuasion of this sort could not have arisen had not the mind of antiquity, inclined as it was toward deistic and pantheistic assumptions, been obsessed with the conviction that the forms and phenomena of nature bore the image of the archetypal concepts of deity. Nature spoke mutely the language of God. Therefore to nature every sage and prophet seeking to indite a "sacred" book of religious truth turned for the materials of graphic literary power. Likewise Jung, seeking to interpret literature of this stamp, turned to nature to find the keys and clues to the mysteries veiled in semantic forms. And he says that it is just this apprehension of the presence and meaning of the God-mind in nature, realized for a long time in unformalized intuition, then later discerned in clear intellection, that the human mind must grasp if the world is not to stand bereft of significance. The deep soul of man, of its own divine impulsion, yearns for wholeness, for sustaining knowledge and, above all, understanding, "and therefore lays hold of the images of wholeness offered by the subconscious." From these premises emerges the final determination of the problem in full-orbed clarity: the subconscious has these divine images because it is itself the tablet and depository of the divine thought.

But man, in whom this subconscious finds itself in function, along with the attribute of consciousness, is a product--and the highest--of nature. And since these two divine attributes have flowered out of the germinal potentialities hidden deep in the basic natural order, the inescapable logic of the situation points to the conclusion that the world of nature harbors within it the seminal essence of consciousness and mind.

Jung’s work bears more or less directly upon two much debated elements of philosophical speculation, Locke’s theory of the mind as at the outset of life a tabula rasa, or consciousness unmarked by any impression until sensory experience stamps sensory images upon it; and the theory of "innate ideas," developed by Descartes, Spinoza and Leibnitz, but rejected by Locke. The general concept of consciousness as an unwritten slate at the start is perhaps a loose idea of the truth. But once the ego has been immersed in the conditions of conscious experience and bombarded with impressions from the world without, the once pure slate becomes voluminously stamped with both images of outer things and the flare-back of its own reactions to the outer contacts.

The theory of "innate ideas" stands in immediate relation to that of the tabula rasa, as it predicates the idea that at the beginning of the conscious life of the individual, God stamped a whole encyclopedia of divine ideas on the pristine matter of consciousness, which would emerge into active manifestation in the course of evolution. Philosophy rather inclines to the idea that God at the outset generated the potential of consciousness and trusted to the experience of the ego units with their material environments to register upon it the forms of ideation adequate to buoy up the soul units in the stream of life. All mental capability must be germinally innate in the soul in embryo. Experience will bring it out. It could not unfold its conscious inheritance except by undergoing the tension between its spiritual nucleus and opposing matter.

The status of things here, which Jung envisaged and clearly demonstrated, is simple enough to be comprehended in the succinct statement of the principle that soul, with its initial endowment of conscious potential, had remained in static inertia in the empyrean, its slate of consciousness would never have been written upon and would, as Aurobindo, Plotinus and Jung contend, never have developed any ideas at all. The ideas are only given birth, as are all other things, by the union of pristine soul force with material reality. Jung, the psychologist, deals with the situation in terms of the relation of the conscious force to the unconscious. If in the individuation process consciousness is to advance to ever higher powers, it must from the start and throughout win this glorification by wrestling with the inertia of the unconscious, and so find its balance with its opposite--which, be it never forgotten, is only itself objectified to its subjectivity. This requires its plunging into the world of nature, where the contents of the cosmic unconscious are made visibly extant. A theology which had lost its soul and its vision mistakenly interpreted this plunge of embryo gods into matter as the expulsion from Eden and the fall from Paradise, whereas it is the sallying forth of souls in the bright morning of their existence to take the road to Paradise.

