'adhyAtmavidyA' in Synthesis: 6. The Mutual Relation of the Self and Not-Self (cont.)

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In this long chapter, the author gives a brief of the efforts of the Western philosophers in their attempts to discover the Absolute Truth. In doing so, the author indicates how the similar ideas and concepts are expounded with better felicity and finality in the Hindu Philosophical Systems. Since the information presented is very interesting and useful, I shall post it easy instalments for reading and understanding.--saidevo

It may perhaps be useful to the reader, especially the Western reader, if a rapid sketch of modern European thought on the subject is given here, showing how its developments stand at the same level, though necessarily with very great differences of method and details, as the second form of Vedanta above given in essence, and the current third form thereof also, viz., the A-dvaita, non-dual-istic (incorrectly understood as mon-istic). The nature of that A-dvaita view will also appear, comparatively, in the course of this sketch.

Motive of Philosophy

Indian thought--in all departments of research, in which we possess tangible results of it, in the shape of Samskrt and Prakrt works--has seldom lost sight of the fact that the end and aim of knowledge is, directly or indirectly, the alleviation of pain and the promotion of happiness.

दुःखत्र्याभिघातात् जिज्ञासा तदभिघात्के हेतौ ।
दृष्टे साऽपार्थ चेत्, न, एकान्तात्यन्ततोऽभावात् ।
ज्ञानेन च अपवर्गो ... व्यक्त-अव्यक्त-ज्ञ-विज्ञानात् ।

duHkhatryAbhighAtAt jij~jAsA tadabhighAtke hetau |
dRuShTe sA&pArtha cet, na, ekAntAtyantato&bhAvAt |
j~jAnena ca apavargo ... vyakta-avyakta-j~ja-vij~jAnAt |

-- Sankhya-karika, 1.2.44

'Because triple pains of many kinds assail human beings, therefore, is there search for cause and remedy thereof; final remedy is knowledge of the real nature of the Subject and the Object, the Unmanifest and the Manifest, (and of the Relation between them, which inheres in that real nature)'.

Upanisbads, Buddhist, and Jaina books, Sankhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Purva-Mimamsa, and pre-eminently, Vedanta Sutras, Aphorisms, and earlier works, all have sentences to the same effect at their beginnings. (vyakta - manifest, avyakta - unmanifest, jnA - knowledge).

The end, aim, and sure and certain result, of the supreme knowledge, is expressly declared to be the alleviation of the supreme pain of the fear of an-other and of annihilation, and the promotion of the supreme pleasure of the assurance of Immortality and Self-dependence. The dominant motive of that thought, therefore, is ethico-religious. (Or "pragmatical" in the highest and most comprehensive sense it would perhaps be now called, in the West, see William James, Pragmatism.)

Even works on grammar and mathematics do not forget to state, at the outset, that they subserve the attainment of mukti, liberation, salvation, in some way or other. "What is the human need it will subserve?", "What is its prayojana, aim, motive?" Who is its adhikAri, i.e., for what manner and quality of student, for person of what qualifications, needs and requirements, is it intended?" these questions are answered at the outset of every recognised ancient classical work in Sarnskrt in every department of its literature.

Since it recognises the organic wholeness and unity of life and nature, the unbreakable connection between all departments of 'nature' and all aspects (corresponding to them) of 'man', soul, mind; therefore, Samskrt philosophy deals with all other questions as subordinate to the main question of the supreme need of the soul "How may the soul be freed from pain, how may misery be abolished, how may happiness be expanded and perpetuated infinitely?" the central motive which governs the whole of life.

Its answer, as will appear later, is, "By realisation of the true Nature of the soul as the Supreme Self." The exposition, of the essential features of that Nature of the Self, contains within itself, answers to all other and minor but connected questions.

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Science, its use and misuse

Modern western thought, on the other hand, has, for various reasons, historical and evolutionary, become, during, and since, the nineteenth century, more and more disconnected with Dharma, Religion-Law, which, in its perfection and completeness, is the one Science of all sciences, knowledge pre-eminently directed to the achievement of desired happiness here and hereafter by means of appropriate action; Veda-Science, as it is named in Samskrt.



यतो ऽभ्युदय-निःश्रेयसिद्धिः सः धर्मः ।

yato &bhyudaya-niHshreyasiddhiH saH dharmaH |
--Vaisheshika-Sutra, I.i.2

Dharma (is) that from which (results) the accomplishment of Exaltation and of the Supreme Good. (The Vaisesika sutras of Kanada by Nandalal Sinha--sd)


The mainspring of this modern western knowledge is mainly intellectual, knowledge for the sake of knowledge--at least as that mainspring is described by some of those in whose hands it has made progress, especially in science.

This fallacy--as it is, despite its brilliant results in science, including psychology also--has its own good reasons for coming into existence.

That it is fallacy may be inferred, in passing, even from the one single and simple fact that public common sense, public instinct, public need, have always declined to rest content with a mere subjective and poetical admiration of the scientific discoveries registered in bulky tomes and journals, but have assiduously applied them, and continue to apply them, with an ever-increasing eagerness and demand, to the purposes of daily life, for the assuagement of its pains and the enhancement of its pleasures; and this, with a success in the mechanical arts and appliances of peace and commerce, which makes modern western civilisation, the wonder, the envy, the exemplar to be copied, of the eastern peoples.



Unhappily, by the Law of Duality, Polarity, Action-and-Reaction, Thesis-and-Antithesis, which Law is inherent in (the) Nature (of the Supreme Self), Good, by Excess, has become Evil, Extreme has changed to Counter-Extreme;

mechanical arts and appliances have been converted into monstrous implements of internecine destruction, and science has been prostituted into the slave of horrible war, instead of being made the mother of peace and prosperity for mankind; especially since the beginning of the twentieth century after Christ;

and the western races, instead of becoming the friendly helpers and uplifters of weaker races, have first become the rulers and oppressors, and now the devastators, of those weaker races, and of themselves also by internecine war, out of excessive greed for lands, serf-labor, markets (called 'colonies' and 'dependencies' and 'mandated territories' in hypocritical diplomatic language).

If the scientists of the world had borne in mind, always, the awful dangers of misuse of science, they would, long ago, have taken due precautionary measures, and insisted on properly guaranteed international pacts, between Scientists and Statesmen, before publishing their discoveries;...


Epistemology vs Pragmatics

In the meanwhile, that Western thought has approached metaphysic proper, too, from the side of psychology or rather epistemology, the theory of knowledge, almost exclusively. (Gr. logos, word, logic, putting into words, of epi-steme, under-standing; the science of the origin, nature, and validity, of knowledge.)

It examines the nature of the Self and the Not-Self in their relation to each other as cogniser and cognised, subject and object, knower and known, rather than in their other relations to each other, of desirer and desired, and actor and acted on.



This predominantly intellectual outlook upon life has, as concomitants or consequences, the great development of the physico-material sciences as against spiritual science; the predominance given to the law of competition, of individualism, of struggle for existence, over the law of co-operation, of universalism, of alliance for existence;

the increase of egoism, ahamkAra 'I am superior' and 'I am at least as good as you'--as against mutual fraternal serviceability of elder and younger; the greater insistence upon one's rights rather than duties;

and the whole development of the mechanico-industrial civilisation 'of the titans' of the modern west, with its endeavour to control 'nature' by means of external machinery, as distinguished from the pastoral-agricultural civilisation 'of the gods' of the ancient world, with its endeavour to commune with 'nature' by means of internal living and subtler senses.

In the comprehensive theosophical phraseology, all these issue from the great development of 'the fifth principle' or manas in 'the fifth race': 'titans' and 'gods' being the same Jivas, taking turns, in different moods, and ages.


In other words, it at first confined itself, in metaphysic, mainly to one relation, that of jnAna, cognition, and did not take much more than incidental account of ichchhA, desire, and kriyA, action. These, in their metaphysical bearing, it left for long entirely to theology, though, of course, the later thinkers have not been able to avoid a survey of the whole field of life from the standpoint they ultimately reached.

