Part 11
The best illustration of this is furnished by what I might call the naïve disunion prevailing within psychology’s own camp. The various movements are not infrequently to be found fighting against one another, like different divisions of the same army in the darkness of night. One party says: “In the analysis of the sensations lies all our salvation. Out of them only can we have consciousness arise synthetically, and, all said and done, up to our time science has achieved nothing just because she has neglected this natural prerequisite to all possibilities of knowledge.” The which {sic}, it maybe remarked in passing, is somewhat cold comfort after more than two thousand years of labour! Then suddenly a counter-movement interjects: “The sensations are what one may not seek to analyse.”[18] Well, that is what I should call plagiarizing the words of the _bon dieu_ in the Garden of Eden: “Of the tree of knowledge thou shalt not eat.” If I may not lay finger upon the fount of my existence, what boots to me the never so broad but turbid stream of the lower levels?
If one compares with this utter lack of success the indubitable honesty of the effort, the entire phenomenon “science” assumes something of an air of sublime absurdity, of melancholy enthusiasm, such as ever and again recalls to one’s mind the immortal hero of Cervantes’ romance--vigorous, single-hearted effort from a mistaken standpoint, directed towards a mistaken end.
As a matter of fact, however, in these latter days the impossibility of the old path with reference to the problem of consciousness seems to be perceived. But the new path upon which in their need men have entered is an utterly paradoxical one; it is the modern theory of the cell endowed with consciousness in the shape of the faculty of memory. Seeing no possibility whatever of explaining consciousness into the cell material without more ado they have recourse to the device of making the cell set out on its campaign, so to speak, with the faculty of memory in its knapsack.[19] In this manner they rid themselves once for all of the mischief-maker, “consciousness”; and with astounding simplicity change ground to a position whence they can fight out the battle about a world-theory after the fashion of army manœuvres, all according to programme upon any lines that may be desired. “Give me a chaos and out of it I will make you a world,” says Kant in his _Prolegomena_. “Give me a cell and out of it I will make you a Goethe or a Newton,” says the modern biologist. The necessary arrangements are all made, the “stern wrestle with the problems of life” can begin in the shape of fantasies drawn from the _Ratskeller_ of the Alma Mater. If one hews out the building stones to one’s own fancy, one may indeed erect systems--a mechanics, a thermo-dynamics, but never a genuine world-conception.
The possibility of ideas such as these is to be found in what I might call the mechanizing of biological values. Thinking is represented, along with heat, as a molecular vibration; the psychic act, under the figure of an impress, of an “Engramm,”[20] thus of work accomplished; and therewith we get the possibility of that rolling back of the _I_-process from the individual to his begetters, and from these in turn to their begetters, and so on backwards _ad infinitum_--in short, the possibility of remaining upon the lines of the purely material, which partakes of the nature of a reaction precisely as much as the lines upon which the physicist works in the cosmogony peculiar to energetics. Just as there, from the outset, the real energies are left out of consideration and only their reactions dealt with, looked upon as work done; so in the treatment of the problem of heredity by science the whole process of life is looked upon simply as work done, in biological guise, a mode of apprehending it to which scientific thought itself, as represented by the teleological school, is entirely opposed.[21]
With the mechanistic representation of things is necessarily involved the question as to the seat of consciousness. Modern physiology vaunts itself not a little upon having got beyond the follies of the centuries that are past, when this seat was sought for in all sorts of hidden nooks. But sooth to say, its own position nowise differs; the change is only in the means of defence employed. Now, as formerly, endeavour is made to localize consciousness in certain regions; there is a search for the “seat” of consciousness. Whether as a pure hypothesis I transfer this seat to the pineal gland, or whether, from the results of experiments upon animals, I seek by a process of exclusion, as it were, to find it in the cerebral cortex--all this makes no essential difference. The mistake, the Hebraism, lies in seeking for a “seat” of consciousness at all. To such an idea only a few exceptionally clear minds oppose a front of resistance. As an example, I cite in a footnote a passage from E. Mach’s _Analyse der Empfindungen_.[22]
Singular reflections are provoked when one contrasts with these extravagant profundities the conception of things presented by the Indian thinker six hundred years before the Christian era began. In the Buddha-thought there is no something called “consciousness,” as equally there is no something called “life.” There is only an experience of the unfolding of consciousness--a constant _becoming conscious_. I do not _have_ consciousness as I might have a half-crown in my pocket, but I _am_ consciousness objectified, as I am will objectified. As long as I think in terms of actuality, there is just but _one_ consciousness in the world--I myself. As long as I think in terms of actuality, consciousness means just this and no more--to experience myself. But this is possible only as an intuition, and a specific impulsion, instruction, is needed in order to arrive at this intuition. Consciousness, just like all the remainder of the _I_-process, is a form of the individual process of nutrition; the only difference is this, that it is the last, the highest phase, as the fruit is the last, the highest phase of the vegetative process. To speak of a “seat” of consciousness has about as much meaning as to speak of a “seat” of bodily heat. All this falls under the one inclusive concept, “nutrition.” What modern physicist would ever be so childish as in some hot body to search for the “seat” of heat? But physiologist and biologist stagger along exhausted under the load of their learnedness on the subject of the “seat” of consciousness. There is just as much reason, and no more, for holding the brain-cells of the cerebral cortex to be the seat of consciousness as there is for regarding the electric cells in its central telegraph office as the seat of the intelligence of a great city.
