On The Pertinence of Philosophy

"Wisdom uncreate, the same now as it ever was, and the same to be for evermore." —St. Augustine, Confessions, ix.10.

"Primordial and present Witness."—Prakāśânanda, Siddhântamuktâvali, 44.

I. Definition and Status of Philosophy, or Wisdom

To discuss the 'problems of philosophy' presupposes a definition of 'philosophy'. It will not be contested that 'philosophy' implies rather the love of wisdom than the love of knowledge, nor secondarily that from the 'love of wisdom', philosophy has come by a natural transition to mean the doctrine of those who love wisdom and are called philosophers.[[1]]

Now knowledge as such is not the mere report of the senses (the reflection of anything in the retinal mirror may be perfect, in an animal or idiot, and yet is not knowledge), nor the mere act of recognition (names being merely a means of alluding to the aforesaid reports), but is an abstraction from these reports, in which abstraction the names of the things are used as convenient substitutes for the things themselves. Knowledge is not then of individual presentations, but of types of presentation; in other words, of things in their intelligible aspect, i.e. of the being that things have in the mind of the knower, as principles, genera and species. In so far as knowledge is directed to the attainment of ends it is called practical; in so far as it remains in the knower, theoretical or speculative. Finally, we cannot say that a man knows wisely, but that he knows well; wisdom takes knowledge for granted and governs the movement of the will with respect to things known; or we may say that wisdom is the criterion of value, according to which a decision is made to act or not to act in any given case or universally. Which will apply not merely to external acts, but also to contemplative or theoretical acts.

Philosophy, accordingly, is a wisdom about knowledge, a correction du savoir-penser. In general, "Philosophy II"[[2]] has been held to embrace what we have referred to above as theoretical or speculative knowledge, for example, logic, ethics, psychology, aesthetic, theology, ontology; and in this sense the problems of philosophy are evidently those of rationalisation, the purpose of philosophy being so to correlate the data of empirical experience as to 'make sense' of them, which is accomplished for the most part by a reduction of particulars to universals (deduction). And thus defined, the function of philosophy contrasts with that of practical science, of which the proper function is that of predicting the particular from the universal (induction). Beyond this, however, "Philosophy I" has been held to mean a wisdom not so much about particular kinds of thought, as a wisdom about thinking, and an analysis of what it means to think, and an enquiry as to what may be the nature of the ultimate reference of thought. In this sense the problems of philosophy are with respect to the ultimate nature of reality, actuality or experience; meaning by reality whatever is in act and not merely potential. We may ask, for example, what are truth, goodness and beauty (considered as concepts abstracted from experience), or we may ask whether these or any other concepts abstracted from experience have actually any being of their own; which is the matter in debate as between nominalists on the one hand and realists, or idealists, on the other.[[3]] It may be noted that, since in all these applications philosophy means 'wisdom', if or when we speak of philosophies in the plural, we shall mean not different kinds of wisdom, but wisdom with respect to different kinds of things. The wisdom may be more or less, but still one and the same order of wisdom.

As to this order, if knowledge is by abstraction, and wisdom about knowledge, it follows that this wisdom, pertaining to things known or knowable, and attained by a process of reasoning or dialectic from experimental data, and neither being nor claiming to be revealed or gnostic doctrine, in no way transcends thought, but is rather the best kind of thought, or, let us say, the truest science. It is, indeed, an excellent wisdom, and assuming a good will, one of great value to man.[[4]] But let us not forget that because of its experimental, that is to say statistical basis, and even supposing an infallible operation of the reason such as may be granted to mathematics, this wisdom can never establish absolute certainties, and can predict only with very great probability of success; the 'laws' of science, however useful, do nothing more than resume past experience. Furthermore, philosophy in the second of the above senses, or human wisdom about things known or knowable, must be systematic, since it is required by hypothesis that its perfection will consist in an accounting for everything, in a perfect fitting together of all parts of the puzzle to make one logical whole; and the system must be a closed system, one namely limited to the field of time and space, cause and effect, for it is by hypothesis about knowable and determinate things, all of which are presented to the cognitive faculty in the guise of effects, for which causes are sought.[[5]] For example, space being of indefinite and not infinite extent,[[6]] the wisdom about determinate things cannot have any application to whatever "reality" may or may not belong to non-spatial, or immaterial, modes, or similarly, to a non-temporal mode, for if there be a 'now', we have no sensible experience of any such thing, nor can we conceive it in terms of logic. If it were attempted by means of the human wisdom to overstep the natural limits of its operation, the most that could be said would be that the reference 'indefinite magnitude' (mathematical infinity) presents a certain analogy to the reference 'essential infinity' as postulated in religion and metaphysics, but nothing could be affirmed or denied with respect to the 'isness' (esse) of this infinite in essence.

Each is then dependent on the other, although in different ways; the sciences depending on revealed truth for their formal correction, and revealed truth relying upon the sciences for its demonstration by analogy, 'not as though it stood in need of them, but only to make its teaching clearer'.

