Commonsense regards the world as consisting of two different things, matter and mind. Matter is inert and lifeless. You can push a chair or take it back, remove it from one place to another, divide it into parts or re-assemble it as you choose. It offers you no resistance. It has no purpose of its own. Such is the case with all “dead” matter.

 

But mind or consciousness is something that is vastly different from matter. When matter is conscious in the ordinary sense of the word, it is capable of movement and action, guided or commanded by a purpose and controlled from within. If you want to control the movements of an animal, you have to adopt a very intricate process based on the study of animal behaviour in response to external stimuli and even then the success is illusory. The animal has its own ends to follow. Purposive action is, therefore, considered to be a characteristic of consciousness, a quality which matter does not possess.

 

In spite of this apparently radical difference between mind and matter, philosophers and scientists, owing perhaps, to an unconscious intuitive conviction that ultimately the Universe must be a single reality, have endeavoured to prove the fundamental identity of the two, holding either that mind is really a form of matter or that matter is essentially a manifestation of mind. While the scientists, at least those of the nineteenth century, have generally inclined to the former view, the philosophers have mostly asserted the truth of the latter in one form or the other.

 

To the scientists of the nineteenth century matter was something permanent and real and according to them, therefore, nothing could be real, the properties of which were not like those of matter, i.e., which could not be seen or touched or subjected to experiments in the laboratory like matter. It was only natural, therefore, that they regarded mind as a property of living matter and disbelieved that anything like a mind could be the cause of the Universe or could have any thing to do with the phenomena of nature. Mind was, according to them, a characteristic of a peculiar type of matter acquiring by chance a particular chemical composition and subject to particular laws of Physics.

 

Among the old scientists the genius of Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) came to the conclusion that nature was not without some thing of the attributes of a mind and that there was a creative and directive force operating in the Universe. But Philosophy, never content like Science with a sectional and fragmentary view of Reality and to a large extent free from the restrictions of the purely scientific method in its search after truth, always insisted that a coherent and consistent explanation of the Universe so eagerly desired by man was impossible without giving a prominent place to consciousness.

 

Consciousness in God and Universe is the one great subject of not only the mediaeval philosophy, the object of which was to rationalize Christian theology but also of the great modern philosophic theories of Descartes, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, Hegel, Fichte, Croce and Bergson, in which it is treated under the various titles of God, the Universal Spirit, the Absolute, the Absolute Idea, Mental Activity, World-will, the Eternal Mind, Monads, Self, elan vital, etc. The first serious challenge of Philosophy to scientific materialism, however, came from Bishop George Berkeley of England who contended that the material world cannot have an independent existence because we can know it only with the help of our perception which is an experience of the mind. Since the physical world, as we perceive it, has no existence apart from mind what really exists is mind and not the physical world. What we perceive is not matter but certain qualities of colour, form, shape, sound, hardness, etc., and in order that these qualities should exist as we know them to exist they have to be perceived by the mind. Without mind nothing would exist. The reality of the physical world is, therefore, mind or consciousness. In the light of his theory Berkeley argues the existence of an Eternal Mind as follows:

 

“All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world have not any substance without the mind. . . . So long as they are not actually perceived by me or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must have either no existence at all or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit.”[1]

 

The subjective idealism of Berkeley has been strongly supported in modern times by the school of Neo-Idealism of which the chief exponents are two Italian philosophers, Beneditto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. Both of these philosophers hold that the Universe is nothing but mind or spirit. Their system is not only the most recent but, according to many philosophers, also one of the most original and the most remarkable developments of modern Philosophy. It is based on the hypothesis that the experience of our mind is the only reality of which we can be certain. It leads to the logical conclusion that the reality of the Universe, if it is anything which can be known by the human mind, must be similar to our own mental experience. As self-consciousness is the clearest and the highest mental experience, the reality of the Universe must be of the type of self-consciousness.