Jung indulges in a number of enlightening ruminations upon the differences in the psychologies of East and West. He says that while the West is seeking the aggrandizement of life by looking outward and upward, the East seeks it by sinking thought ever more deeply into the interior of consciousness. It presents a sharp contrast, broadly speaking, between the materialistic and the psychic views of reality. Jung admonishes both parties that the true view is that which brings the two movements together in the understanding of the conflict of the two trends in the basic polarity. The West may in a deeper view of existence agree with the Orient that eventually souls must disengage themselves from their entanglement in the meshes of matter. But it also would remind Eastern mentality that the epochal achievement is to be consummated not by the obliteration of physical experience, but by fulfilling its demands.

In a notable passage Jung shows how the human psyche, if it is not integrated by the sanifying power of acquaintance with the divine archetypes, is subject to wayward tendencies and suffers many forms of psychic dissociation. As a cure for this dismantling of the soul’s integrity, he advocates the return of thought to nature, where the salutary influence of the archetypes of wholeness are to be, even if unconsciously, encountered. He says that nature’s semantic cinema "reflects something that lies hidden in the subject himself, in his own transsubjective reality." The mythology of the divine life speaks of the dismemberment of the God-nature as it fragments itself to provide and distribute the eucharistic spiritual bread to all beings. This is the treasure of infinite worth that is not to be hid in the napkin, but to be sown as the good seed that will take root, germinate and produce fruit for a hundredfold harvest. In Jung’s philosophy it is this engagement of the units of potential consciousness with the archetypes lodged in the unconscious of nature that will restore the individual souls to their integrity and harmony with the cosmic consciousness. He closely matches the Platonic ideas in saying that the soul suffers psychic dismemberment in its immersion in the distractions of sense and must reintegrate its wholeness by the acquisition of intelligence and wisdom through the exigencies and pressures of its experience with nature. He says that if there was a general clear understanding of this dissociation of the ego into its own limited measure of open consciousness, on the one side, and the vast encompassing area of the unconscious on the other side, "we would know where to attack." The distressing reality of the situation, he believes, is that the deciding factor in our life lies with the individual man, "who knows no answer to his dualism." This is indeed the nub of the human problem, as it commits an enormous volume of human effort to a futile pitching at fantasies and fantastic unrealities fabricated by quixotic theological aberrancies and unsound philosophies.

Jung’s magnificent achievement is an immense contribution to an enlightenment of this darksome condition. His theory of the archetypal base of our potential knowledge, along with his own lucid interpretation of many of the symbolic images of truth will tend to focus research and interest upon the true sources of understanding and thus help to keep the human psyche in harmonious relation with the archetypes of verity embodied in nature.

CHAPTER TEN

Any survey of the history of naturalistic theory pretending to be comprehensive would be immensely voluminous. Our relation to nature is so close and crucial that no philosopher can formulate a system rationalizing our life without including it organically in the purview. Nature enters into the heart and soul of poetry and provides at least the setting of all romantic literature. Anthropology must deal intimately with it.

But a limited survey of its treatment on an eclectic basis is eminently sanctioned, as the insights and theorizations of the profoundest thinkers on the theme will prove to be highly stimulating and will help in the formulation of the theses and the rationale of the philosophy of nature at which this work aims. It is an educative enterprise of the highest cultural value to gain a panorama of the views of our deepest thinkers on this basic element in human life. While much repetition will be unavoidable, selection of material will be guided by the effort to present diversity of approach and viewpoint.

In A History of Philosophical Systems, Vergilius Ferm, the editor, it is well stated that a summary definition of naturalism would be: Nature is the sum and substance of all that is, and to know nature is to come to terms with it in the most productive or effective way, by study and reflection. Not to take it as the sure ground of truth, or true reality, is to assume that life is to be explained by something beyond it that excludes it from the context of real being. One of the writers states that nature is the ultimate inspiration of all poetry.