If the human wisdom, depending upon itself alone ('rationalism'), proposes a religion, this will be what is called a 'natural religion', having for its deity that referent of which the operation is seen everywhere, and yet is most refractory to analysis, viz. 'life' or 'energy'. And this natural religion will be a pantheism or monism, postulating a soul (anima, 'animation') of the universe, everywhere known by its effects perceptible in the movements of things; amongst which things any distinction of animate and inanimate will be out of place, inasmuch as animation can be defined rationally only as 'that which is expressed in, or is the cause of, motion'. Or if not a pantheism, then a polytheism or pluralism, in which a variety of animations ('forces') is postulated as underlying and 'explaining' a corresponding variety of motions.[[7]] But nothing can be affirmed or denied as regards the proposition that such animation or animations may be merely determinate and contingent aspects of a 'reality' indeterminate in itself. Expressed more technically, pantheism and polytheism are essentially profane conceptions, and if recognisable in a given religious or metaphysical doctrine, are there interpolations of the reason, not essential to the religious or metaphysical doctrine in itself.[[8]]

On the other hand, the human wisdom, not relying on itself alone, may be applied to a partial, viz. analogical, exposition of the religious or metaphysical wisdoms, these being taken as prior to itself. For although the two wisdoms (Philosophy II and Philosophy I) are different in kind, there can be a formal coincidence, and in this sense what is called a 'reconciliation of science and religion'. Each is then dependent on the other, although in different ways; the sciences depending on revealed truth for their formal correction, and revealed truth relying upon the sciences for its demonstration by analogy, 'not as though it stood in need of them, but only to make its teaching clearer'.

In either case, the final end of human wisdom is a good or happiness that shall accrue either to the philosopher himself, or to his neighbours, or to humanity at large, but necessarily in terms of material well-being. The kind of good envisaged may or may not be a moral good.[[9]] For example, if we assume a good will, i.e. a natural sense of justice, the natural religion will be expressed in ethics in a sanction of such laws of conduct as most conduce to the common good, and he may be admired who sacrifices even life for the sake of this. In aesthetic (art being circa factibilia) the natural religion, given a good will, will justify the manufacture of such goods as are apt for human well-being, whether as physical necessities or as sources of sensible pleasure. All this belongs to 'humanism' and is very far from despicable. But in case there is not a good will, the natural religion may equally be employed to justify the proposition 'might is right' or 'devil take the hindmost', and in manufacture the production of goods either by methods which are injurious to the common good, or which in themselves are immediately adapted to ends injurious to the common good; as in the cases of child-labour and the manufacture of poison gas. Revealed truth, on the contrary, demands a good will a priori, adding that the aid of the rational philosophy, as science or art, is required in order that the good will may be made effective.[[10]]

Religion requires of its adherents to be perfected; metaphysics that they realise their own perfection that has never been infringed.... Sin, from the standpoint of religion, is moral, from that of metaphysics, intellectual.

There is then another kind of Philosophy I, viz. that to which we have alluded as 'revealed truth', which though it covers the whole ground of Philosophy II, does so in another way, while beyond this it treats confidently of 'realities' which may indeed be immanent in time and space tissue, and are not wholly incapable of rational demonstration, but are nevertheless said to be transcendent with respect to this tissue, i.e. by no means wholly contained within it nor given by it, nor wholly amenable to demonstration. The "First Philosophy", for example, affirms the actuality of a 'now' independent of the flux of time; while experience is only of a past and future. Again, the procedure of the First Philosophy is no longer in the first place deductive and secondarily inductive, but inductive from first to last, its logic proceeding invariably from the transcendental to the universal, and thence as before to the particular. This First Philosophy, indeed, taking for granted the principle 'as above, so below' and vice-versa,[[11]] is able to find in every microcosmic fact the trace or symbol of a macrocosmic actuality, and accordingly resorts to 'proof' by analogy; but this apparently deductive procedure is here employed by way of demonstration, and not by way of proof, where logical proof is out of the question, and its place is taken either by faith (Augustine's credo ut intelligam) or by the evidence of immediate experience (alaukika-pratyakṣa).[[12]]

Our first problem in connection with the highest wisdom, considered as a doctrine known by revelation (whether through ear or symbolic transmission), consistent but unsystematic, and intelligible in itself although it treats in part of unintelligible things, is to distinguish without dividing religion from metaphysics, Philosophy II from Philosophy I. This is a distinction without a difference, like that of attribute from essence, and yet a distinction of fundamental importance if we are to grasp the true meaning of any given spiritual act.