 

As already mentioned the scientists of the nineteenth century could not accept any ideas of this kind, as they knocked out the very foundation of their physical laws. When the axioms of Newtonian Physics were first questioned by Berkeley, he was met by a scornful derision by the scientists but who could have known that in the controversy whether mind or matter was real the philosopher was soon to have the better of the scientists and that also through the weapons made accessible by the discoveries of the scientists themselves. Philosophers had always insisted on a spiritual explanation of the Universe. If their view-point could not receive a general acceptance, it was due mainly to the hindrance of science. But thanks to the Theory of Relativity, the Quantum Theory and the discovery of some facts of Biology, that hinderance has now ceased to exist and materialism, the idol of science, has received a shattering blow from science itself. The discoveries of Physics have reduced matter (once a hard, simple, obvious fact), and along with it energy, motion, space, time and ether, to an absolute nothing. “Modern matter,” to quote Dr. Joad, “is something infinitely attenuated and elusive; it is a hump in space-time, a mush of electricity, a wave of probability undulating into nothingness, frequently it is not matter at all but a projection of the consciousness of its perceiver.”

 

Professor Rougier, while discussing the implications of Relativity Theory, says in his book, Philosophy and New Physics:

 

“Thus matter is resolved into electrons which themselves vanish in etherised undulations, so that there is a final loss of matter, and an uncompensated dissipation of energy. For the universal principle of invariance which the Ionic natural philosophers placed at the basis of natural philosophy and which assured its intelligibility namely ‘nothing is created nothing is lost’, one must now substitute the contrary principle ‘nothing is created everything is lost’. The world marches towards a final bankruptcy and the ether, of which it has been asserted in vain that it is the matrix of the worlds, is revealed as being their final tomb^.”[2]

 

Dr. Harry Schmidt in his book Relativity and Universe is almost touched with despair while giving an account of the Universe as it was discovered to be when the theory of Relativity entered into the scheme of things. “Space and time,” says he, “sank to shadows, motion itself became meaningless, the shape of bodies a matter of view point, and the world ether was banished for ever.

 

Woe, woe

Thou hast destroyed

The beautiful world

With violent blow.

‘Tis shivered’ tis shattered

The fragments abroad by a demi-god scattered

Now we sweep

The wrecks into nothingness

Fondly we weep

The beauty that is gone.”

 

But, if matter is not real and permanent, facts point to the existence of a better entity than dead matter as a substitute for it, that is, a Living Creator. For how are we to account otherwise, for all the rich variety of creation in which there is beauty, art, design, purpose, harmony and accurate mathematical thinking. These are surely the attributes of consciousness which must be the sole reality of the Universe. It is evident, therefore, that the disappearance of matter has not only cleared the way for a spiritual explanation of the world but has also made it indispensable. To assume a metaphysical reality of the Universe is, today, at least as imperative as it was in the nineteenth century to assume that the Universe was nothing but matter. Philosophical thought generally had emphasized all along in its history a spiritual explanation of the Universe independently of science, rather in spite of it. Already this explanation was in no way less convincing than the materialistic explanation and now here was science offering a strong evidence in support of it.

 

As matter has proved to be unreal, the physicists feel that they are unable to solve the problems of Physics by confining themselves merely to the realm of matter. They are compelled to go beyond the world of matter in their search after truth because now it is there that they hope to discover the reality of matter. Thus we find quite a large number of them in England as well as in Europe, for example, Eddington, Jeans, Whitehead, Einstein Schrodinger and Planck, attempting to explain the material world from a spiritual point of view; from physicists they have turned into metaphysicians. The reasoning of all these scientists attempts to support the hypothesis that the reality of the Universe is a form of consciousness. Professor Planck, the propounder of the Quantum Theory, remarked in an interview with J.W.N. Sullivan which appeared in the Observer of 26th January 1931: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we postulate as existing requires consciousness.” Sir Oliver Lodge wrote:-

 

“The Universe is ruled by Mind and whether it be the Mind of a Mathematician or of an Artist or of a Poet, or all of them, and more, it is the one Reality which gives meaning to existence, enriches our daily task, encourages our hope, energizes us with faith wherever knowledge fails, and illuminates the whole Universe with Immortal Love.”[3]

 

Sir James Jeans argues that all matter can be reduced to mathematical relations. Mathematics is involved in the constitution of the atom as well as in the systems of heavenly bodies. Laws of Mathematics are strictly obeyed by the nearest physical objects as well as by the most distant parts of the Universe. But all the knowledge of Mathematics that we have, is acquired by us as a result of logical reasoning carried on independently of any reference to nature. Having formulated the laws of Mathematics as a product of our own minds and being guided by our own reasoning powers, when we turn to the physical world, we find not only that it is built up in accordance with these laws but also that these laws are its ultimate nature. Since matter is unreal, nothing remains of the material Universe ultimately except the laws of Mathematics. How could it be possible for us to discover these laws all by ourselves and how could these laws become involved in the construction of the material world unless it is a fact that the material world is a creation of a mind like our own—a mind that is capable of thinking accurately and mathematically, as we are? Both the external world and our own minds must be the result of the creative activity of this mind.