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Western Philosophers

Thus it has happened that Locke (born, 1632, in Britain) decided that what was called 'mind' was a tabulu rasa, a clean slate, had no 'innate ideas', and that all its contents were written on it by experience of the outer world of 'matter'; nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, there is nothing in the intellect which is not given to it by the senses.

Leibnitz (b. 1646, in Germany) swung back towards idealism, and pithily criticised Locke by adding these words nisi ipse intellectus, except intellect itself.

'Within' and 'Without'

The periodic cyclical duel, or rather duet, was repeated by Berkeley and Hume. Berkeley, (b. 1685), enquiring into the relation of knower and known, under the names of mind and matter, came to the conclusion that the very being of matter is its perceptibility by mind. Its esse is its percipi. What matter is, apart from its cognisability by mind, we cannot say; indeed, we may well say, it is nothing apart from mind. Thus, that which we have regarded so long as out of us, apart from us, independent of us, is in reality dependent on us, is within us; 'without is within' (J. H. Stirling's English translation of Schwegler's History of Philosophy, p. 419, Annotations).

Hume (b. 1711) came after Berkeley. He may be said to have shown with equal cogency that, if the being of matter is perceptibility, the being of mind is percipience; that if we do not know matter except as it is known--almost an Irishism, (Bishop Berkeley was an Irish Bishop!), but with a special fullness of significance--we also do not know mind except as it knows, and apart from what it knows. What is mind but something cognising something? Vacant mind, empty of all cognition, we know nothing about; therefore 'within is without.

Thus, then, between Berkeley and Hume, the status quo of the problem was restored, and the shopkeeper in his shop and the ploughman at his plough might well feel delighted that these two philosophers in combination were no wiser than they, though each taken separately might have appeared something very fearfully profound; that the, net product of these mountains in labour was that mind was that which knew matter, and that matter was that which was known by mind.

Yet something seemed to have been added to general knowledge. A very close and intimate tie, an unbreakable nexus, of complete interdependence between mind and matter now clearly distinguished, even as 'opposites' had been made apparent, as was not before apparent, to those who had not travelled along the paths of enquiry trodden by Berkeley and Hume, in their company, or in that of their elders and predecessors in the race of thinkers, or, it may be, by themselves and alone. The problem was therefore the richer for the labours of these philosophers, and had now a newer and deeper significance.

'Things-in-themselves'

Kant (b. 1724) took it up at this stage. The tug-of-war between materialism (or 'sensism', which tends to pass into 'sensualism' on the ethical side), and idealism (or 'mentalism', which tends to grow, ethically and practically, into 'unpractical mysticism'), went on.

What is the nature, what are the laws, of this unbreakable bond between mind and matter? What are the two? How do they affect each other? 'Within is without' and 'without is within'--is all right enough: but this mutual absorption shows independence as well as interdependence. Two men may appear to be standing on each other's shoulders by bending, bowlike, in opposite directions; but even this can be only appearance; each, or at least one, must have a separate, open or secret, fulcrum, standing-ground.

After many years' hard thinking, Kant came to the conclusion that each did have such a separate standing-ground. Behind mind was a 'thing-in-itself,' and behind matter was a 'thing-in-itself'; and from these two noumena there irradiated and coruscated, spontaneously and by inherent nature, phenomena which entangled themselves with each other and produced what we know as mind and matter.

But, Kant added, the phenomena that issued from the mental thing-in-itself were few in number and took the shape of 'universal' laws and 'forms', 'categories', into which the far more numerous 'particular' phenomena that streamed from the material thing-in-itself as 'sensations' the 'matter' of knowledge, as opposed to its 'form', in technical language--fitted in exactly and helplessly; and so an organic whole of systematised knowledge was produced.

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Eastern and Western ways of treating 'categories'

Compare the sva-1akshaNa, own-mark', of the Sankhya and the Bauddhas. The Samskrt words, tat-tva, 'thatness' and tan-mAtra, 'that alone' or 'the nature, maker, measure, essential characteristic, of that', convey the same idea as 'thing-in-itself', but with a fuller and more real and substantial significance. sv-Atmaka, would be a literal translation of 'thing-in-itself', but is not justified by usage; and it is only a variation of sva-1akshaNa.

These words do not vaguely imply any such elusive will-o'-the-the-wisp wisp as Kant's 'thing-in-itself'; e.g., in Sankhya, the eight forms of Prakrti are all tat-tvas, and the five sens-able qualities are all tan-mAtras. In the Vedanta, the expression Atma-tattva, 'Self-fact, Self-essence' is frequent.

A 'fact', 'essence', 'substance', having a specific. defining, demarcating, unique characteristic, is a 'that' or 'that-ness', tat-tva;

and the characteristic quality, in the case of the five sens-able substances or true 'elements' is the tan-mAtra, i.e., the sens-able qualities known as sound, touch, colour-form, taste, and smell.

Bhagavata III. xxvi, uses the expressions shabda-mAtra 'sound only, pure sound, sound-continuum', also sparsha-, rupa-, rasa-, gandha- mAtram, 'pure tact, color, shape, taste, odour only' i.e., continua, highest genera, of these.

Some further observations regarding western 'epistemologists'
Mind and Matter

It may be noted here that the Indian philosophies, Darshanas, 'Views' (of the Universe), 'Outlooks' (upon Life), do not approach the problem that occupied the above-mentioned western thinkers, in the manner of the latter. Indeed it may be said that they do not discuss that particular problem, in that particular form, at all.

They all, more or less, with slight variations, take it for granted, as undisputed and indisputable, and not needing discussion or enquiry, that the 'mind'-subject, jiva, chitta, vishayI, has three aspects or functions, is triune, knower-desirer-actor;

and that 'matter'-object, jada, chetya, vishaya, has also three aspects, is triune, known-desired-manipulated, or cognisability-desirability-movability. Jiva-chitta, as a whole, is said to possess the faculty or function of 'memory', whence its name chitta, from chi, to gather, to store up.

Sankhya

The Sankhya treatment of Purusha-subject and Prakrti-object, may be said perhaps to be like the western philosophers' treatment of knower and known; yet is different; 'psycho-physical parallelism' is nearer to it. 'So many men, (bodies, faces), so many minds'; yet there is something in common, too, uni-ting them all; making some understanding possible amidst much misunderstanding; Unity in Multiplicity.

In Sankhya, Purusha-Spirit is Pure Consciousness, chin-mAtra; and all the details and particulars, that are commonly ascribed, some to 'mind', intelligence, understanding, reason, (as the words are ordinarily understood and used), for instance, the Kantian 'forms' and 'categories', and the rest to, 'matter'.

i.e., the multifarious congeries of countless sensations and sense-objects, the Kantian 'matter' or 'material', which the 'forms' are supposed to sort out and arrange all these are assigned to Prakrti-Nature(-Matter-Energy);

and relational laws-and-and-facts, 'forms-and-material', genera-and-species (from summa genera to in-fima species, individuals, singulars), universals-(generals)-and-particulars, all arise together; all are 'objects', seen in unbreakable, indivisible, connection;

though they are distinguishable, while inseparable, and though the seeing, the discerning, of the inseparability-with-distinctness, of both series, of facts and of relations, becomes clearer and clearer with the evolutionary growth of 'mind-body'; which evolutionary growth, in cycles, is fully recognised and declared at length in the Purana-History, and also, much more briefly, of course, in the Upanishads and Vedanta-works.

Vaisheshika

The 'categories' of Kant are dealt with as padArthas in Vaisheshika-Darshana; six are the main:

• dravya (substance or substantiality),
• guNa (quality, attribute, specificate, determinative),
• karma (motility, activity)

as one triplet; and as another triad,

• sAmAnya (universality or generality),
• vishesha (particularity, or singularity, or individuality),
• sam-av-Aya (inseparability), mutual inherence, togetherness.

(The last is specially noteworthy, for it seems to be absent from the list of Kant, and subsequent German philosophers have, apparently, not named it specifically as a distinct category.)