We proceed therefore first to emphasize the distinctions that can be drawn as between religion and metaphysics with respect to a wisdom that is one in itself and in any case primarily directed to immaterial, or rationally speaking, 'unreal' things.[[13]] Broadly speaking, the distinction is that of Christianity from Gnosticism, Sunnī from Shi'a doctrine, Rāmânuja from Śankarācarya, of the will from the intellect, participation (bhakti) from gnosis (jn̄āna), or knowledge-of (avidyā) from knowledge-as (vidyā). As regards the Way, the distinction is one of consecration from initiation, and of passive from active integration; and as regards the End, of assimilation (tadākāratā) from identification (tadbhāva). Religion requires of its adherents to be perfected; metaphysics that they realise their own perfection that has never been infringed (even Satan is still virtually Lucifer, being fallen in grace and not in nature). Sin, from the standpoint of religion, is moral, from that of metaphysics, intellectual (mortal sin in metaphysics being a conviction or assertion of independent self-subsistence, as in Satan's case, or envy of the spiritual attainments of others, as in Indra's).

Religions may and must be many, each being an 'arrangement of God', and stylistically differentiated, inasmuch as the thing known can only be in the knower according to the mode of the knower, and hence as we say in India, 'He takes the forms that are imagined by His worshippers', or as Eckhart expresses it, 'I am the cause that God is God.'

Religion, in general, proceeds from the being in act (kāryâvasthā) of the First Principle, without regard to its being in potentiality (kāraṇâvasthā),[[14]] while metaphysics treats of the Supreme Identity as an indisseverable unity of potentiality and act, darkness and light, holding that these can also and must also be considered apart when we attempt to understand their operation in identity in It or Him. And so religion assumes an aspect of duality,[[15]] viz. when it postulates 'primary matter', 'potentiality' or 'non-being' far removed from the actuality of God, and does not take account of the principal presence of this 'primary matter' in, or rather 'of' the First, as its 'nature'.[[16]]

Religions may and must be many, each being an 'arrangement of God', and stylistically differentiated, inasmuch as the thing known can only be in the knower according to the mode of the knower, and hence as we say in India, 'He takes the forms that are imagined by His worshippers', or as Eckhart expresses it, 'I am the cause that God is God.'[[17]] And this is why religious beliefs, as much as they have united men, have also divided men against each other, as Christian or heathen, orthodox or heretical.[[18]] So that if we are to consider what may be the most urgent practical problem to be resolved by the philosopher, we can only answer that this is to be recognised in a control and revision of the principles of comparative religion, the true end of which science, judged by the best wisdom (and judgment is the proper function of applied wisdom), should be to demonstrate the common metaphysical basis of all religions and that diverse cultures are fundamentally related to one another as being the dialects of a common spiritual and intellectual language; for whoever recognises this, will no longer wish to assert that 'My religion is best', but only that it is the 'best for me'.[[19]] In other words, the purpose of religious controversy should be, not to 'convert' the opponent, but to persuade him that his religion is essentially the same as our own. To cite a case in point, it is not long since we received a communication from a Catholic friend in which he said 'I've been ashamed for years at the superficiality and cheapness of my attempt to state a difference between Christians and Hindus'. It is noteworthy that a pronouncement such as this will assuredly strike a majority of European readers with a sense of horror. We recognize in fact that religious controversy has still generally in view to convince the opponent of error rather than of correctness in our eyes; and one even detects in modern propagandist writing an undertone of fear, as though it would be a disaster that might upset our own faith, were we to discover essential truth in the opponent; a fear which is occasioned by the very fact that with increasing knowledge and understanding, it is becoming more and more difficult to establish fundamental differences as between one religion and another. It is one of the functions of the First Philosophy to dissipate such fears. Nor is there any other ground whatever upon which all men can be in absolute agreement, excepting that of metaphysics, which we assert is the basis and the norm of all religious formulations. Once such a common ground is recognised, it becomes a simple matter to agree to disagree in matter of details, for it will be seen that the various dogmatic formulations are no more than paraphrases of one and the same principle.[[20]]

Few will deny that at the present day Western civilisation is faced with the imminent possibility of total functional failure nor that at the same time this civilisation has long acted and still continues to act as a powerful agent of disorder and oppression throughout the rest of the world. We dare say that both of these conditions are referable in the last analysis to that impotence and arrogance which have found a perfect expression in the dictum 'East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet', a proposition to which only the most abysmal ignorance and deepest discouragement could have given rise. On the other hand, we recognize that the only possible ground upon which an effective entente of East and West can be accomplished is that of the purely intellectual wisdom that is one and the same at all times and for all men, and is independent of all environmental idiosyncrasy.[[21]]

We had intended to discuss at greater length the differentia of religion and metaphysics, but shall rather conclude the present section by an assertion of their ultimate identity. Both, considered as Ways, or praxis, are means of accomplishing the rectification, regeneration and reintegration of the aberrant and fragmented individual consciousness, both conceive of man's last end (puruṣārtha) as consisting in a realisation by the individual of all the possibilities inherent in his own being, or may go farther, and see in a realisation of all the possibilities of being in any mode and also in possibilities of non-being, a final goal. For the Neo-Platonists and Augustine, and again for Erigena, Eckhart and Dante, and for such as Rūmī, Ibn 'Arabī, Śankarācarya, and many others in Asia, religious and intellectual experience are too closely interwoven ever to be wholly divided;[[22]] who for example would have suspected that the words 'How can That, which the Comprehending call the Eye of all things, the Intellect of intellects, the Light of lights, and numinous Omnipresence, be other than man's last end', and 'Thou has been touched and taken! long has Thou dwelt apart from me, but now that I have found Thee, I shall never let Thee go', are taken, not from a 'theistic' source, but from purely Vedāntic hymns addressed to the Essence (ātman) and to the "impersonal" Brahman?!