The teaching of Buddhist physiology is as follows:--
Where the eye and forms encounter one another, and the antecedent conditions are such that each acts upon the other, there arises visual consciousness. Where the ear and sounds encounter one another, there arises aural consciousness. Where nose and odours encounter one another, there arises olfactory consciousness. Where tongue and flavours encounter one another, there arises gustatory consciousness. Where bodies and objects come in contact with one another, there arises tactile consciousness. Where thinking and things (known abstractly) encounter one another, there arises thought-consciousness.
“If the inward eye is undamaged, and external objects do not come within the range of vision, and (as a consequence) no corresponding interaction takes place, then a corresponding moment of consciousness does not result. If the inward eye is undamaged, and external objects come within the range of vision, and (nevertheless) no corresponding interaction takes place, then also a corresponding moment of consciousness does not result. If, however, the inward eye is undamaged, and external objects come within the range of vision, and the corresponding interaction takes place, then there results the corresponding moment of consciousness.”[23]
Thus my entire individuality, the totality of individual experience is a _becoming conscious_ at every moment of existence. Consciousness is a Sankhāra, like all else, distinguished therefrom only in this, that in it Kamma itself becomes perceptible to sense.
Were teleology and mechanistics to come before the Buddha and say, “Decide thou! Which of us two is right? Is the eye born of seeing, or is seeing born of the eye? Is the brain born of thinking, or is thinking born of the brain?” the Buddha would reply with a smile:--
“My young friends, you are both right because you are both wrong. Your question is not correctly put. There are no such things as ‘eye’ and ‘brain’ in the sense in which you use the words. There is only an _I_-process, that unfolds itself by way of certain differentiations which in themselves run their course at a pace sufficiently slow to justify such separate verbal designations as the ‘eye,’ the ‘brain,’ and so forth. Your question, ‘Is the eye born of seeing, or is seeing born of the eye? Is the brain born of thinking, or is thinking born of the brain?’ would have sense and meaning only if the eye and the brain were in themselves organs all finished and complete, to which in that case a specific function also would have to correspond. All this, however, is nothing but a phase, nothing but the form of development assumed by a single process. It is not the eye that sees: _you_ see. The eye is neither born of seeing, nor yet is seeing born of the eye; the eye is simply _the form under which seeing exists_. You do not see _with_ the eye but in virtue of the fact of eye-evolution, the same as you think in virtue of the fact of brain-evolution, which is only another way of saying that you are the form assumed by individual energies.”
Here the physiologist breaks in: “That consciousness has its seat in certain regions of the cerebral cortex may be proven by experiments on animals.” But this is a conclusion as grossly mistaken as that of the physicist when he imagines he can follow up energy throughout all its ramifications.[24] What can be got at by experimental methods is merely negative phenomena, and these furnish no warrant for coming to conclusions as to the seat of consciousness. If I cut through the wire connected with an electric light at any point at all in the circuit, the negative phenomenon “darkness” assuredly supervenes; but to say on that account, “The point of section must be the seat of the electric energy; here is ocular demonstration,” would be sheer foolishness. Yet the physiologist is guilty of just such foolishness, and at its behest does not stick at the perpetration of all those cruelties such as are scarcely to be avoided in experiments upon animals. If only the time would come when true ideas about life would take possession of science, the laboratories of physiologists would no longer be those places where every day sacrifice is made to error as in the temples of blood-stained idols.