Later, 'modern' adherents and exponents of the system have added a seventh to the six, viz., a-bhAva (non-being, non-existence), distinguished into four sorts,

• atyanta-abhAva (eternal, utter, non-being),
• prAg-abhava (absence or non-existence before coming into existence and manifestation),
• pra-dhvamsa-abhAva (non-existence after destruction and disappearance), and
• any-onya-abhAva (mutual non-existence, each being-not, not-being, what the other is;

Hegel's 'reciprocal negation', 'mutual determination', Spinoza's omnis negatio est determinatio, 'all determination is negation', seem to embody much the same idea). Under each of the other six, also, are grouped many subordinate ones (some of which are equivalents of those mentioned by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, but not by Kant).

Nyaya

The 'laws of thought', the subject-matter of western 'logic' (in the common sense of the word, not Hegel's), and the triad of term-proposition-reasoning, or concept-(or notion)-judgment-syllogism, or (Hegelian) apprehension-judgment-reason (or notion), pada-vAkya-mAna, together with their subsidiaries, major premiss, minor premiss, conclusion, various forms of syllogism, etc., are dealt with in the Nyaya; which is the science-and-art of correct thinking; as Vyakarana, Grammar, is that of correct speaking-and-writing, correct expression of thought.

But note that Nyaya is not mere and wholly sterile deductive logic, as that logic, in strictness, must be; (as Hegel too recognises, see Wallace, The Logic of Hegel, p. 184, edn. of 1874); but is induction-deduction in combination; first induction, by the method of concomitant variations, agreement-and-difference, anvaya-vyatireka, and then deduction.

Yoga and Vedanta

• Psychology, pure and applied, is the subject-matter of Sankhya and Yoga;

• Ethics, sin-and-merit, vice-and-virtue, right-and-wrong, good-and-evil, exertion-and-destiny, freewill-and-fate, self-dependence-and-other-dependence, are the Subject-matter of Mimamsa;

• Metaphysic, the ultimate problems of Being-and-Nothing, Unchanging-and-Becoming, Truth-and-Untruth, and Reality-and- Illusion, God-and-Nature, Spirit-and-Matter, Subject-and-Object, God-and-Man, Universal-Self-and-Individual-self, Param-Atma-and-Jiv-atma, Universal-and-Singular, Self-and-Not-self, and the Relation between these Pairs of Opposites, (dvam-dvam these are dealt with Vedanta.

Causes of Difference in the Darshanas

The other systems too have something to say on these ultimate questions; and, in this reference,

• Vaisheshika and Nyaya are thought to favor what has been described before (pp. 7-11) as Arambha-vAda;

• Sankhya and Yoga, pariNAma-vAda;

• Mimamsa and Vedanta Atma-vAda (as sva-karma-vAda, the supremacy of the Self's will-and-action), and vivarta-vAda;

but they are so thought, generally and popularly, not quite precisely and accurately; though 'popular' impressions and broad views are seldom wholly wrong, and often more correct and more useful than specialist's and expert expertist's minutiae and 'exactitudes'.

Subtle differences on minor points, mostly verbal, due to use of the same words in several, sometimes even opposite, senses, and consequent misunderstandings; due frequently to even mere controversial and quarrel-some 'cussedness'; or craving to pose as 'original' and 'superior'--such differences, for the pleasure of differing, are without end, in the later exponents of the six systems; also of the several schools of thought into which the original Buddhist and Jaina philosophies broke up. The primal vAsanas, sub-supra-conscious urges of ego-ism, are active in would-be philosophers also, in east and west alike.

The earlier Sutra-and-Bhashya writers of 'Aphorism-and-Commentary' differ seldom; and then they indicate that whatever difference ence there is, is due to difference of viewpoint and naming.

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Error and Correction

Wallace in his work The Logic of Hegel ('Prolegomena', pp. Iviii-lxi) observes:



• Locke as well as Kant began with an assumption based upon abstraction. This assumption led to a fatal flaw in their conclusions.

• Both took the understanding or reason to be some sort of thing or entity, however much they differed as to the peculiar nature of its constitution.

• Both confronted the mind to an external world, an object of knowledge existing apart by itself, and coming in certain ways and under certain forms into connection with the subject-mind, likewise existing apart by itself.

• In ibis state of absolute disruption, with two independent centres in subject and object, how was it possible to get from the one to the other? This was the common puzzle from Descartes to Spelling, Locke and Kant included ('but', the present writer would add, 'Fichte excluded').

• For its solution, all sorts of incredible devices have been suggested, such as pre-established harmony, divine interposition, and impressions with ideas. It has given rise to two opposite views, sometimes known as Idealism vs. Realism, sometimes as Spiritualism vs. Materialism." (Medieval Conceptualism, Nominalism, Realism, etc., ring changes on the same theme).

• But every true philosophy must be both idealist and realist. Realism asserts the rights of the several and particular existences; Idealism asserts the thorough inter-dependence of all that exists. (The former exhibits the Many; the latter, the One which includes and interweaves the Many).

• Neither mind nor so-called external world, 'subject' and 'object', are, either of them, self-subsistent existences.

• The objective world and the subject are really one; they spring from a common source, which Kant called the 'original synthetic unity of apperception' ... (In plain language, the original Unity of Self-Consciousness, which synthesises, interlinks, Self and Not-Self, against which Not-Self, by contrast to which Not-Self, by negation of which Not-Self, the Self eternally realises It-Self. Kant seems to have only glimpsed, very late, that the Self was the one and on(e)ly Thingin-it-Self, behind both outer and inner).

• The subjective world, the Mind of Man, is really constituted by the same force as the objective World of Nature. Hegel came to prove that God is the 'original synthetic Unity', from which the external world and the Ego have issued by differentiation, and in which they return to Unity." (Again, in plain words, 'God is the Supreme Universal Self, whose Unity synthesises, posits-and-negates, creates-(maintains)-destroys, all Multiplicity').

• The deepest craving of thought, the fundamental problem of philosophy, is to discover the Nature and Law of that Totality or primeval Unity, which appears in the double aspect of matter and mind.


It will have been noted by the reader that the fatal flaw referred to in the extract, is the flaw of extremism, as usual; by omitting the italicised words 'apart by itself', 'absolute', 'independent', the flaw disappears. As will be expounded in the subsequent chapters, Vedanta tells us that the Ab-sol-ute, solved, salved, from all limitations, Param-Atma, the supreme Self, is Pratyag-Atma, abstract Self, plus Mula-prakrti, abstract Not-Self, which appear as mind-plus-matter, man-plus-nature, inner-plus-outer, Jivatma-plus-Jada.

Yet, the occurrence of the 'fatal flaw' has not been useless. It was inevitable, even desirable, that the 'philosophic mind' should have erred away for a while from the 'thesis' of Unity of Subject-Object, into the 'anti-thesis' of the 'disruption into two or Many', in order to re-cover, with fuller knowledge, the 'syn-thesis' of that primal Unity; in the terms of the Gita, EkatA, One-ness, thence Prthag-bhAva (vistAra), Separateness (Multiplication), then again Eka-stha-tA (re-establishment in One-ness), according to the Law of Duality, of contradictory opposites, appearing, and also balancing, neutralising, cancelling, each other, in the One. By Error and Correction, an enrichment of thought is achieved.

Many theories of many schools

But this was worse and worse. The shopkeeper and the ploughman might be excused for staring aghast. We had two difficulties to deal with before, viz., mind and matter; now we have four, viz., two (or, one for each mind?, and one for each material object, therefore countless), things-in-themselves, and two (or rather an endless number) of things-in-other-than-themselves!

What are these things-in-themselves? Some ran away with the idea that they were the unknowable ultimates of the universe.

Others, impressed by the stately technical harness and trappings, big unusual words, of the philosophy, but not caring to examine beneath those externals, took to themselves the belief that these things-in-themselves were knowable in some mystic state; unmindful that the very definition of 'thing-in-itself' excluded any such possibility of cognition; that, as soon as anything is cognised, it ceases, by that very fact, to be a thing-in-itself; that its thing-in-itself retires inwards, beneath and behind that which has been cognised and has therefore become an attribute and a phenomenon veiling the now deeper thing-in-itself.

Thus many theories and schools arose on the basis of the labours of Kant and under the shadow of his "critical philosophy" as it was called.