II. How Divers Wisdoms Have Considered Immortality

Let us now consider the application of different kinds of wisdom to a particular problem of general significance. The pertinence of philosophy to the problem of immortality is evident, inasmuch as wisdom is primarily concerned with immaterial things, and it is evident that material things are not immortal as such (in esse per se), nor even from one moment to another, but are continually in flux, and this is undeniable, regardless of whether there may or may not be in such perpetually becoming things some immortal principle. Or to regard the matter from another angle, we may say that whatever, if anything, there may be immortal in phenomenal things must have been so since time began, for to speak of an immortal principle as having become mortal is the same thing as to say it was always mortal.

It needs no argument to demonstrate that human wisdom, rationalism, our Philosophy II, will understand by 'immortality', not an everlasting life on earth, but an after-death persistence of individual consciousness and memory and character, such as in our experience survives from day to day across the nightly intervals of death-like sleep. Rational wisdom then will take up either one of two positions. It may in the first place argue that we have no experience of nor can conceive of the functioning of consciousness apart from the actual physical bases on which the functioning seems to rest, if indeed consciousness be in itself anything whatever more than a function of matter in motion, that is to say of physical existence; and will not therefore conceive the possibility of any other than an immortality in history, viz. in the memories of other mortal beings. In this sense there can also be postulated the possibility of a kind of resurrection, as when memory is refreshed by the discovery of documentary proofs of the existence of some individual or people whose very names had been forgotten, it may be for millennia. Or human wisdom may maintain, rightly or wrongly, that evidences have been found of the 'survival of personality', viz. in communications from the 'other world', of such sort as to prove either by reference to facts unknown to the observer, but which are afterwards verified, or by 'manifestations' of one sort or another, a continuity of memory and persistence of individual character in the deceased who is assumed to be in communication with the observer. If it is then attempted to rationalise the evidence thus accepted, it is argued that there may be kinds of matter other and subtler than those perceptible to our present physical senses, and that these other modalities of matter may very well serve as the suppositum of consciousness functioning on other planes of being.

It will be readily seen that no spiritual or intellectual distinction can be drawn between the two rationalistic interpretations, the only difference between them being as regards the amount or kind of time in which the continuity of individual character and consciousness can be maintained in a dimensioned space and on a material basis, theories of 'fourth dimensions' or of 'subtle matter' changing nothing in principle. Both of the rationalistic interpretations are rejected in toto, equally by religion and metaphysics.

Not that the possibility of an indefinite perdurance of individual consciousness upon indefinitely numerous or various platforms of being and in various temporal modes is by any means denied in religion or in metaphysics (it being rather assumed that individual consciousness even now functions on other levels than those of our present terrestrial experience),[[23]] but that a persistence in such modes of being is not, strictly speaking, an immortality, this being taken to mean an immutability of being without development or change and wholly uneventful; while that which is thus presumed to subsist apart from contingency, viz, the soul, form or noumenal principle (nāma) of the individual, by which it is what it is, must be distinguished alike from the subtle and the gross bodies (sūkṣma and sthūla śarīra) which are equally phenomenal (rūpa), as being wholly intellectual and immaterial.[[24]]

the Angels,... as conscious intellectual substances, [are] partaking of eternity as to their immutable nature and understanding, but of time as regards their accidental awareness of before and after, [and] the changeability of their affections.

For example, 'things belonging to the state of glory are not under the sun' (St. Thomas, Sum. Theol., iii., Sup., q.I, a.I), i.e. not in any mode of time or space; rather, 'it is through the midst of the Sun that one escapes altogether' (atimucyate), (Jaiminīya Up. Brāhmana, i.3.), where the sun is the 'gateway of the worlds' (loka-dvāra), (Chānd. Up., viii.6.6), Eckhart's 'gate through which all things return perfectly free to their supreme felicity (pūrnânanda)...free as the Godhead in its non-existence' (asat), the 'Door' of John X, 'Heaven's-gate that Agni opens' (svargasya lokasya dvāram avrnot), (Aitareya Brāhmana, iii.42).[[25]] It is true that here again we shall inevitably meet with a certain and by no means negligible distinction of the religious from the metaphysical formulation. The religious concept of supreme felicity culminates as we have already seen in the assimilation of the soul to Deity in act; the soul's own act being one of adoration rather than of union. Likewise, and without inconsistency, since it is assumed that the individual soul remains numerically distinct alike from God and from other substances, religion offers to mortal consciousness the consolatory promise of finding there in Heaven, not only God, but those whom it loved on earth, and may remember and recognize.