A variant view of naturalism is expounded in another work, likewise a symposium of essays by a group of authors: R. B. Perry, S. Butler, J. E. Boodin and others, which speaks of a synthetic naturalism. One of its presuppositions is that matter and spirit are not to be considered as opposites, but a composition of complementary forces, effecting a synthesis. S. Alexander is quoted as proposing that the universe is evolving toward deity in mankind; and he thinks that religion needs to explore the mine of inspiring truth that nature may conceal in her depths of meaning. He asserts that matter and energy are inert or grossly coarse. Neither are they morally evil; there is no sin involving matter. One ought to disenchant one’s mind of traditional views, which, in ignorance of the real essence of either spirit or matter, followed superficial notions that they were opposite and mutually hostile. This is well discerned and brings these thinkers to the grand visions of the early hierophants of the sage wisdom of the past.

Dr. George P. Conger, eminent savant in Minnesota University, has given expression to a sharp point of logical deduction, in asserting that it is only in a world in which God is not fully and adequately revealed that a special extraneous revelation assumed to emanate from the delivered oracles of God can have any valid importance. A world of God’s creation that would not present the full epiphany of his nature and being, but that would need his publication of a separate manual or commentary, or gloss in literary form, would seem a bizarre idea. If God is assumed to have thrust his children into a world where the terms and significances of that existence would not, as it were, automatically educate his progeny in at least the basic import and the practical management of the situation, his action would belie our concept of his omniscience and omnipotence alike, and convict him of failure to match his performance with his ideal program. On the ground of our hypostatization of the God character, this view of the human situation is dialectically unpredictable. His revelation of himself in his creation, then, must be accepted as adequate, if not complete. (It is supposable, however, that it may not be finished.) This reasoning at once becomes a formidable challenge to all "revealed" authority in religion.

In fact it seems patently illogical that we should think it necessary to look outside the order of the physical world structure to detect the principles that must be inherent in the structure to constitute it what it is. It is closely in line with this train of thought that Bernard Shaw, in characteristic fashion, has expressed that, "although the life-force supplies us with its purpose, it has no other brains to work with than those it has painfully and imperfectly evolved in our heads." The inference here would be that nature, in evolving as her top product creatures with competent brains, intends to make her own revelation of her secret purposes through those brains.

Dr. Conger gives expression to another keen insight in classifying the analogies that can be drawn between natural things and the concepts and principles of truth as "cosmological categories." That is to say, that the world known to us would not have developed without a ground-source of its form and nature subsisting in the original creative concept. Protesting that our problem surely is one of living rightly in the world of matter rather than trying to escape it, he concludes that in spite of many fond hopes of mystics to win release from conditioned being, "escape from the world of matter, at least during our present condition of life, is impossible." He quotes Emerson to the effect that without movement through matter’s domain toward something more perfect, there would be stagnation and death. Evolution is not blind change or chance; it is advance of life to grander status. Its aim is revealed in every step forward, if there is discernment in the witnesses.

The progress of science and culture achieved through the increasing effort at reflection certifies that the principles of harmony that human reason exhibits are the same as those embodied in the life of nature itself, is the conclusion of another writer, Joseph A. Leighton (The Field of Philosophy).

Carlyle proclaims that nature, standing as symbol of a reality in the noumenal world, is the outspoken revelation of the Infinite in the finite.

James Royce harmonizes nature and mind on the ground that evolution tends to bridge the gulf between the two forms of being, matter and consciousness. There is no break anywhere in the continuity of process. William James agreed with Heraclitus and Aristotle that "the perpetual flux in the authentic stuff." In the flowing stream of the movement of life was to be found the manifestation of the divine ideal and real being.

Rabindranath Tagore, Hindu poet, analogizes the progress from ignorance and imperfection to intelligence and self-mastery, from nature to mind, with the transition from bud to rose. We for convenience separate the two stages, but they are phases of the one existence.

In his Novum Organum, the great Francis Bacon states categorically that merely mental ideas and notions, formed apart from reference to the physical reality of the world, should be disallowed, and all understanding based anew upon the actualities of experience, "since there is no other entrance open to the kingdom of nature than the one to the kingdom to heaven, in which no one may enter except in the form of a little child." The passports giving entry to the one realm are the same as those admitting to the other. Crisp and clear is his assertion that "reality only presents itself to us when we look out upon the world of the senses. The senses alone provide us with realities, the realities of empirical knowledge." This is a ringing echo of the Egyptian Hermes.