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Law of Parsimony: one source of mind and matter

But the plain and patent objection to the conclusions of Kant was that instead of an explanation he had given us only an increase of confusion.

Another difficulty which seems to have been left unsolved by Kant is as to the number of these things-in-themselves. Is there only one thing-in-itself for all minds (or mind?) on the one hand, and all matters (or matter?) on the other; or one each for each person and each thing; and if the latter, how to define person and thing respectively?

Such objections to Kant's views have been taken by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Stirling, Wallace, Caird, and other thinkers.

There was no superior law provided by Kant, as was most imperatively needed, to regulate and govern the fitting of sense-phenomena (the matter) into the so-called laws, (the forms) of mind, the mind-phenomena.

If there was something inherent in the sense-phenomena which guided them instinctively to close with the right laws, then that same instinct might well enable them to marshal themselves out into systematic knowledge too without the help of any of such mental laws.

On the other hand, if the mind-phenomena had something in them which would enable them to select the right sense-phenomena for operation, then they might also very well have in themselves the power to create such phenomena without the aid of any material thing-in-itself.

Kant himself seems to have felt these difficulties in his later days, and to have begun to see that the mental thing-in-itself was nothing else than the Ego, and that this Ego was the law and the source of all laws. Perhaps he had also begun to see that the Ego was not only thing-in-itself to mind, but also, in some way or other, thing-in-itself to matter too. Perhaps, also that all individual ego-s were somehow unified in the Supreme Universal Ego. But it was not given to him to work out and attain those last results in that life of his; and Fichte took up and onward the work left unfinished by Kant.

Law of Relativity: Hegel and Fichte

Fichte clearly saw the necessity, in the interests of mental satisfaction, true internal liberty, and respite from restless doubt, of deducing the whole mass and detail of the universe from a single principle with which the human Jiva could find the inviolable refuge of identity; and he also saw therefore that this principle must be the Ego.

Fichte is the western thinker, who, of all western thinkers, ancient and modern, known to the present writer, appears to have come nearest the final truth, attained closest to the ultimate explanation of the universe.

He divides with Schelling and Hegel, in current public judgment, the high honour of leading a large number of thinkers in the West, away from the deadly pits of blind belief on the one hand and blind scepticism on the other, towards the magnificent health-giving mountain heights of a reasoned knowledge of the boundlessness and unsurpassable dignity of the Jiva's life.

Some incline to place Hegel's work higher than Fichte's, especially Stirling, yet it may be said that, though Hegel's work was fuller in detail and more encyclopaedic in its comprehension of the sciences than Fichte's, the latter's enunciation of thef basic principle of the World-Process is more centre-reaching, more luminous--one would almost say wholly luminous, were it not for a last remaining unexplained difficulty--than Hegel's.

And, therefore, it may also be said that Fichte has gone a step further than Hegel. The man's noble and transparent personal life deserved too, that he should see more closely and clearly the nobility and transparence of the truth. Hegel's life does not seem to have been so selfless as Fichte's, according to the biographers of the two; therefore he probably saw the truth under a thicker veil.



To western philosophy and science, such considerations may seem irrelevant. Ancient metaphysic says that without ethical qualification of vairAgya, viveka, etc., Vedanta cannot be successfully studied; other sciences may be. The reason is: Vedanta is the Science of the Infinite; all others are sciences of the Finite.

To enter on this realisation of the Infinite, the 'individual' must have begun to turn from 'individualism' in its triple form of avidyA-kAma-karma clinging to the Finite, intellectually, emotionally, and practically, i.e., in thought, feeling, and action; and turn towards 'universalism' in its corresponding threefold form of jnAna-bhakti-virakti, i.e., recognition of the small self's identity with the Great Self, philanthropic altruism, and asceticism. Taint of selfish ego-ism dims vision of the True Self.


It may be that if Fichte had lived longer he would have explained the last difficulty that remains behind at the end of his work; he would then have applied a master-key to all the problems and the sciences that Hegel has dealt with, and opened up their hearts with a surer touch.

It may also be that if Hegel had lived longer, and not been suddenly cut off by an epidemic, he might have completed his system, (as Stirling suggests) which also suffers from a single but very vital, pervasive, and perpetual want, by means of Fichte's single principle, and so have done the same work that might have been done by Fichte.

But before taking up Hegel, a word should be given to Schelling, who has very much in common with Hegel. The two were contemporaries and associates of each other and partly of Fichte's also, both being greatly influenced by Fichte. But Schelling failed to make such a lasting impression on European philosophy as did Hegel, because of repeated radical changes in his views, and lack of such consistency, stringency, and rigour of thought and genetic construction as Hegel carried into effect.

The net addition made by Schelling to the stock of Western philosophy may be said to be a deeper and fuller view of the Law of Relativity, viz., the law that two Opposites imply each other. The point which Hegel emphasised so much does not seem to have occurred to him, that such opposites further inhere in a third something, which is not exclusively and wholly either the one or the other, but somehow includes and contains both, and is itself the summation of the two.

What Hamilton and Mansel of England derived from Schelling, and Herbert Spencer from them, is that as everything implies its opposite, so the whole of the world, the whole mass of relatives, of opposites, being taken together as one term which may be called the Relative this whole would necessarily imply its opposite, the Absolute. Hamilton and Mansel vaguely called this Absolute, God; Herbert Spencer called it the Unknowable. In one sense this conclusion is true; in another it is only a verbal quibble, so that critics have not been wanting to point out that the Absolute and the Relative make a new relation, a new pair of opposites, which also requires an opposite in a higher absolute, and so on endlessly.

[saidevo]

Hegel's Philosophy: Being, Nothing, Becoming: Where it fails

Hegel put a stop to this unfruitful and fatuous endlessness of higher and higher absolutes, which really explains nothing and is a contradiction in terms, by showing that when all opposites had been once heaped together under the Relative, no further opposite could be left outside of this mass in the shape of an Absolute; that if such a train of reasoning was to be followed at all, the logical conclusion should be that the Absolute was immanent in the mass of the Relative; that every thing contained its opposite within itself, and that the true Absolute would be complete when opposites had been resolved into each other, so that no further search for a higher Absolute was left to make.

Hegel's most important contribution to metaphysic accordingly seems to be a full development and application of the law that two opposites, two extremes, always find their reconciliation in a third something, a mean, which, as said before, is neither the one nor the other exclusively but both taken together.

Applying this principle to the World-Process in the mass, he first analyses it into two 'pure' opposites, 'pure' Being and 'pure' Nothing, and then proceeds to state that the collapse of these two into each other is 'Becoming', is the World-Process.

The fact that 'Becoming' is the conjunction of Being and Nothing, and that every particular combines and reconciles within itself two opposites; and the consequent law that the reconciliation of two extremes should be always sought for in the mean, and that extremes should always be regarded as a violent and unnatural disruption of the mean--this fact and this law are profoundly significant and very helpful to bear in mind in all departments of life.

But yet the mere statement of them, which is practically all that Hegel has done, leaves behind a sense of dissatisfaction. The why and the how are not explained; and the why and the how necessarily come up when we begin with two and not with one.

If we begin with One and can maintain it Changeless, then none may ask why and how. Merely to say that every change implies a falling of Being into Nothing and of Nothing into Being is perfectly true; but is true only as breaking down some old preconceived notions obstructive to further progress, true as a stimulus to further enquiry; it is not at all satisfactory in itself or helpful towards the solution of the final doubt.

It was declared long before Hegel, and declared a thousand times, and the fact is indeed so patent that he who runs may read and even with the eyes of the flesh, that the world of things is Being, sat, as well as Non-Being, asat; that it is both and that it is neither; but the statement remains dark, unlighted; the fact remains unintelligible. Where is the lamp to light it up and to make all clear at once?

Then this speaking in the third person, Being and Nothing, instead of in the first and second person, Self and Not-Self ('I' and 'you'--Shankara, Shariraka-Bhashya, the very first paragraph), re-invests the whole problem with the old strangeness which we were at so much pains to transform into the home-feeling that goes with the words Self and Not-Self.