Nor will metaphysics deny even in a 'Heaven', on the farther side of time, there may be, at least until the 'Last Judgment', a knowledge-of (avidyā) rather than a knowledge-as (vidyā), though it will not think of him whose modality is still in knowledge-of as wholly Comprehending (vidvān) nor as absolutely Enlarged (atimukta). Metaphysics will allow, and here in formal agreement with religion, that there may or even must be states of being by no means wholly in time, nor yet in eternity (the timeless now), but aeviternal, 'aeviternity' (Vedic amrtatva) being defined as a mean between eternity and time;[[26]] the Angels, for example, as conscious intellectual substances, partaking of eternity as to their immutable nature and understanding, but of time as regards their accidental awareness of before and after, the changeability of their affections (liability to fall from grace, etc.) and inasmuch as the angelic independence of local motion (because of which Angels are represented as winged, and spoken of as 'birds'),[[27]] whereby they can be anywhere, is other than the immanence of the First, which implies an equal presence everywhere. Nor is it denied by religion that 'Certain men even in this state of life are greater than certain angels, not actually, but virtually' (St. Thomas, Sum. Theol., i, q.117, a.2, ad.3), whence it naturally follows that 'Some men are taken up into the highest angelic orders' (Gregory, Hom. in Ev. xxxiv), thus partaking of an aeviternal being; all of which corresponds to what is implied by the familiar Hindu expression devo bhūtvā, equivalent to 'dead and gone to Heaven'. Precisely this point of view is more technically expressed in the critical text, Brhadāranyaka Up., iii.2.12, 'When a man dies, what does not forsake (na jahāti) him is his 'soul' (nāma),[[28]] the soul is without end (ananta, 'aeviternal'), without end is what the Several Angels are, so then he wins the world everlasting' (anantam lokam). Cf, Rūmī (xii in Nicholson's Shams-i-Tabrīz), 'Every shape you see has its archetype in the placeless world, and if the shape perished, no matter, since its original is everlasting' (lāmkān-ast); and St. Thomas, Sum. Theol., II-I q.67, a.2c, 'as regards the intelligible species, which are in the possible intellect, the intellectual virtues remain', viz. when the body is corrupted. This was also expounded by Philo, for whom 'Le lieu de cette vie immortelle est le monde intelligible',[[29]] that is to say the same as the 'Intellectual Realm' of Plotinus, passim. If we now consider the implications of these dicta in connection with Böhme's answer to the scholar who enquires, 'Wither goeth the soul when the body dieth?', viz. that 'There is no necessity for it to go anywither...For...whichsoever of the two (that is either heaven or hell) is manifested in it (now), in that the soul standeth (then)...the judgment is, indeed, immediately at the departure of the body',[[30]] and in the light of Brhadāranyaka Up., iv.4.5-6, 'As is his will...so is his lot' (yat kāmam...tat sampadyate) and 'He whose mind is attached (to mundane things)...returns again to this world...but he whose desire is the Essence (ātman), his life (prâṇāh) does not leave him, but he goes as Brahman unto Brahman', it will be apparent that although the soul or intellect (Vedic manas) is immortal by nature (i.e. an individual potentiality that cannot be annihilated, whatever its 'fate'), nevertheless the actual 'fate' of an individual consciousness, whether it be destined to be 'saved' or 'liberated' (devayāna), or to enter into time again (pitryāna), or to be 'lost' (nirrtha), depends upon itself. And therefore we are told to 'Lay up treasure in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust corrupt'; for evidently, if the conscious life of the individual be even now established intellectually (or in religious phraseology, 'spiritually'), and the intellectual or spiritual world be aeviternal (as follows from the consideration that ideas have neither place nor date), this conscious life cannot be infringed by the death of the body, which changes nothing in this respect. Or if the consciousness be still attached to and involved in ends (whether good or evil) such as can only be accomplished in time and space, but have not yet been accomplished when the body dies, then evidently such a consciousness will find its way back into those conditions, viz. of space and time, in which the desired ends can be accomplished.[[31]] Or finally, if conscious life has been led altogether in the flesh, it must be thought of as cut off when its sole support is destroyed; that is, it must be thought of as 'backsliding' into a mere potentiality or hell.

What is then from the standpoint of metaphysics the whole course of an individual potentiality, from the 'time' that it first awakens in the primordial ocean of universal possibility until the 'time' it reaches the last harbour? It is a return into the source and well-spring of life, from which life originates, and thus a passage from one 'drowning' to another.