The modern John Dewey articulates this same recognition in stating that actual life transcends intellect. It does so at least in the sense that it grounds all intellectual activity. He takes issue with Kant’s affirmation and mystical claims that a higher or supra-intellectual faculty is needed to consummate a consummative synthesis of the data of experience, asserting that experience itself demonstrates and teaches the principles of righteousness.

"The organization intrinsic to life renders unnecessary a supernatural and super-empirical synthesis. It affords the basis and material for a positive evolution of intelligence as an organizing faculty within life."

Nature herself, both as the external support of life and its expression through man’s own growth, will provide the guiding principles of understanding and action.

Many writers voice the idea that the life of the inorganic world is just as wonderful, and just as significant, as that of the organic.

Dr. Guy P. Rohrbaugh, in A Natural Approach to Philosophy, argues that if evolution establishes that higher forms have emerged from lower and the organic has evolved from the inorganic level, it follows that the inorganic world had carried in its original womb the seed potentialities of the later higher development. Even now nature must be harboring the unknown shapes of future life. He finds a law of continuity to pertain to all types and reaches from the lowest to the highest forms of existence. No one can locate a sharp line of demarcation between living and non-living matter.

J. S. Haldane expresses the conception that the material world, which has been so long regarded as a world of blind mechanism, is in reality the spiritual world, seen only partially and imperfectly, the only real world there is. This was of course the thesis of Henry Drummond in his formerly quite influential work, The Natural Law in the Spiritual World. John Locke virtually made the natural and the moral law identical.

Then there is Sir Oliver Lodge, one of our first nuclear physicists, who declares that the universe has never been other than rational. Its operations reveal a harmony with the human mind when that is sufficiently illumined to perceive the grandeur of nature’s revelation of truth.

The eminent modern Physicist-philosopher, Eddington, maintains that our knowledge of the physical world is symbolic of the ideation that gave it existence and form.

A modern writer of keen insight is Etienne Gilson. Since the universe is born of a final cause, i.e., created for a purpose, it is saturated with finality, so that we can never dissociate the explanation of things from their primal-ultimate raison d’etre. If, as the modern bent in science tends so completely to do, we look in nature only for the how of explanations, we must not be surprised if we miss the why of it. There is no true finality to understanding unless we posit intelligence at the source and at the heart of things and conceive creation as an act of intelligence.

This scholar quotes Duns Scotus, medieval schoolman, as saying that intelligence is identical with its essence, implying the identity of mind and matter, so that the universe is conceivably mind materialized.

Nature, he elucidates, has depths which exceed its external expression; they involve metaphysical realities and prepare the way for the mystic. But since causality flows from actuality, it must be seen that nature outwardly presents a face which is the reverse side of itself, so that what we tend to read on the one side in terms of force, energy and law can be translated on the other side in terms of divine ideations, or seen as the analogies of these. For one who can make this translation the physical world takes on the character of a sacred world and religious values take strong hold on the mind.

As one reflecting and justifying the Church’s philosophy, he still sees fit to condemn the ecclesiastical contempt for the natural life and attempt to suppress its sensual proclivities which instituted the harsh rigors of asceticism and mortification of the "fleshly lusts which war against the Soul." The Fathers of the Desert, he says, driven mad by an insensate hatred of nature, embarked on a life which is a radical negation of all wholesome human values. He says they mistook desert solitude for peace. The negative and defamatory Christian view of nature, he enlarges, can not be upheld. On the authority of St. Thomas, illumination consists in the gift made by God to man in his creation, which is the very thing it was the essence of Augustinianism to deny. Thomism, Gilson claims, closed the era of the theological blight on the natural potential for illumination, and let the light of God’s revelation of himself in nature henceforth shine out for the edification of doctrinism. Aquinas’ philosophy made possible the function of empirical contact with nature as a force designed to generate the concepts of truth in man’s mind, since nature is herself the expression of truth. Coeli enarrant gloriam Dei. If the heavens declare God’s glory, it is because they, and earth, too, bear his image. The great medieval doctor, Gilson says, penetrated into the heart of nature and touched there the very roots of causality. The work of the Almighty can not be inert and meaningless, for thus it would give no testimony to the divine craftmanship. So to attempt to exalt God by vilifying his handiwork is both a glaring logical fallacy and an insult to the deity it would aim to glorify. The things God has created partake of his perfection in such a way that any detraction of his performance detracts also from his glory and his power.

