Part 9
All unspoiled, natural thinking and feeling proceeds by way of immediate effectuation. The never wholly-eradicable idea of magic, as it still survives to-day--one last little remnant of it--in the form of “_Sympathiekuren_,” is nothing else but the instinctive idea of the necessity for such effectuation. How the nobleman of Capernaum would have laughed if Professor X. had said to him, “When you say to your servant, ‘Do this!’ and he does it, that seems to you quite a natural thing. But in strict truth this fact simply bristles with insuperable difficulties from the point of view of exact scientific explanation.” It is the high privilege of our age to listen with becoming awe to such-like profound absurdities just because the sense of actuality is lost to us, because through the insistence and authority wherewith science has been able to make her re-actual views prevail, we have finally come to the point of believing in all seriousness that in the actual, in things like eating and drinking, a proceeding indispensable to their proper performance is carefully to count one, two, three!
Science dubs all immediate effectuations “mystical,” and refuses to rest until she has extirpated all such-like ideas. But the mystical is not that which science understands by the term; for to her the mystical is nothing but the non-scientific. It is actuality itself that is mystical. Apart from actuality there is nothing mystical whatever; for it is only the actual, no matter where one lays hold of it, that rolls back into the twilight of beginninglessness. Beginninglessness is what is mystical, and my consciousness _the_ mystical itself. A miracle is nothing mystical. For, if it happens, then it is law; and if it does not happen--why, then it simply is not!
This immediate action of man upon man--this it is that reveals to me how energies operate. When a glance from my eye produces a “stir” in another human being, this energical impulse is not obliged to pass through all the media lying between, but operates _immediately_. To be sure, an attempt is made to read mechanically this fact also--to interpret it in the form of psychic vibrations, subtlest etheric waves; and science and theosophic, spiritistic, and all sorts of mysticism here go hand in hand. But there is not the least necessity that it should be a glance, a sound, or anything else of a positive nature which moves another. A silence, a failure to look may ofttimes be that which produces the most striking psychic convulsions. To interpret this, however, as a case of transmigrating vibrations, were scarcely possible even for the boldest of hypothesis-makers.
It is even so! That which is most natural is most strange to us. Here too, as with “consciousness,” it is a case of _sapere aude!_ We simply must learn again to dare to take actuality for that which it is--for that which acts there where it can and must act.
When love springs up between two beings, this means that unique attunement prevails. This, however, signifies that energy passes over immediately. It has no need first to wrestle with air and ether molecules: _it exists there only where it acts, and it acts there only where it is uniquely attuned_.
This is the way in which actual energies operate. This way cannot be proven inductively: it can only be experienced intuitively. And it is this experience which supplies us with our parallel, our point of support, in comprehending how Kamma works. And only because we have lapsed out of this actual life into the re-actual life of science, has the Kamma-teaching become strange and unnatural to us.
The value of an intuition to him who has not himself experienced it, is only measurable by the extent to which it is of service as a working hypothesis.
Of what service is the Buddha-thought here?
In the first place, it makes it possible to “read” both kinds of motion, the inorganic as well as the organic, the falling as well as the proceeding, from one common point of view.
Where the whole _actual_ play of world-events is a summation of self-sustaining processes, existence is action itself; and the simple existence of an energical, of a Kammic system, purports that it makes itself felt with regard to other systems of energies--sustains itself in opposition to them. Actuality is devouring: man in his very nature an eater.
Where there are a number of energical systems, they act against one another. Where there is action, the corresponding reactions are present in the shape of motions perceptible to sense.
These latter, here also, signify nothing save that energies are present, and as such are at work according to circumstances and antecedent conditions.
When two men, in wrestling with each other, fall into a whirling movement, this by no means implies that there resides in these men an energy of this particular variety; it means nothing more than that energies are present, even as the circular movement of two electro-magnets intimates nothing more than that energies are present. Here also motion is only a by-product, the equivalent of the shadow in the case of light--nothing in and of itself. When the flower unfolds itself to the sun, when the creeper draws itself up towards the light, when the caterpillar crawls along the leaf, when the wild geese cleave the air like a wedge, when the dog snaps at the tit-bit, when I lift my arm, lie down, get up, do this or the other thing--in each case it is the same. All this only intimates that energies are present, and in the course of their action against other systems of energies yield by-products. In this mode of apprehending the fact “motion” as the _shadow of energy_ the entire play of world-events, organic as well as inorganic nature, the dead as the living, the re-actual as the actual, admits of one uniform reading.
Secondly:--
In her fight against “telekinesis,” it is with science as with one who in public discourses eloquently on enlightenment, but whose own house is haunted by a ghost.