Space will not permit us to discuss the theory of 'reincarnation' at any length. The fundamentals are given in the Rg. Veda, where it is primarily a matter of recurring manifestation, in this sense for example, Mitra jāyate punah (x.85.19) and Uṣas is punahpunar jāyamāna (i.92.10). An individual application in the spirit of 'Thy will be done' is found in v.46.1, 'As a comprehending (vidvān) horse I yoke myself unto the pole (of the chariot of the year)...seeking neither a release nor to come back again (na asyāh vimucam na āvrttam punah), may He (Agni) as Comprehender (vidvān) and our Waywise Guide lead us aright'. The individual, indeed, 'is born according to the measure of his understanding' (Aitareya Āranyaka, ii.3.2), and just as 'the world itself is pregnant with the causes of unborn things' (Augustine, De Trin, iii.9), so is the individual pregnant with the accidents that must befall him; as St. Thomas expresses it, 'fate is in the created causes themselves' (Sum. Theol, i, q.116, 2), or Plotinus, 'the law is given in the entities upon whom it falls...it prevails because it is within them...and sets up in them a painful longing to enter the realm to which they are bidden from within' (Enneads, iv.3.15); and similarly Ibn 'Arabī, who says that while being is from God, modality is not directly from Him, 'for He only wills what they have it in them to become' (Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Mysticism, 1921, p.151). On the other hand, it may be taken as certain that the Buddhist and still more the modern Theosophical interpretations of causality (karma) or fate (adṛṣṭa), which assert the necessity of a return (except for one who is mukta or has 'reached' nirvāna) to the very same conditions that have been left behind at death, involve a metaphysical antinomy; 'You would not step twice into the same waters, for other waters are ever flowing in upon you' (Heracleitus). What is really contemplated in Vedic and other traditional doctrines is the necessity of a recurrent manifestation in aeon after aeon, though not again within one and the same temporal cycle,[[32]] of all those individual potentialities or forces in which the desire to 'prolong their line' is still effective; every Patriarch (pitr) being, like Prajāpati himself, prajā-kāmya, and therefore willingly committed to the 'Patriarchal Way' (pitryāna).

What is then from the standpoint of metaphysics the whole course of an individual potentiality, from the 'time' that it first awakens in the primordial ocean of universal possibility until the 'time' it reaches the last harbour? It is a return into the source and well-spring of life, from which life originates, and thus a passage from one 'drowning' to another; but with a distinction, valid from the standpoint of the individual in himself so long as he is a Wayfarer and not a Comprehender, for, seen as a process, it is a passage from a merely possible perfection through actual imperfection to an actual perfection, from potentiality to act, from slumber (abodhya) to a full awakening (sambodhi). Ignoring now the Patriarchal Way as being a 'round about' course, and considering only the straight Angelic Way (devayāna), with which the Rg. Veda is primarily and the individual mumukṣu specifically concerned, we may say that this Way is one at first of a diminishing and afterwards of an increasing realisation of all the possibilities intrinsic to the fact of being in a given mode (the human, for example), and ultimately leads to the realisation of all the possibilities of being in any or every mode, and over and beyond this of those of being not in any mode whatever. We cannot do more than allude here to the part that is taken by what is called 'initiation' in this connection; only saying that the intention of initiation is to communicate from one to another a spiritual or rather intellectual impulse that has been continuously transmitted in guru-paramparā-krama from the beginning and is ultimately of non-human origin, and whereby the contracted and disintegrated individual is awakened to the possibility of a reintegration (samskarana),[[33]] and that metaphysical rites, or 'mysteries' (which are in imitation of the means employed by the Father to accomplish His own reintegration, the necessity for which is occasioned by the incontinence of the creative act), are, like the analogous traditional scriptures, intended to provide the individual with the necessary preparatory education in and means of intellectual operation; but the 'Great Work', that of accomplishing the reunion of essence with Essence, must be done himself within himself.

The metaphysical concept of Perfection, indeed, envisages a state of being that is, not inhuman since it is maintained that such a state is always and everywhere accessible to whoever will press inwards to the central point of consciousness and being on any ground or plane of being, nor 'heartless' unless we mean by 'heart' the seat of soulfulness and sentimentality; but assuredly non-human.

We have so far followed the Wayfarer's course by the Angelic Way to the spiritual or intellectual realm; and here, from the religious point of view, lies his immortality, for indeed 'the duration of aeviternity is infinite' (St. Thomas, Sum. Theol., i, q.10, a.5, ad.4.) But it will be maintained in metaphysics, or even in a religion or by an individual mystic such as Eckhart (in so far as the religious experience is both devotional and intellectual in the deepest sense of both words) that an aeviternal station (pada), such as is implied in the concept of being in a heaven, is not the end, nor by any means a full return (nivrtti), but only a resting place (viśrāma).[[34]] And likewise, it will be maintained that to conceive of the intellectual realm itself as a place of memories would be a derogation, for as Plotinus says of its natives, 'if they neither seek nor doubt, and never learn, nothing being at any time absent from their knowledge...what reasonings, what processes of rational investigation, can take place in them? In other words, they have seen God and they do not recollect? Ah, no...such reminiscence is only for souls that have forgotten' (Enneads, iv.4.6);[[35]] and still more must we say respecting mundane memories (vāsanā) that 'when the soul's act is directed to another order, it must utterly reject the memory of such things, over and done with now' (ibid, iv.4.4.8).