Being means Self to us; and Nothing is nothing else than Not-Self (in the sense of a denial of the Self), if it is anything at all. To talk of Being and Nothing, after Fichte has spoken of Ego and Non-Ego, is to take a regressive rather than a progressive step.

Indeed, this may be said, in a sense, to be the greatest defect of Hegel's system. To speak in terms of 'pure universal notions,' of Being and Nothing, etc., instead of Self and Not-Self and their derivatives; to imply that 'Spirit' (in the sense of Self) is subsequent to 'pure immaterial thought'; this is to walk on the head instead of the feet.

Introspection

Of course, it is clear that, if we would deal with psychology and metaphysic, we must intro-spect; we must look inwards, more or less; we must turn our eyes in a direction opposite to that in which we usually employ them in ordinary life; we must become 'introvert', rather than 'extravert', for the time. But, while our eyes are 'in-turned', or even closed, our hands have to be kept, however lightly, on the 'outer' also; we should not lose touch of and with the 'outer' World altogether; for, then, the 'inner' will vanish from consciousness also; 'inner and outer', 'abstract and concrete', both will fall asleep in Chaos, slumber.

As regards the difficulty of Vedanta, Metaphysic-Philosophy, the Science of the Infinite, and of the introspection needed for the study thereof, Katha Upanishad (II. i. 1) tells us:

न हि सुविज्ञेयः अणुरेष धर्मः ।

na hi suvij~jeyaH aNureSha dharmaH |
-- Katha Upanishad, I.i.21

"Very subtle, not easy to be understood, is this highest 'Duty', (of achieving, this highest Knowledge of the Self)."

पराञ्चि खानि व्यतृणत् स्वयम्भूः,तस्मात् पराङ् पश्यति न अन्तरात्मन् ।
कश्चिद् धीरः प्रत्याग्-आत्मानं एक्षद् आवृत्त चक्षुर्, अमृतत्वं इच्चन् ॥

parA~jci khAni vyatRuNat svayambhUH, tasmAt parA~g pashyati na antarAtman |
kashcid dhIraH pratyAg-AtmAnaM ekShad AvRutta cakShur, amRutatvaM icchan ||

-- Katha Upanishad, II.i.1

"The Self-born (appearing, illusorily, to be born in a body, a not-Self) pierced the senses out-wards; therefore the individualised self looketh out-wards, not in-wards, not to and at it-Self. One here, one there, desirous of Immortality, resolutely turning vision in-wards, saw him-Self, the Self."

We may therefore decline Hegel's invitation to stand on our heads; and may suggest to those of his way of thinking, that, instead, they may practice, what is known in Yoga as, the shAm-bhavI or vaishNavi mudrA, eyes nearly but not quite closed; attention turned in-ward to the Great Self behind the small self's workings; but not wholly oblivious of the out-ward, the Not- Self. Vedanta does not recognise 'absolute thought'--an expression of frequent recurrence in the English expositions of Hegel; it recognises the 'Absolute Self', behind and around all 'thought'; it is the same as Absolute Self-Consciousness, including all Not-Self, all not-selves, all 'this-es'; so that, ultimately, and eternally, Abstract and Concrete, Inner and Outer, all merge into the One which is Number-less.

'Pure-s' can't create 'particulars'

Moreover, while pure Being and pure Nothing might well be allowed to combine into pure Becoming, whence comes this endless multiplicity of particular becomings, or rather 'becomes', i.e., of special things that have become? Hegel does not seem to have explained this; although it seems necessary and even quite easy to do so from the standpoint of a true definition of the Absolute. A single word explains it. Has Hegel said that word? It does not appear that he has. If he has, then there is nothing more to be said against him on this score.

Yet the story goes that Krug once asked Hegel to deduce his particular writing quill from the general principle that Being and Nothing make Becoming, and that Hegel could reply with a smile only. Stirling talks of Krug's 'ridiculous expectation'; it seems to others that Krug's request was perfectly fair and legitimate. The arbitrariness of Krug's particular quill does require to be explained away.

Wallace says, "Hegel's system ... can only unveil what is, ... it has no vocation to say why it is, or how it can be so"; and Hegel himself says, "The idea of Nature, when it is individualised, loses itself in a maze of chance ... points of existence, kinds, distinctions, which are determined by sport and adventitious incidents; ... phenomena are regulated by no law, but depend upon arbitrary influences". Yet the why is vitally important to us, lest we become such chance-phenomena.

Hegel's 'petitio principii' (assuming the conclusion)

Again, Hegel's fundamental proposition, the very base and foundation of his system viz., that Being and Nothing are the same and yet opposite, and that their mutual mergence makes Becoming, which, he says, is the true Absolute--is wholly unsatisfactory.

It may be true, nay, it is true, in a certain sense, that Being and Nothing are the same and yet opposed; but it is not Hegel who tells us what that certain sense is. It may be true, nay, it is true, in a certain sense, that Becoming is the Absolute; but it is not Hegel who tells us what that sense is.

On the contrary, the general impression is that Hegel began with a violent petitio principii when he assumed that Being and Nothing, though opposite are the same, and so took for granted the very reconciliation of opposites which it was his business to prove. After assuming that the two most opposed of all opposites are identical with each other, it is truly easy to reconcile all other opposites that may come up for treatment later.

Then, what is meant by saying or implying that Becoming is the Absolute? If the word Becoming is taken to mean the totality of the World-Process from the beginning to the end ot beginningless and endless time, then of course an absolute may be meant, but such an absolute remains absolutely unilluminative and useless.

Hegel says (as summarised by Schwegler): "The absolute is, firstly, pure immaterial thought; secondly, heter-isation of pure thought, disruption of thought into the infinite atomism of time and space--Nature; thirdly, it returns, out of this its self-externalisation and self-alienation, back into its own self, it resolves the heterisation of nature, and only in this way becomes at last actual, self-cognisant, thought, Spirit."

Perhaps, then, he means, not the totality of the world-process, but, a growing, maturing, absolute; in the course of the growth of which, the cropping up of anything, of countless things, hetera, 'others', im-pure, concrete, out of the pure, abstract, remains a mystery, unexplained as ever.

But the absoluteness of an evolving, changing, thing or thought is a very doubtful thing and thought. Indeed, there should be no distinction of thing and thought in the Absolute; and this distinction is one of the very hardest and subtlest tasks of metaphysic to explain away.



The thirty-two thousand shlokas or two-line stanzas of the Yoga Vasishtha constitute the great and unique Epic, in Samskrta literature, of this particular Herculean labour.


The general impression left by Hegel is that the Absolute is an idea, which finds its gradual expression and manifestation and realisation in the things, the becomings, of the world-process; and that, consequently, there is a difference of nature between the idea and the things. But if there is any such difference, then the things fall outside of the idea and have to be explained, and the whole task begins again.

But even apart from this difficulty, which constitutes a separate doubt by itself, is the main difficulty of a changing absolute. The elementary Veda texts, which helped as temporary guides at an earlier stage of the journey, and which said that the Self multiplied it-Self into Many, had to be abandoned (for the time being at least) for want of sufficient reason and justification for the changing moods of a Supreme. We have been pining all along for changelessness, for rest and peace amidst this fearful turmoil. Hegel gives us an endlessness of change.

He says the Absolute-Universal realises itself, through Nature-Particular, in and into the Individual-Singular; i.e., the already supreme and perfect God developes into and finds himself in perfected man, self-conscious man, (typified by Jesus).



The element of truth in this view is to be found in the Vedanta doctrine of the Jivan-mukta, the Sufi's insan-ul-kamil, the Biblical phrase 'Sons of God', (Sons, in the plural, not only one 'Son' Jesus, who is on)y a typical Jivan-mukta of high quality, 'freed from egoism while still in the body'.


A doctrine unsatisfactory enough in the mouth of anyone, and much more so in the mouth of Hegel who knows nothing, or at least indicates nothing of the knowledge, of the vast evolution and involution of worlds upon worlds, material elements and jIvas, of the incessant descent of Spirit into Matter and Its re-ascent into it-Self, which is outlined in the Puranas.

What does Hegel say as to where and when the Absolute began its evolution and when it will complete and end it?