This hobgoblin of exact science is _gravitation_; and it bids fair to scatter all exactitude to the winds, since the physicist, too, is unable to represent it to himself otherwise than as acting independent of time.
In the Buddha-thought this independence of time permits of being “read” without the least difficulty, since here it is nothing but the by-product which two systems of energies acting upon one another yield with every alteration of energy-value on one side or the other. When I shift the light with reference to the object illumined, the movement of the shadow takes place as a by-product independent of time. In the selfsame way, what we call gravitation is nothing but the by-product independent of time which informs us that a change is taking place in the energical relation of two world-systems.
Thirdly:--
The Buddha-thought furnishes a reading of the concept of time and space.
Time and space as something existent in themselves are only possible where one is working with “bodies” in the physical sense, where one is operating with identities. Such bodies have need of a space existent in itself in order to perform movements; and, as a matter of fact, physics so completely objectifies the conception of space that it does not hesitate to make the attempt to determine the curvature-measurement of space. Such bodies, further, require time as something objective in order to traverse this space. An objective time and an objective space represent, so to speak, the ordinate and abscissa of the artificial system “body” as conceived of by the physicist. If one does not work with such “bodies,” but, as a philosopher, with things regarded as mere “appearances”--like Kant, for instance--then time and space, from being things purely objective, must become just as much things purely subjective--forms of perception given _a priori_; the one view as erring as the other!
“Avoiding both extremes, the Buddha points to the truth in the mean.” This continually-recurrent phrase applies, as everywhere, so also here in the strife of opposites. Actuality has no opposites. It is the union of opposites itself. And wherever contention reigns of or about opposites, it only shows that both parties alike have become entangled in pseudo-problems of a purely dialectical nature. This the seeker for truth may depend on, as a rule that has no exceptions: Where there are opposites, there is nescience! Whence it follows that there is no solution from the side of things, but only from the side of thinking, in the rectification of our mental assumptions.
So also is it here.
Where the actual play of world-events is comprehended as a summation of individual combustion-processes, time and space are things neither purely objective nor purely subjective, but belonging equally to both--a _Becoming_, like everything else. They arise, spring up, in the effectuation of the _I_-process with respect to the external world wheresoever the preliminary conditions are such that they can and must unfold themselves; in just the same way that consciousness arises in the effectuation of the _I_-process with respect to the external world wheresoever the preliminary conditions are so regulated that it can and must unfold itself.
So much for the Kamma-teaching, and its bearing upon the claims of modern physics.
Immediate passing over does not contradict actuality, but only the artificial premises of science. All that is actual is immediate. For this reason a passing over of the actual in time and space is an absurdity, since time and space are, first and foremost, functions of the actual, forms of experience, hence never can be made to serve as measure of this experience.
VIII
BUDDHISM AND THE PROBLEM OF PHYSIOLOGY
In the position it assumes towards actuality science resembles a man who has reduced all language to mere grammar and now finds himself hard put to it to explain how purely grammatical signs and formulæ could ever have given rise to actual speech. As grammar presupposes actual speech--is secondary, derived from it--so the mechanical, re-actual view presupposes actuality--is secondary, derived from it--and it is against all common-sense to seek now to turn the tables with an endeavour to prove the possibility of the living language “actuality,” assess its title to existence, by the “grammar” of the scientific conception of things. From this position, the fact that anything ever happens at all, remains an eternally unfathomable mystery.
The first claim upon the genuine thinker is that he should understand clearly that a something given is present, whose simple existence represents also the _power to exist_; whose activity has no need of being proven, since proving itself by itself. The endeavours of science from its re-actual position, to govern and administer actuality itself also, betray a limitedness and crudity of thought at which later generations will stand amazed. So long as science fails to understand and respect her natural limitations, so long as she keeps trying to interpret the actual mechanically, so long is she as serious a danger to the world as faith.
In the treatment of the problem of physiology that follows I can be brief, because all the details here relate to a technical domain to which the majority of my readers are unlikely to bring either interest or ability to understand.
Just as physics--in the widest sense of the word--may be briefly designated as the teaching that informs us of the relations existing between “bodies,” so physiology may be succinctly termed the teaching that instructs us as to the relations existent between living beings and the external world.
Where living beings are comprehended as processes of combustion pure and simple, every relationship betwixt them and their environment becomes a _form of alimentation_. The intellectual as the vegetative, the psychic as the physical life, are here comprised under the one common, all-inclusive concept of alimentation. Whether I appropriate, assimilate something to myself through the organs of sense and thought or through the tongue and the digestive apparatus, both proceedings are the same--forms of alimentation.