The metaphysical concept of Perfection, indeed, envisages a state of being that is, not inhuman since it is maintained that such a state is always and everywhere accessible to whoever will press inwards to the central point of consciousness and being on any ground or plane of being, nor 'heartless' unless we mean by 'heart' the seat of soulfulness and sentimentality; but assuredly non-human. For example, in Chāndogya Up. v.10.2 it is precisely as amānava purusa, 'non-human person', that the Son and aeviternal avatāra, Agni,[[36]] is said to lead onward the Comprehending one who has found his way through the Supernal Sun to the farther side of the worlds, and this is the 'pathway of the Angels' (devayāna) as contrasted with that of the Patriarchs (pitryāna) which does not lead beyond the Sun but to re-embodiment in a human mode of being. And it is foreseen that this devayāna must lead, whether sooner or later, to what is expressed in doctrinal mysticism as a 'final death of the soul', or 'drowning', the Sūfi al-fanâʿan al-fanâ; by which is implied a passage beyond even consciousness in deity as act, to a Supreme (Skt. para, parātpara) beyond all trace of even an exemplary multiplicity, nor in any way 'intelligible'. And there, so far that is from any possible 'reminiscence' of any that have been known or loved in otherness, in the words of Eckhart, 'No one will ask me whence I came or whither I went', or in Rūmī's, 'None has knowledge of each who enters that he is so-and-so or so-and-so.'[[37]]

If this appears to be a denial of ultimate significance to human love, the position has been altogether misunderstood. For all metaphysical formulations, assuming that an infallible analogy relates every plane of being to every other, have seen in human love an image of divine felicity (pūrnânanda), imagined not as a contradiction of but as transformation (parāvrtti) of sensual experience. This is the theory of 'Platonic love', according to which, as Ibn Farīd expresses it, 'the charm of every fair youth or lovely girl is lent to them from Her Beauty'; a point of view implicit too in Erigena's conception of the world as a theophany, and in the Scholastic doctrine of the vestigium pedis, the trace or footprint of divinity in time, which has its equivalent in Vedic and Zen symbolisms. What this means in actual tradition is that the beloved on earth is to be realised there not as she is in herself but as she is in God,[[38]] so it is in the case of Dante and Beatrice, Ibn ʿArabī and an-Nizām,[[39]] and in that of Chandīdās and Rāmī.[[40]] The beauty of the Beloved there is no longer as it is here contingent and merely a participation or reflection, but that of the Supernal Wisdom, that of the One Madonna, that of the intrinsic being of the Bride, which 'rains down flames of fire' (Convivio) and as claritas illuminates and guides the pure intellect. In that last and hidden station (guhyam padam), nature and essence, Apsaras and Gandharva, are one and indivisible, knowing nothing of a within or a without (na bāhyam kimcana veda nântaram, Brhadāranyaka, Up., iv.321), and that is their supreme felicity, and that of every liberated consciousness.

All this can only be described in terms of negation, in terms of what it is not, and therefore we say again that metaphysics can in no way be thought of as a doctrine offering consolations to a suffering humanity. What metaphysics understands by immortality and by eternity implies and demands of every man a total and uncompromising denial of himself and a final mortification, to be dead and buried in the Godhead. 'Whoever realises this, avoids contingent death (punar mrtyu), death gets him not, for Death becomes his essence, and of all these Angels he becomes the One' (Brhadāranyaka Up., i.2.7). For the Supreme Identity is no less a Death and a Darkness than a Life and a Light, no less Asura than Deva: 'His overshadowing is both Aeviternity and Death' (yasya chāyā amrta, yasya mrtyuh, Rg. Veda, x.121.2).[[41]] And this is what we understand to be the final purport of the First Philosophy.

[[1]]: It is not pretended to lay down a final definition of philosophy

[[2]]: Our numbering of the philosophies in inverse order as II and I is because Aristotle's First Philosophy, viz. Metaphysics, is actually prior in logical order of thought, which proceeds from within outwards

[[3]]: This is, for example, the matter in debate as between Buddhist and Brahmanical philosophers. For the nominalist, the ultimate forms, ideas, images or reasons are merely names of the counters of thought and valid only as means of communication; for the realist (idealist) the ultimate forms are 'realities' dependent upon and inherent in being, i.e. real in their being and nominal only in the sense 'only logically distinguishable'

[[4]]: Common sense is an admirable thing, as is also instinct, but neither of these is the same as reason, nor the same as the wisdom that is not about human affairs, but 'speculative', i.e. known in the mirror of the pure intellect