Has he anywhere entered into the question whether this actual self-cognisant spirit, this perfected individual, this perfected man, who has achieved that combination of reason with desire or will which makes the true freedom, the true internal liberty, moksha as altruistic synthesis and balancing of jnAna, bhakti, and karma, knowledge, selfless desire, selfless action--whether such an individual is completed in and arises at a definite point of time, or is only an infinitely receding possibility of the endless future?

Also, whether many such are possible at one time or not? There were millions of individualised human Jivas upon earth in the time of Hegel. Had the Absolute finished evolution in them or any of them, and if not, as it clearly had not, then why not?

Such are the legitimate questions that may in all fairness be put to Hegel. He does not seem to have answered them. Yet each and every one of them should and can be answered from the standpoint of a complete metaphysic.

It is not probable that Hegel in this birth, and in the life and surroundings of the period he lived and worked in, (1770-1831 CE), knew all the even partial and onesided details about kosmic evolution, which have since then become accessible to the human race in the West, not to speak of the complete outlines (though lacking in detail) which are sketched in the Puranas (and now in theosophical literature).

He ridicules the doctrine of rebirth, (in the article on Pythagoras in his work History of Philosophy)--Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, and many others, poets, writers, thinkers, even physical scientists, famous in the west, have believed in rebirth--and shows thereby, that he did not realise the full significance and extensive application of some of the metaphysical laws which he himself, or Fichte and Schelling before him, stated.

Yet these particulars of endlessly recurring cosmic evolution and dissolution, in smaller and larger cycles, as ascertained by masters of yoga, and embodied, in broad outlines, in the extant Puranas and other Samskrt and Prakrt writings (and in theosophical literature), are alone capable of providing a basis for a true and comprehensive metaphysic; for they, in the very act of pointing out the way to the final goal, explain how they themselves are inseparately connected with and derived from that goal.

And if Hegel was not acquainted with such details, it is no wonder that his metaphysic remains incomplete. It is, indeed, a wonder, on the contrary, that it is so full as it is.

[saidevo]

Fichte's Closer Approach

We see thus that, while Schelling and Hegel made a very close approach to the final explanation, they do not seem to have quite grasped it. Let us now examine what appears to have been in some respects a closer approach than theirs.

Fichte, as said before, realised and stated that the Ego is the only true universal, perfectly unconditioned in and by (sensuous) matter as well as in and by (intellectual) form (in the technical language of German thinkers); the certainty of which can not possibly be ruffled by any doubt.

And from this universal, he endeavoured to deduce the whole of the world-process. His deduction is usually summed up in three steps:

Ego == Ego
Non-Ego is not == Ego
Ego in part == Non-Ego and Non-Ego in part == Ego.

(See Adamson, Fichte (Blackwood's Philosophical Classics), p. 172, for explanation of the third proposition).

• There is first the thesis, the position of identity, 'I' is 'I';
• secondly, there is the antithesis, the op-position of contradiction, 'I' is not 'Not-I';
• lastly, there is the synthesis, the com-position, i.e., a reconciliation, of the opposites, by mutual limitation, mutual yielding, a compromise in which the 'I' becomes, i.e., takes on the characteristics of, the 'Not-I', and the 'Not-I' of the 'I'.

Ego, emperical & universal

And this is entirely and irrefutably in accordance with the facts of the world-process as they are there under our very eyes. No western thinker has improved upon this summary of the essential nature of the world-process; and it is difficult to understand how Stirling has failed to give due meed to this great work.

He says regarding Fichte: "What is said about the universal Ego ... is not satisfactory. Let us generalise as much as we please, we still know no Ego but the empirical Ego, and can refer to none other." (Stirling's Schwegler's History of Philosophy, p. 428.) Now, with the respect one has for Stirling's metaphysical acumen, one can only say that this statement of his is very difficult to understand.

For it is exactly equivalent to the entire denial of the possibility of an 'abstract', simply because we can never definitely cognise anything but a 'concrete' with our physical senses.

Ego, prius and also ultimus

As said before, in dealing with the process by which the nature of the universal Self is established,

• the mere fact of a diversity, of the 'many', of concretes and particulars, necessarily requires for its existence, for its being brought into relief, the support and background of a continuity, a 'unity', an abstract and universal.

• The two, abstract and concrete, universal and particular, are just as inseparable as back and front; though, of course, it is not only possible, but is what we always actually do, viz., that we distinguish between the two, and attend more to the one, now, and more to the other, at another time.

• But looking for a highest uniersal and a lowest particular, we find that the extremes meet.

• The highest universal, (Self It-Self as) Being, sattA-sAmAnya, is also the most irreducible point, charama-vishesha, the 'singular' (Jlva or atom).

• The universal Ego is also (the essence of) the individual ego (the so-called empirical ego); the universal Being and the anu, atom, of the Vaisheshika system of philosophy, correspond to the Pratyag-Atma and the ideal atom which, enshrining a self, is the Jlvatma.

• Between these two limits, which are not two but one, the all-comprehending substratum of all the world-process, the Infinite which is also the Infinitesimal, "greatest of the great and also smallest of the small," there fall and flow all other pseudo-universals and pseudo-particulars; pseudo, because each falls as a particular under a higher universal (or general) and at the same time covers some lower particulars (specials).

• The universal Ego is thus the only true, absolutely certain and final, universal.

"Hegel, in opposition to Fichte, ... held that it is ... not the Ego that is the prius of all reality, but, on the contrary, something universal, a universal which comprehends within it every individual." This is where the deviation from the straight path began. It began with Hegel.

And the results were: (1) that dissatisfaction with Hegel which Stirling confesses to again and again; and (2) a tacit reversion, by Stirling himself, to that impregnable position of Fichte (as shown throughout Stirling's work, What is Thought? in which he endeavours to make out that the double subject-object, 'I-me', is the true Absolute).

For if "we know no ego but the empirical ego, how much more do we know no 'being' but empirical and particular beings, no 'nothing' but empirical and particular non-commencements or destructions."

Compare the Sankshepa-Sharlraka:

आश्रयत्व विषयत्वभागिनी निर्विभागचितिरेव केवला ।

Ashrayatva viShayatvabhAginI nirvibhAgacitireva kevalA |

"Only this partless, indivisible, Consciousness is both subject and object at once."

Meaning of Being and Nothing

Ego and non-Ego we understand; they are directly aqd primarily in our constitution; nay, they are the whole of our constitution, essence and accidence, core and crust, inside and outside, the very whole of it.

• But Being and Nothing we understand only through Ego and Non-Ego; otherwise they are entirely strange and unfamiliar.

• Being is nothing else than pro-position, pre-positing, affirmation, by consciousness, by the 'I'; Non-Being is nothing else than op-position, contra-position, denial, by that same 'I'.

Stirling practically admits as much in What is Thought? Fichte's approach, then, is the closer and not Hegel's; and Stirling's opinion that "the historical value of the method of Fichte will shrink, in the end, to its influence on Hegel" (Stirling's Schwegler, p, 427) is annulled by his own latest research and finding.

The probability indeed, on the contrary, is that Hegel's work will come to take its proper place in the appreciation of students as only an attempt at a filling and completion of the outlines traced out by the earnest, intense, noble, and therefore truth-seeing spirit of Fichte.



Dr. J. H. Stirling, in a very kind letter to the present writer, said : "Dr.Hutchinson Stirling would beg to remark only that he is not sure that Mr.Bhagavan Das has quite correctly followed the distinction between Fichte's and Hegel's use of the Ego in deduction of the categories--the distinction at least that is proper to Stirling's interpretation of both; Stirling holding, namely, that Fichte, while without provision for an external world, has only an external motive or movement in his Dialectic, and is withal in his deduction itself incomplete; whereas Hegel, with provision for externality, is inside of his principle, and in his deduction infinitely deeper, fuller, and at least completer."

I give this extract from Dr. Stirling's letter with the view that it may help readers to check and correct any errors made in this chapter, in the comparative appreciation of Hegel and Fichte.