Accordingly we find the Buddha calling living beings “āhāraṭṭhitikā,” _i.e._ “existing through alimentation,” and placing this expression--as synonymous--alongside “sañkhāraṭṭhitikā,” _i.e._ “existing through Sankhāra,” compounded, conditioned.
Here in their every movement the entire existence of living beings becomes a _laying hold of the external world_--a gross laying hold with hands and teeth as well as that subtle _mental_ laying hold which we generally denominate “comprehension.” As the whole existence of a flame is a laying hold of the external world, as it subsists solely by reason of this prehensile activity, even so is it with the _I_-process.
Buddhist psychology distinguishes between four varieties of aliment. First, there is aliment in the common, vulgar sense of the word, be it in gross growth-promoting form as solid or liquid food, be it in fine growth-promoting form as respiration. Second, contact, as the mutual encounter of the senses and their corresponding objects. Third, mental apprehension; and fourth, consciousness; these two latter being the working up, the assimilating of what issues from contact.
From the commanding height of the position which Buddhist thinking takes up towards the process of life, it cannot possibly encounter that “problem” with which scientific physiology finds itself forced to wrestle.
Briefly stated, that problem runs as follows:--
“How can it ever be possible for a living being to appropriate something to itself, assimilate something, take up something into itself, whether this ‘something’ be of the gross growth-promoting variety--nourishment in the vulgar sense of the word--or of the intellectual sort, as sense impressions and the content of consciousness?”
There was a time in the history of natural science, more particularly in the history of the healing art--and that time is hardly past yet; we still stand within its fringes--when to work at all with the concept of a “vital energy” was regarded as synonymous with being unscientific, indeed, was esteemed mere blind faith. At every opportunity, seasonable and unseasonable, it was declared that “to-day” we had no longer any need of a “vital energy,” that the mechanical view explained all that very much better; yet, in actual truth, one only showed how wanting one was in the sense of actuality when one could accept as satisfactory a “reading” of life which presented it under the figure of endosmotic and diosmotic processes, and such like.
Here, however, is abundantly proved true that saying of Horace that nature is something which man cannot drag out even with a pitchfork; and it was with a pitchfork of the biggest sort that the mechanists took the field against actual life. To-day the antithesis of the mechanical view--the teleological--has found its way back into medical thought, and begins again to move about naturally and without restraint in the domain of therapeutics.
Beyond all else, it was the progress made in physiological chemistry, the peculiar, seemingly inexplicable facts here observed, which perforce impelled towards this inversion of positions.
Here in the domain of physiological chemistry there come to light processes, reactions, which make a mock of all the rules and laws got from reagent tubes. Here in the living organism it is found that the “strongest” acid--sulphuric acid--is crowded out of its combinations by the “weakest”--carbonic acid; which means nothing else but that the concept of “strength” as it has been taken over from inorganic nature does not apply here at all. By reason of such experiences it has been found necessary to introduce a new concept, that of “avidity”; in other words, here as everywhere, one hobbles along at the heels of the facts of actuality, being obliged ever and again to adapt oneself to them anew as best one may.
Here in the living organism, albumen, fats, and carbohydrates are worked up at temperatures at which they undergo no change under the
## action of the oxygen of the atmosphere. The most marvellous thing of
all, however, is the action of the glands, which, in taking up the material to be elaborated, display a power of choice that, so far as our ideas go, defies all explanation. Not the least regard is here paid to chemical and physical laws as abstracted by science from inorganic nature. Complete arbitrariness prevails. The epithelium of the stomach, for example, possesses the power of always despatching the hydric chloride set free from sodium chloride in one direction--namely, into the excretory ducts of the rennet glands, and of always sending the sodium carbonate formed in another direction, back into the lymph and blood circulation.
Examples such as this might be multiplied to almost any extent, did we here aim at completeness.
The key-word to it all, as revealed to us by the latest researches in physiological chemistry, is--arbitrariness!
Of course, as everywhere so also here, only give her time enough and science will come round to adjustments in thought, and with that to the formulation of all such facts into laws. In respect of such facts, however, it must clearly be understood that the purely mechanical view is no longer able to hold the field; that the teleological view has broken through the artificial embankments of the mechanical view and again poured forth over the level lands of scientific thinking.
That which has hitherto given such weight to the mechanical view in physiology is the possibility, up to a certain degree, of reading the physiological facts mechanically. One can “read” the eye so far as its external apparatus is concerned, according to the laws of catoptrics and dioptrics; but the bearing of this upon the faculty of seeing or upon an explanation of that faculty is simply nothing. This is not the fitting place to deal with the revolting outrage upon sound thinking of which the scientific theory of vision is guilty in its interpretation of the reversed retinal image: that demands a chapter to itself.