 

“The Universe”, writes Sir James Jeans in his book, The Mysterious Universe, “cannot admit of material representation and the reason, I think, is, that it has become a mere mental concept…… Thirty years ago we thought or assumed that we were heading towards an ultimate reality of a mechanical nature……Today there is wide measure of agreement which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator or the governor of the realm of matter—not of course our individual minds but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown exist as thoughts. The new knowledge compels us to revise our hasty first impressions that we had stumbled into a Universe which either did not concern itself with life or was actively hostile to life. The old dualism between mind and matter which was mainly responsible for the supposed hostility seems likely to disappear, not through matter becoming in any way more shadowy or unsubstantial than heretofore or through mind becoming resolved into a function of the working of matter but through substantial matter resolving into a creation and manifestation of mind. We discover that the Universe shows evidence of a designing and controlling power that has something in common with our own individual minds—not so far as we have discovered, emotion, morality or aesthetic appreciation but the tendency to think in the way which for want of a better word we describe as mathematical. And while much in it may be hostile to the material appendages of life; much also is akin to the fundamental activities of life; we are not so much strangers or intruders in the Universe as we at first thought. Those inert atoms in the primaeval slime which first began to foreshadow the attributes of life were putting themselves more and not less in accord with the fundamental nature of Universe.”[4]

 

Apart from the theories of the Idealist and the Neo-Idealist philosophers and the evidence of new Physics which we have seen to be strongly in favour of a spiritual interpretation of the world, there are some facts of Biology which lead to the same conclusions. Some regular systems of Philosophy have developed around these facts. One of these philosophical systems is the theory of Creative Evolution, evolved by Professor Henry Bergson of France. The materialists believe that life is nothing but a property of a particular type of matter that comes to acquire a particular chemical composition. The organism that comes into existence in this way reacts as a sensitive mechanism to the conditions of the environment and the result is that it undergoes a modification in its physical structure. The modification goes on accumulating in the course of ages on account of ever fresh conditions of environment which the organism has to face, with the result that new species continue to appear. But recent developments in the science of Biology do not support this contention.

 

Serious students of Biology, according to Professor J.S. Haldane, no longer entertain the view that life is merely the result of a definite chemical constitution of matter. The experiments of the German biologist Driesch, in particular, have led to the conclusion that the behaviour of a living organism in its reaction to the external conditions of environment, is categorically different from the working of a machine. A machine is controlled from outside and is no more than the sum total of a number of parts. An organism exhibits an internal drive to acquire and maintain a particular form or structure of the body. It behaves as a whole with an inner drive which attends to the needs of the whole. When we cut off the leg of a crab, another leg appears in its place. No machine is capable of replacing its broken parts automatically. Driesch cut an embryo into two parts in the earliest stages of its growth, that is, at a time when the tissues are yet plastic and before the cells are irrevocably determined by chemo-differentiation, and found that a portion developed into a complete animal. The results remain the same no matter where the cut is made or what happens to be the relation of the part to the whole. Thus the cells that may have grown to form the head in an individual embryo may grow to form a leg. In fact, any part of the embryo may develop into any limb in accordance with the needs of the whole organism. The question arises: How is it possible for that which is a part to acquire the properties of the whole? The same principle is found to govern the development of the embryonic tissue. If a newt’s tail is cut off another tail grows in its place; and, if the tail is cut off early enough and grafted on to the freshly cut stump of a leg, the tail grows into a leg and not into a tail.

 

Such facts cannot be explained in terms of the physical categories of the Universe. Driesch, therefore, abandoned the attempt to explain the development of the embryo on the assumption that life results from the operation of definite laws of Physics and Chemistry. It was necessary to assign a separate category to processes of life and he, therefore, substituted for the chemico-physical theory a vitalistic theory of entelechies. Driesch concluded that the organism was impelled by a spontaneous drive to reach its appropriate form and to perform its appropriate function.  He assumed that there was an internal regulating principle active in the organism which moulded and formed it in the interests of the whole, changing and directing its purpose to suit these interests. This regulating principle must be interested in the growth and evolution of life. Bergson gives it the name of the elan vital or the vital impetus and identifies it with consciousness.