All these researches on the subject of the seat of consciousness are only possible where one is working with empty concepts. If one thinks in terms of actuality consciousness is just that with regard to which a reading, a working hypothesis of an inductive nature, is utterly impossible; for here the reading is precisely the form assumed by the consciousness, by that which is to do the reading, by the problem itself, and thus itself again requires a reading, and so on _ad infinitum_.
But there is another point involved in this problem of “consciousness” which, so far as I know, has never been taken account of, and yet is of the utmost significance.
As the Darwinian idea does not embrace in its purview the case of hybrid formations--it does not react upon it at all--so the scientific mode of envisaging things does not take in the case of the physiological negative phenomena of consciousness, does not at all react upon it. With the apparatus of science there is no possibility whatever of getting at such facts as “faith,” “illusion,” “error,” “forgetting.” Science requires something sensible and objective, something so constituted that I can rank it along with other things. In no respect, however, are any of these negative phenomena objective things. Here no possible point of entry offers for science with its instrument, induction.
I may indeed _read_ consciousness under the figure of associative occurrences, but only in the form of recollection. Applied to the corresponding dissociative event, forgetting, this explanation is as impossible as that a molecular mixture which has once come to equilibrium within itself should again spontaneously return to dissolution, to dissociation. As the natural adjustment of differences of molecular tension may be explained or read as a fall, so in its associative activities consciousness may be explained or read as a fall, but never so in its dissociative activities. This, however, involves the utter worthlessness of the former explanation; for every mixture, every association, presupposes separation, dissociation, and, called upon to indicate the _essence_ of consciousness, what I should point to is not so much the associative as the dissociative, not so much recollection, conjunction, as forgetting, disjunction. Once the stone is raised from the earth’s surface its return fall forthwith ensues. But it is the separation from the earth’s surface for which effective causes must be found. In like manner, it is dissociation, forgetting, that really demands elucidation; association, recollection can as easily be read mechanistically as the fall of a stone once it has been raised. Dissociation is the physiological miracle, in presence of which science stands altogether helpless.
The like holds good of faith, illusion, error. The purely mechanistic conception of things, the view which regards the _I_-process simply as an instance of the phenomenon of the compensation of tensile differences, can never be accommodated to the possibility of such things as faith, illusion, and error. But a similar impossibility also exists for the teleological apprehension of the world. How should a “force” ever acquire the faculty of deceiving itself or of falling into error? To a compensation-phenomenon pure and simple, as to God, illusion and error are wholly unattainable potentialities; they belong to mankind alone, to the man whom the Buddha points out to us.
If I am nothing but an unceasing reaction to the outer world, if I constantly adapt myself to things and things adapt themselves to me, not as a mere adjustment but in virtue of specific energies, only then are faith, illusion, error, and all other negative phenomena equally possible with all positive phenomena. Beginningless process furnishes the possibility of both.
Such things as actual illusion, actual error, science may nowise recognize, for in so doing she would be recognizing something for which there is absolutely no room in her cosmogony. One would thereby introduce functions for which one could furnish no organized basis. Only in the cosmogony of the Buddha, only in the concept of individual beginninglessness does each find its necessary place. Here they are the necessary preconditions of all existence. Science is powerless to defend herself against them otherwise than by an attempt to “explain away” such occurrences out of the order of world-events. Upon this point E. Mach, in his _Analyse der Empfindungen_, expresses himself as follows: “The phrase, ‘illusion of the senses,’ shows that man has not yet rightly come to a consciousness, or at least has not yet found it necessary to express such consciousness in fitting terminology, that the senses indicate neither false nor true. The only ‘true’ of which one can speak in connection with the sense organs is that under different conditions they yield different sensations and perceptions. Since these conditions are so extremely manifold in their variety ... it may very well seem ... as if the organ acts dissimilarly under similar conditions. Results out of the usual order are what men are accustomed to call illusions.” This is to make illusion merely truth in an infinitesimal form, to “read” it as a special form of truth, and so be rid of it.
But the value of the Buddha-thought in this domain does not end here. Over and above, it explains to begin with, the every-day fact of experience, that not every pairing evolves a new embryo. This fact is alike incapable of explanation whether from the standpoint of faith or from that of science.