One may “read” the heart and the vascular system as a pumping contrivance, and the osseous system and its joints as an arrangement of levers. One may reckon in heat-units the nutrition-values taken in and given off, and equilibrate them with tolerable success, as can also be done with a calorimeter; that is to say, one can “read” the living organism in accordance with the formula of the law of the conservation of energy. But nothing thereby is gained that is of the slightest assistance towards a comprehension of the _actual_ energies at work in all these functions, except in so far as to the genuine thinker all this makes more vital and pressing the question as to what precisely that wonderful something is which pulls the strings. And if one school of science would like to make us believe that on the basis of an ever-increasing facility in “reading” the organism mechanically the question as to actuating energies may in the end be completely disposed of, as referring to quantities so minute as to be negligible, it need not be taken seriously; it only resembles a man who would account for the revolution of a wheel solely from the shape and texture of the wood.
That which along with the results of physiological chemistry helped towards the overthrow of the mechanical view, was the new tendency in therapeutics--serum therapeutics, to wit--which, put briefly, amounts to a working out of specific affinities between the living organism and certain organic substances.
As the physiological chemist was forced to note that he had fallen out of the realm of crude but easily-handled quantities into the realm of unaccountable qualities--that is, out of re-actuality into actuality--so was it with the experimenter in these specific remedies. One was obliged to take note that in this field the grossly quantitative according to mass and weight no longer went for anything. Ehrlich calls the antitoxins “magic bullets” which hit their mark _immediately_. Here it is no longer a question of the mere more or less by which one has hitherto been accustomed to gauge effects, but of an attunement more or less fine and delicate. In short, one has forced one’s way into the domain of actual energies and seeks gropingly after one or another method of accommodation. For the quantitative position may not be abandoned entirely if one would remain scientific. One must be able to measure. Actual energies, however, do not admit of being measured by dead material. They are only to be measured through themselves, _i.e._ through their working.
Already more than a hundred years ago, Hahnemann, the founder of the homœopathic method of treating disease, consciously and completely abandoned the crude quantitative position in the field of medical science. He had freed himself entirely from the quantitative conception of curative effect. He called his remedies “potencies,” and this potency was determined not according to mass but according to the fineness, the delicacy of the mutual accord between the organism and the remedy. This mutual accord, however, grows subtler, more acute, with progressive dematerialization, with the freeing of the active energies resident in the remedies from the burden of their ballast of material. Hence the apparently paradoxical idea that the curative effect augmented with the diminution of the dose--an idea which has given the doctors of the orthodox schools such abundant occasion for misunderstanding and barbed raillery. The effectiveness is not increased with the lessening of the dose, but with the subtilization of the unique accords concerned. Hahnemann had the courage to bring his thinking into line with the actual energies and their manner of working--a courage which modern serum therapeutics does not possess, and quite likely never will possess, so that we may look to see the wave of actuality which here has burst upon therapeutic life again crushed under by re-actual tendencies.
Wherever opposites are found, there mere dialectical problems form the subject of contention. The contradictions between the mechanical and the teleological views with respect to the living organism are also of a purely dialectical nature. Both take up the position that the organism is an identity, and accordingly a something so constituted that it can take nutriment _into itself_. Both alike, teleology as mechanism, looking upon the cell as life itself, make it their endeavour to master the miracle of that life; the former, as a result of its efforts, coming to the conclusion that a vital force, an incomprehensible something in itself, must somewhere lie concealed in this wonderful machinery; whilst the latter pushes on unswervingly towards the goal it has set before itself--that of becoming, by ever closer and closer description, master at length of the great riddle.
As everywhere, so also here, the Buddha stands between and above these two opposites, inasmuch as he teaches:--
A living being so constituted that it must and can take up something _into itself_ simply does not exist. Such a living being is only to be found where one is dealing with the concept of identities. But identities are nowhere to be found within the domain of actuality. Here are only processes of combustion. If one sets out with the concept of identities, one creates for oneself a problem whose insolubility proceeds as much from its purely dialectical nature as the problem of telekinesis in physics. If one abides by the _actual_, if one holds strictly to the insight that living beings are individual processes of combustion, then there exist nothing but energies which for a certain period of time put a body of material specifically belonging to themselves in a specific condition of tension, for a time maintain it so, and then after a time again abandon it. Here the cell is not life itself, but simply the most primitive structural expression of the fact that certain materials find themselves in a certain state of tension, in the same way that the ridges and furrows in a Chladni’s sound-figure are a structural expression of the fact that a certain material--some sand on a glass plate--finds itself in a certain state of tension.