Professor J. E. McTaggart, of Trinity College, Cambridge, also isaid, in a letter to the present writer: "... I still maintain that Hegel has got nearer the truth than Fichte".


Description, not Examination

Hegel's work is a supplementation, by mere description, not at all a deduction or explanation, of the successive steps in mind-development, from simple sensuous perceptions to complex intellectual thinking or comprehending, in terms of abstract ideas and relations.

Darwinian evolutionism is similar; it is a description, not an explanation, of body-development; it assumes countless perpetual variations of environments, and corresponding ones in organisms, at every step; power of variation is assumed at every step.

By sheer force of intense gaze towards the Truth, Fichte has reached, even amidst the storm and stress of a life cast in times when empires were rising and falling around him, conclusions which were generally reached in India only with the help of a yoga-vision developed by long practice amidst the contemplative calm of forestsolitudes and mountain-heights. (Perhaps he had been a disciple in the home of an Indian sage, in a previous life, and done all the preliminary thinking there!)



Fichte's lecture on The Dignity of Man (pp. 331-336 of the Science of Knowledge, translated by A. Kroeger) is full of statements which might be read as meaning, on Fichte's part, a belief in the evolution of the Jivatma of the kind described in Vedantic and theosophical literature, in direct contrast to Hegel's statements.


Page after page of his work reads like translations from Vedanta works. Schwegler, apparently unmindful of their value and even disagreeing with them, sums up the conclusions of Fichte in words which simply reproduce the conclusions of A-dvaita-Vedanta as now current in India.

• Fichte's statement, quoted above, as to the transference of their characteristics to each other by the Ego and the Non-Ego, is the language of Shankara. (The opening lines of his commentary, the Sharlraka-Bhashya, on the Brahma-sutras.)

• His distinction between the absolute Ego and the individual or empirical ego is the distinction between the higher Atma and the jiva.

Abstract Ego & Absolute Ego

The words 'higher Atma' are used here, because one of the last defects and difficulties of the current A-dvaita-Vedanta turns exactly, as it does in Fichte, on the confusion (of the distinction without a difference) between Pratyag-Atma and Param-atma, the abstract universal Ego and the true Absolute ego.

Again, Fichte's view is thus stated by Schwegler: "The business of the theoretical part was to conciliate Ego and Non-Ego. To this end, middle term after middle term was intercalated without success. Then came reason with the absolute decision--'Inasmuch as the Non-Ego is incapable of union with the Ego, Non-Ego there shall be none.'"

This is to all appearance exactly the Vedanta method, whereby

• predicate after predicate is superimposed upon the Supreme,
• and then refuted, negated and struck away, as inappropriate,
• till the naked Ego remains as the Unlimited
• which is the Negation of all that is Not-Unlimited,

• and the searcher exclaims: "I am (is) Brahman," (Brhad-Aranyaka, I.iv.10) and "the Many is not at all," (Brhad-Aranyaka, IV.iv.19) as the two most famous Veda-texts, great sentences (in the Samskrta phrase, mahA-vAkyas) or logia, the foundation of the A-dvaita-Vedanta, describe it;

and the method of the world-process. The spirit is ions, electrons, atoms? No. It is gases, metals, minerals? No. Vegetables? No. Animals? No. Humans? No. Upa-devas, devas, Vishva-srjas? No. And so on.

World as dream of Brahman

The opposition between the specification-less Brahman or Atma or Ego, on the one hand, and the Non-Ego, on the other, is stated by the Vedanta thus: (The Atma is) That of which AkAsha (ether), air, fire, water, and earth, are the vi-vartas, opposites, perversions. (Bbamati, p.l)

The relation between them is indicated in a manner which comes home to the reader more closely than Fichte's: "Brahman dreams all this universe, and its waking is the reduction of it all to illusion." (Madhusudana Sarasvati's Sankshepa-Shariraka-Tika iii,shloka 240)

Thus we see that some of the most important conclusions of the current A-dvaita-Vedanta have been independently reached by this truly great German thinker.

And in seeing this, we have ourselves taken a step further than we had done, when we left the Vishishta-advaita system as the second result of the last endeavour to solve the supreme question of questions.

[saidevo]

Another Hitch

We have seen that the current A-dvaita-Vedanta is an advance upon the VishishtAdvaita. We have also seen that Fichte and Hegel are supplementary to each other.

For, while Fichte's dialectic is the more internal, starting with the Ego, and therefore the truer and less artificial, it follows out the world-process up to the end of two stages only, as it were, those of origination and preservation, i.e., the present existing order of things, a commingling of the Ego and the Non-Ego;

whereas Hegel's dialectic though external, starting with Being (returning however to thought and Self afterwards), and therefore the more artificial completes, in a way, the circuit of the world-process to the last stage, that of destruction, dissolution, or return to the original condition.

(The words 'in a way' have been used for want of the certainty that the full significance of this cyclic law and triple succession of origin, preservation, and dissolution of the kosmic systems which make up the world-process, and which law is reiterated over and over again in all Samskrta literature, was present to the minds of Fichte and Hegel.)

• We feel now that Hegel, Fichte, and current A-dvaita-Vedanta have come close to the very heart of the secret;

• we feel that it cannot now be very far off; we are face to face with the lock that closes the whole treasurehouse of explanations of all possible mysteries and secrets and confusions;

• we also hold in our hands the key which we feel is the only key to the lock;

• and not only do we hold the key, but in our struggles with the key and the lock we have, in the good company of the Indian Vedantis and the German idealists, broken through panes of the door leaves and almost moved the door away from its hinges, and obtained many a glimpse and even plain view of many of those treasures and secrets.

Why Maya? Why Dream

Yet the key will not quite turn in the lock. Some rust-stain somewhere, some defect of construction, prevents this.

The defect, some features of which have been already pointed out in treating of Hegel, is that we cannot deny altogether this Non-Ego.

We cannot quite convince ourselves that it is 'pure' Non-being, atyanta-asat. It seems both existent and non-existent, sad-asat.

Whence this appearance of existence in it? The last unexplained crux of the current A-dvaita-Vedanta is the connection between Brahman, the Absolute, and Maya, the Illusion of the World-Process.

As with Fichte's Non-Ego, so with the Vedanti's Maya, there remains behind an appearance of artificiality, of a deus ex machina, a lack of organic connection and spontaneity, in the working of the world-process into and out of the Ego, in the arrangement between Maya, on the one hand, and Brahman, on the other.

Why should Brahman dream? A hundred different ways of enunciation and illustration are tried by the ordinary vedanti. None is satisfactory. And therefore the current A-dvaita does not reach to the final stage of a true A-dvaita.

When pressed, it, like Fichte, falls back upon the position that Maya (Non-Ego, with Fichte) is wholly Non-being, instead of both existent and non-existent, and this we cannot quite bring home to ourselves.

Besides this difficulty, there is the process of change: the 'I' opposes to itself the 'Not-I', and reverts again to an original condition. Why? Our Absolute must be above change.

Again, there seems to be an artificiality and arbitrariness about the 'Not-I' in another way. Why any one particular 'Not-I'?

Fichte's deduction of the world-process is effected in a syllogism of three steps, three propositions, and even then it does not quite complete the process, but leaves it half-finished.

It ought to be complete in one proposition, one single act of consciousness; otherwise the difficulty of change in the Absolute remains unsolved.

Eternity vs Time

There are expressions and indications that to the mind of Fichte and other German thinkers, as to the mind of the Vedanti, there is present the distinction or rather opposition between Eternity, succession-less Timelessness, kAla-atIta-tA, transcendence of time, on the one hand, and successive time, kAla, even though endless, on the other.

In this opposition lies the clue to the whole of the secret; but it does not seem to have been utilised.

It is not properly utilised in the extant books on A-dvaita-Vedanta, although the fact that Brahman is beyond space and time, is reiterated incessantly.

Nor does it seem to have been put to effective use by Fichte or any other Western thinker, though it has been recognised by even such a non-metaphysical but extremely acute reasoner as J.S.Mill (In his Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy) as the distinction between the true and the false Infinite.

One hesitates to say positively that Fichte has left this last work unperformed; but from the accounts and translations of his writings available in English, this seems to be the case.