The eminent early Orientalist, Max Mueller, has commented on Christianity’s contempt for nature as a danger to Christianity itself.

Another discerning writer, F. W. Dillistone, in his Christianity and Symbolism, holds for man the possibility of aligning himself harmoniously with the eternal time sense and the rhythm of nature, if he will withdraw his consciousness sufficiently from the superficialities and distractions of his life in time. He may then find himself becoming sensible of his even movement with the groundswell of the pulse of the universe. And only in that orientation of consciousness can he find his ultimate satisfactions and his peace. But Dillistone more positively, if less poetically, relates man to his world in saying that the pattern of existence and exalted consciousness predicted for the future is analogous to the existential mode in this world. He avers that if man is to survive, he must rediscover the meaning of organic wholeness in his relation with nature. Man’s chief need and task of today is to harmonize his life dynamically through symbols. He must find in them the principles that will integrate his life happily with his environment. The eminent Harvard theologian, Paul Tillich bemoans the Church’s loss of the moving power of its own symbols as stifling the spiritual life. Father Gerald Vann, in his Water and Fire, agrees with this view, saying that our age has lost the power to register cathartic regeneration from the efficacy of symbolism.

The British physicist and philosopher, Sir Bertrand Russell, forthrightly declares that "it is only in marriage with the world that an idea can bear fruit; divorced from it, ideas remain barren." He amplifies this by saying that to read the book of nature with the conviction that it is an illusion is just to miss the possibility of understanding.

Bacon and Goethe alike insist that we must find the bond of kinship between nature and the subject reflecting upon it. We are continually bent on making nature conform to the schematism of our ideologies. On the contrary, it is inevitable that we must bend our ideas into conformity with the paradigms which nature holds up to us.

It is the pronouncement of W. E. Hocking, former head of the Philosophy Department of Harvard University, that "to lodge meanings somewhere in nature seems to guarantee their genuineness, as if all meanings must be made to touch base in a region of indifference before they may spin their alliance with feeling and action." This says simply that nature is that realm of which we can predicate certitude of real existence, all others resting upon suspicion of fantasy. In its unchallengeable objectivity it is the one thing that we can trust for reality.

In her Logic and Nature, Marie C. Suabey writes that since no individual genius is competent to account for the infinitude of natural processes, it seems necessary to abandon the perceptual view of existence and assume instead that nature’s criteria of truth are to be tested by logical rather than by sensual evidences. Nature--as shall be brought out later in this study--will not yield up her meanings merely to the eye; her redaction into significance demands the intellect and one with a keen edge. A logical order must be assumed to be the ground of the temporal.

Even the mystic realizes that to override and neglect or negate the natural, the personal, the human aspects of life in the reach for higher being--to push the natural out that the divine may enter--is to unhinge and unbalance the salutary order of existence. If to give existence to God in personality one has to depersonalize the human and sever it from its sources of health and power in nature, then personality itself is thrust out into meaninglessness.

That keen analyst of philosophical concepts, T. V. Smith, is forthright enough in his view of the relation of thoughts to things to assert that beyond doubt the outcome of thought "grown prideful of its emancipation from things, is lunacy." This would point the finger of a psychological dementia at most Hindu religious systemology. He fortifies this judgment with the logical principle that for the Eternal to produce something less perfect than himself is shocking to human reason and is contradictory as well. Those who besmirch God’s physical creation with the moral stigma of imperfection and evil cast the stigma of incompetence and error upon the Almighty. This is to set man psychologically at odds with his mind and thus at odds with his universe.