Faith, which sees a divine soul breathed into the material of generation, permits of no standpoint at all, since for it everything takes place according to God’s good pleasure. From the standpoint of science, however, with every conjunction of ovum and sperm-cell, conception also must be granted, since here both are already the form of the new life, already contain in themselves all the ingredients of this new life. It is only the Buddha-thought that explains why, meanwhile, despite the union of ovum and sperm, conception does not take place: it has not “struck in.” At the moment when both were open to the inflow of the energy, the latter was not ready. In the ceaseless, unbroken attunement, each to the other, of the happenings of a world, the proper moment was let slip.[25]
The Buddha-thought further explains the else inexplicable fact of the simultaneous resemblance and lack of resemblance between parents and children. The view of the matter taken by faith supplies no argument in favour of any kind of resemblance whatever between the two. The soul is inbreathed by God whithersoever it pleaseth him. In the view of science, on the contrary, there is found no argument for any failure in resemblance betwixt progenitors and offspring. Ever and always the characteristics of the latter can only be a combination of the characteristics of both the parents. In the Buddha-thought _alone_ are similarity and dissimilarity alike accounted for. I may have inherited my father’s nose, his manner of blowing it indeed, since all lay foreshadowed in the material, and was obliged so to evolve itself: but the evolver is a stranger, hence one common starting-point yields an independent evolving series. Here conception means no more than that two paths, two lines, that of the material and that of energy, intersect one another. We are as at some cross-road, where two highways meet, only to lead further and further away from each other the further we pursue them.
The third item that finds an explanation in the Buddha-thought is the fact of innate aptitudes. Where the act of learning is envisaged from a purely empirical point of view these are a standing, incomprehensible miracle. Opposed to this, the defectiveness of the nativistic theory resides in the fact that according to it every being must make his appearance fitted out all complete with fixed, inborn abilities. Midway removed from both extremes stands the Buddha. With equal ease he explains the possibility of gradual development and that of appearance all ready and complete, inasmuch as with him all depends upon the _tempo_ at which the energy closing with the material enters upon its unfolding process. Is the _tempo_ so fast that the organic recipients are already developed upon leaving the womb, then the innate abilities are there present; the organs can set to forthwith, the external world acts immediately as liberating lure, and the nativists have the last word. Is the _tempo_ slow, then there set in processes that admit of being empirically interpreted or read as a gradual attainment of faculty by experience.
Apart, however, from the biological facts, the Buddha-thought also explains those lofty speculations that have haunted the minds of men from the earliest times, such as “previous existence,” Plato’s idea of learning as “reminiscence,” and so forth. “Many a time it has seemed to me as if I must have been in existence once already,” says such a clear, keen mind as Lichtenberg. Indeed here, if one likes, even the Kantian “_a priori_ of all experience,” this pure _ens_ of scholasticism, acquires sense and meaning. That which with Kant stands out from reality as a blind end, destitute of any real foothold, like the spirit moving upon the face of the waters, here balls itself together into the _I myself_. My Kamma is the “_a priori_”; in a sense, such as Kant never suspected, it is true. All these minds lack guidance, lack light. In dim fashion they feel, but they do not see. During my latest sojourn at Anuradhapura, in the course of a conversation with the abbot of Ruanwelli, he said to me, “Every one who is without the Teaching is like the blind elephant in the jungle: he feels at every twig”--to find out if it is eatable. Here we have an apt illustration of inquiring ignorance.
With this solution of the problem of procreation as furnished by the Buddha are involved a few necessary questions which might have been disposed of in our fifth essay, but may more fitly be dealt with here.
The first is this:--
“If, as said above, the uniquely appropriate energy is not always ready for the material, if contact can be missed, must then a quota of material always stand ready for the Kamma that is set free at every death?”
To which the answer is: “That a faggot should miss the kindling spark; this may very well happen, but that the kindling spark should find nothing upon which to act, such is never the case.” Its very being is just its taking hold, the actuity itself. The _I_-energy takes hold there precisely where it can take hold.
But will it always take hold just there where legitimately it ought to take hold? Will it take hold rightly?
To put such a question is the same as if one should ask: “Will the sun indicate mid-day correctly and unfailingly every day? Or: Will the ocean maintain itself unceasingly at sea-level?” Where the entire universe _has_ not but _is_ law there, “to take hold” is as much as to say “to take hold legitimately”: “to take hold legitimately” is as much as to say “to take hold rightly.” All such questions were justified only if we had to do with a reciprocal being attuned; but all things are found to be a series of ever new self-attunings, each after other--no working into one another like cog and groove, no pre-established harmony, no psycho-physical parallelism. The whole universe is a thing that finds itself in a state of perpetual nascency. If a jest may be ventured in face of the monster, one might say that the whole world is constantly in a state of bringing forth, yet never is there born a “something” that stands ideally fast, so as to be fitted to serve as a standard for true and untrue.