Yet the secret is there, all the time, among the ideas expressed in his writings, as much as in the better works of current A-dvaita-Vedanta. Just the one rust-stain has to be removed frprn the key, then it will turn, and will finally unclose the lock, and lay open before us what we want.

Dead Changelessness?

We want, as said before, That Which combines within itself Change as well as Changelessness, and will also be our own inmost Self.

• An infinity of change, even though it be a change of progress--a progress that has no self-contained and consistent meaning; that is without a definite final goal towards which it is a progress;

• an increasing progress which, there is reason to believe, may also be alternating with an everincreasing regress;

• a progress in a convolved spiral, which, if it turns upwards to ever greater glories of higher and subtler life, may also, by necessary correspondence, in accordance with the law of balance, compensation, action-reaction, thesis-antithesis, pass downwards too, through ever-increasing miseries of lower and grosser densities of matter;

such ceaseless, aimless, dual process, swing to-and-fro, or progress even, means not satisfaction, brings not happiness, but rather a desolate weariness.

Fichte has said (to quote again the words of Schwegler): "It is our duty at once, and an impossibility to reach the infinite; nevertheless, just this striving, united to this impossibility, is the stamp of our eternity." (Schwegler's History of Philosophy, p.270). Schelling has said the same
thing (in his What is Thought?, pp.397-398).

To the principle of this metaphysical 'deduction', corresponds the actual fact, ascertained by Yoga and occult science, and stated in the Puranas and other theosophical and Yoga-Vedanta literature, that there is endless evolution of jIvas, by birth after birth, in body after body and world after world.

Sisyphus & Tantalus

But this fact is not the whole truth; it does not stand by itself. If it did, then such a mere infinity of change, without a constant and permanent basis of changelessness and peace, would only add the horrors of Sisyphus to the agonies of Tantalus.

No soul, however patiently it now accepts--as many do--the doctrine of an endless progress, will long feel peace in it by itself. The longing, yearning, resistless and quenchless craving for Changelessness and Peace and Rest, for something final, will come upon it sooner or later.

Besides this emotional difficulty, this surfeit with unrest, which is now upon us, there is the intellectual difficulty, the impossibility of understanding the very fact of change.

The instinct of the intellect cries out, as the very first words of all logic, as the primary laws of all thought, that A is A, that it is not not-A, that Being is Being only, and never Nothing.

"The non-existent cannot be, and the existent cannot not-be." (Gita, ii.16; otherwise, I might become non-est also! The intellectual instinct too is emotional rebellion against that possibility.)

Yet every mortal moment of our lives, all around and above and below us, these much-vaunted laws of logic are being violated incessantly.



And in these textbooks of deductive logic themselves, most barefacedly! Solemnly declaring that A is A only and B is B only, they at once also say, A is B, B is C, therefore A is C! If A is A, B is B, and C is C, only, how can A ever be B, or B be C, or C be A? If A really is B. i.e., identical with B, then why two names for the same thing? Call it either A, or B.

Samskrt Nyaya does not misapply these laws of Universal Thought, as if they were laws of individual and concrete thinking, for which the distinction between thing and thought, idea and reality, holds good.

It does not say A is B, and B is C, therefore A is C, but that A has C, because C goes with B, and A has B.

It does not artificially separate out an utterly sterile deductive or formal logic from the wholly useful inductive or real logic, but combines both, as is inevitable and natural.

The true and full significance of these laws of thought appears only in metaphysic, as laws of Being, i.e., Universal Thought, as will appear later on.


Deduction after Induction

Every infinitesimal instant, something, some existent thing, is becoming non-existent, and some non-existent thing is coming into being, is becoming existent.

We may say that it is only the form that behaves like this. But what is the good of saying so?

All that the world really means to us--sounds and sights, tastes, touches, and scents--all is included in the 'form' that changes.

Even weight, it is being attempted to prove by mathematical computations, will change, with change of position, from planet to planet. (See Scripture, The New Psychology; but Ostwald in his Handbook of Chemistry seems to think otherwise.)

And, finally, those mathematical laws themselves, on which such computations are based, can nolonger boast permanence; they, too, are being changed by mathematicians, and it is endeavoured to be shownthat parallel lines can meet and two things occupy the same space; though, on these points, it seems likely that exuberance of originality has led to exaggerations, and that the 'old order' will be restored.

We have an indestructible faith that matter is indestructible; this faith is not due to any limited facts we know, for limited data can never justify limitless inductions and inferences; it is only the unavoidable assignment by us, by the 'I', of a conjugal share in our own indefeasible eternity, to our undivorceable partner in life, the 'Not-I', matter.



The real secret of the unlimitedness of inductions and generalisations, as made, is that every single instance, every one, has in it the principle of infinity. Many cases, a number of cases, are not necessary to justify an induction. One case, but it must be a clear and unmistakeable case, is enough. Because in one, therefore in all ones which are the same; because once, therefore always, in the same conditions.

One school of Nyaya puts the matter in a simple way; we have pratyaksha, direct perception, of a vyakti, a particular, and of its jati, species or genus, both, together, simultaneously; because particular-and-general are inseparably bound together by samavAya, co-inherence, mutual 'together-ness'. No 'induction' by elaborate observation and comparison of many instances would be necessary, and 'generalisation' could be arrived at straight off, from the very first observation, if it be sufficiently precise, accurate, unmixed; but, in practice, observation and comparison of many instances are needed, to eliminate irrelevant circumstances. In short, particular-perception and the connected general-perception (Kantian 'matter' and 'form') arise together in the observer's consciousness.


Common Logic vs Metaphysics

Such being the case, it does not help us in any way to say that only the form changes. The form is practically everything; and even if it were not so, even tthen it is something, it is an existent something at one moment.

And what is existent once, should be existent ever. How, why, does it pass into non-existence? We do not understand change. We do not understand the world-process.

If you would have us understand it, you must show that this world-process is not a process at all, but a rock-like fixity; that procession is illusion, and fixity the truth. Then only shall we be able to bring it into accord with the primary laws of thought.

Such is the difficulty of the exaggerated, yet also legitimate, demand of the reason, on the one hand.

On the other hand stands the difficulty of what may be called the demand of the senses. A doctrine of mere changelessness is incomplete; a mere assertion of it perfectly unconvincing. It explains nothing and is not a fact.

It is, as just said, denied by every wink of our eyes, by evsry breath of our lungs, by every beat of our hearts. We want that which will combine and harmonise both change and changelessness. We want to reduce each into terms of the other.

"I am That I am", but something more needed

Many have been the efforts to shut up the world-process into something which can be held in a single hand; which shall be but one single act of consciousness.

• Kant says, in his Kritik of Practical Reason, "to deduce all from a single principle, is the inevitable demand of human reason; we can find full satisfaction only in a complete systematic Unity of all the possessions of our reason"; but he himself failed badly to satisfy that demand.

• Fichte could not do it in less than three successive, unsimultaneous, and therefore change-involving steps, and then too but incompletely.

• The great mystic school of Rosicrucians has endeavoured to do so in one thought and Bible-text: "I am that I am"; but this propounds mere changelessness, and makes no provision for change.

• The Veda-texts belonging to the penultimate stage have exclaimed separately, as said before: "(The) I am (is) Brahman", and then: "The Many is not at all"; but these too are insufficient for our purpose; they too establish changelessness alone and explain not change;

• while other Veda-texts embody change only and not changelessness, as thus : "May I who am One become Many; may I be born forth and multiply," (Chandogya, VI.ii.3, and Taittiriya, II.vi.1), "It created that, and entered into that also." (Taittiriya, II.vi.1).

What we seek shall be obtained

• by compressing the three steps of Fichte into one;
• by combining the first two separate scripture-utterances into a unity;

a small change perhaps, at first sight, but almost as radical and important in result as an alteration of the mere order of letters composing a word, an alteration which makes a completely new word with an entirely new meaning.

(As regards the inquiries of many other philosophers not mentioned in the main text, as well as further comparision of the works of Hegel, Kant and Fichte and how they in turn compare with the Eastern thoughts, please read the book, pp.94-107--sd).