In addition to the leading psychologists, many savants in philosophy dilate on the function of symbols in conceptual science and deplore the obvious unreceptivity of the mind of our age to their nuances of significance. It is declared that the domain of once living symbols has become a morgue of mummies. The fires of esoteric meaning in these archetypes has all gone out. This unfortunate situation conduces to blindness of the mind and paralysis of the spirit. The inevitable result is bound to be psychic debacle. The symbol is ultimately the only means by which a law, a principle, a truth or abstraction of any sort can be represented and purveyed to intelligence. Our regulative ideas take form and exert living influence through their representation to consciousness by symbols.

Dillistone finds much of the difference between Greek and Hindu systematism traceable to their divergent attitudes toward nature. The Greek view, he dissertates, lays prime emphasis upon the operation of mind in nature, whereas in the main the Indian approach reflects an indifference to the form, the rhythm, and orderliness of the world. The Hindu thought saw nature’s luxuriant profusion of images as mere surface movements upon the ocean of a single cosmic life. But the Greek mind, as the Egyptian before it, could not rest content with such a conception; it was convinced that nature revealed the rule of a principle of world-order underneath the surface manifestations which could be discovered or at least comprehended by the human mind. The Greek concept did not look upon nature with the idea of controlling it for his own grandiose aims, but to understand it, to interpret its message. Instead of attempting to conform nature to his own patterns of thought, he sought to bring his thought into line with nature’s patterns. In so far as the Egypto-Greek conception attempted to plot the form of any future existence for man, it moulded the view of the future over the pattern found in this world. In this conception, the assumed presence of mind in nature made a true science of nature possible, if there was developed a power of introspection capable of discerning it. Prof. R. G. Collingwood elaborates this same analysis in his work, The Idea of Nature.

That mind is dependent upon nature for all concepts that would give it an insight into truth is the conclusion of the Indian philosopher Das Gupta. In the interplay between mind and object, if for the object its title to being rests on its being perceived, so mind’s claim to reality is based on its power to perceive. It is impossible for us to think of a mind perceiving or being active in any other way than through its perception of objects. Without objects confronting it demanding explanation and understanding, mind would but stare into a void. It would be in the same predicament as a man floating in the air, unable to move in any direction for lack of something resistant to push against. There can be no apprehension without something to be apprehended. Therefore mind had to be confronted with objects.

The modern humanitarian-theologian Albert Schweitzer has given expression to a direct assault upon the traditional theological attitude of negation and condemnation of nature. The world is now free and ripe for a higher religion in which the ego in man will be able to utilize the influences of nature as aids to its spiritual aggrandizement, instead of having, as the old theology dictated, to alienate itself from it, push it aside and trample it underfoot. The new attitude will be to penetrate to the heart of its secrets, where the discovery will be made that the laws and principles of its own spiritual life are surprisingly exemplified in every operation.

The deeply piercing mind of the German Hegel rejects the philosophies that posit the development of some kind of transcendental faculty of consciousness as a necessary instrument for apprehension of the highest truth. He finds the eternal truths adumbrated in the present order of things. He does not find it necessary for the human mind to abandon the lower road of its purely human capabilities in an effort to find a higher road on which travel is somehow magically easier. The pathway to absolute knowledge is also the pathway of the natural consciousness. He says that the experience of the soul in conscious existence becomes the history of consciousness itself, and by the process it transforms itself into self-consciousness. For the fulfilment of this prodigious evolutionary transformation, the polarized opposition of conscious units to an external natural world of objectivity is indispensable. The German thinker would probably have agreed with Santayana, who went farther than any one else in the way of disqualifying the much-exalted faculty of "intuition" as allegedly superior to intellect, in saying that intuition is itself pathetically animal.