 

The study of life reveals some other facts too which support the conclusions of Driesch. These facts have been adduced by Bergson in his book, Creative Evolution, to show that the inward impulse of life is the cause of the first appearance of animal life on earth and of its reproduction and evolution into higher forms. Lamarck explained the evolution of life as a result of the fact that living beings must be adapted to the conditions of the environment. Adaptation causes a slight alteration in the form of the animal, which alteration is inherited by the offspring, which being itself subjected to the necessity of adaptation undergoes further change. In this way modifications go on accumulating gradually till we have a new species.

 

For one thing this explanation is incompatible with the facts now well-established that variations may not only be due to an accumulated effect but may also take place suddenly. This is impossible unless there were a conscious or unconscious drive in the organism itself causing it to develop a sudden change and improvement. Secondly, the necessity for adaptation to the conditions of environment is a reason which explains why the evolution of life should stop rather than why it should go on. As soon as a creature has adapted itself to its environment sufficiently to be able to maintain its life, it would not require to change or evolve any further. Adaptation, in so far as it is determined by the need of self-preservation, should explain the arrest of life rather than its progress towards forms of ever higher and higher organization. “A very inferior organism,” says Bergson, “is as well adapted as ours to the conditions of existence, judged by its success in maintaining its life. Why then does life which succeeds in adapting itself go on complicating itself……more and more dangerously? Some living forms to be met with today have come down unchanged from the remotest palaeozoic times, they have persisted unchanged throughout the ages. Life then might have stopped at some one definite form. Why did it not stop wherever it was possible? Why has it gone on, why, unless it be that there is an impulse driving it to take ever greater and greater risks towards its goal of an ever higher and higher efficiency?”

 

Such facts lend support to the view that consciousness does not emanate from matter but has an independent existence of its own, that it is fundamental and not a derivative from the properties of matter. If consciousness is a reality by itself, it is but a step to the inference that it is the sole reality of the Universe, matter itself having emanated from it. Matter, no less than organic life, has evolved in the course of ages. That inner drive which has been responsible for the maintenance and evolution of organic life must be responsible for the evolution of matter as well, so that matter too is a form of consciousness. And, we must recall, this conclusion is eminently supported by the discoveries of modern Physics.

 

What are the qualities of consciousness? Whatever may be the qualities of consciousness, they are certainly expressed in the creation and we can deduce them by a careful study of the Universe around us. The highest form of creation in which consciousness expressed itself is man. We can, therefore, infer that the qualities of the human being, at his best and in the state of his highest evolution, should be akin to the qualities of consciousness, with this obvious difference that the qualities of consciousness must be of the highest perfection. This point will be elucidated further on in one of the chapters that follow.

 

Sir James Jeans with the caution of a scientist admits only one quality of his Universal Mind, that of intelligence and mathematical thought, the only quality which could be established and which has been established scientifically or mathematically. But naturally, when you grant one attribute of consciousness to an entity you cannot resist the conclusion that it must have all the attributes with which consciousness is associated in our own knowledge. Sir James Jeans concludes that the Universal Mind is a mind like our own in the quality of mathematical thinking but there is no reason why it should not be a mind like our own, in other qualities as well. In our own experience we have never known mathematical thinking to exist in a mind independently of ethical qualities. The highest intelligence indicates the highest form of consciousness which is self-consciousness. Ethical qualities always go with the quality of self-observation, so far as we know. Consciousness, therefore, cannot be merely a quality of mathematical thinking. Consciousness is self-consciousness. It is aware of itself and is, therefore, a Personality or Self. It is inseparable from the qualities of Power, Truth, Goodness and Love. Our nature, because of the fundamental similarity of the human mind with the Universal Mind, is such that we love to own these qualities and in as much as they are lovable to us they can be described by one word, Beauty. In the succeeding chapters there will be an attempt to give a fuller treatment of the nature and qualities of consciousness. In view of what has been said above we shall use the words Life, Consciousness, Self-consciousness or only Self for the entity which we have found to be the ultimate reality of the Universe.

 

[1] Quoted from James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (Macmillan, Cambridge University Press, 1948), p. 126.

[2] Louis Rougier, Philosophy and the New Physics (translated by Morton Massins, P. Balkinstons Son & Co., 1921), p. 150.

[3] Francis Mason, Ed, The Great Design (Duckworth, 1934), p. 233.

[4] James Jeans, op. cit, pp. 123, 136, 137, 138.