[[5]]: When a cause is discovered, this is called an explanation. But each cause was once an effect, and so on indefinitely, so that our picture of reality takes the form of a series of causes extending backward into the past, and of effects expected in the future, but we have no empirical experience of a now, nor can we explain empirically how causes produce effects, the assumption post hoc propter hoc being always an act of faith

[[6]]: As is very elegantly demonstrated by St. Thomas, Sum. Theol. I, q.7, a.3, cf. q.14, a. 12, ad.3; his 'relatively infinite' being our 'indefinite' (ananta), incalculable (asaṁkhya) but not placeless (adeśa) nor wholly timeles (akāla)

[[7]]: Science differs from animism only in this respect, that while science assumes forces in the sense of blind wills, animism (which is also a kind of philosophy) personifies these forces and endows them with a free will

[[8]]: Pantheism is more commonly predicated of a given doctrine merely by imputation, either with unconsciously dishonest intention or by customary usage uncritically perpetuated. In every case the observer presumed to be impartial should consider the doctrine itself, and not what is said of it by hostile critics. On the general impropriety of the term 'pantheism' in connection with the Vedānta, see Lacombe, Avant-propos to René Grousset, Les Philosophies Indiennes, p. xiv, note 1, and Whitby, Preface to René Guénon, Man and his Becoming according to the Vedānta, 1945, p. ix

[[9]]: St. Thomas, Sum. Theol. I, q.1, a.6, ad.2

[[10]]: Prudence is defined as recta ratio agibilium, art as recta ratio factibilium

[[11]]: E.g. Aitareya Brāhmana, viii.2

[[12]]: 'Metaphysics can dispute with one who denies its principles, if only the opponent will make some concession; but if he concede nothing, it can have no dispute with him....If our opponent believes nothing of divine revelation, there is no longer any means of proving the articles of faith by reasoning' (St. Thomas, Sum. Theol. I, q.1, a.8c.); and ibid. q.46, a.2: 'The articles of faith cannot be proved demonstratively'. Similarly in India it is repeatedly and explicitly asserted that the truth of Vedic doctrine cannot be demonstrated but only experienced. 'By what should one know the Knower of knowing' (Brhadāranyaka Up. iv.5.15)

[[13]]: Throughout the present essay it is assumed that sensibility means perception of things by the senses, not a cognition but a reaction; reason, the activity of the intelligence with respect to the causal series of accidents, sometimes called the chain of fate, or in other words an intelligence with respect to things phenomenally known in time and space and called 'material'; and intellect, the habit of first principles

[[14]]: Thus Chāndogya Up. vi.2.1 asserts a religious point of view, as distinct from the metaphysical point of view that prevails in the Upanishads generally, e.g. Taittiriya Up. ii.7. Christian philosophy maintains that God is 'wholly in act'. Metaphysics concurs in the definition of perfection as a realisation of all the possibilities of being, but would rather say of God that 'He does not proceed from potentiality to act' than that He is without potentiality

[[15]]: Duality, as of 'spirit and matter', 'act and potentiality', 'form and substance', 'good and evil'. This is avoided in Christianity metaphysically, when it is shown that evil is not a self-subsistent nature, but merely a privation, and can be known to the First Intellect only as a goodness or perfection in potentia. It is avoided in Sūfi metaphysic by considering good and evil as merely reflections in time and space of His essential attributes of Mercy and Majesty

[[16]]: 'Matter' here must not be confused with the 'solid matter' of everyday parlance; in Christian philosophy, 'primary matter' is precisely that 'nothing' with respect to which it is said ex nihilo fit. Such 'matter' is said to be 'insatiable for form', and the same is implied when in the Jaiminiya Up. Brāhmana, i.56, it is said that 'In the beginning, the woman (= Urvaśī, Apsaras) went about in the flood seeking a master' (icchantl salile patim)

[[17]]: The physical analogy is represented in the assertion of the anthropologist that 'God is man-made'; a proposition perfectly valid within the conditions of its own level of reference

[[18]]: That is mainly, of course, in Europe from the thirteenth century onwards. In Hinduism, a man is regarded as a true teacher who gives to any individual a better access to that individual's own scriptures; for 'the path that men take from every side is Mine' (Bhagavad Gītā, iv.11). Clement of Alexandria allows that 'There was always a natural manifestation of the One Almighty God amongst all right-thinking men' (Misc., v); Eckhart says almost in the words of the Bhagavad Gītā cited above, 'In whatever way you find God best, that way pursue'; Dante will not exclude all the pagan philosophers from Heaven; in the Grail tradition, Malory says that 'Merlyn made the round table in tokenyng of the roundenes of the world for by the round table is the world sygnifyed by ryghte. For all the world crysten and hethen repayren vnto the round table' (Mort d'Arthur, xiv.2); these may be contrasted with the position taken in the Song of Roland where, when Saragossa has been taken, 'A thousand Franks enter the synagogues and mosques, whose every wall with mallet and axe they shatter...the heathen folk are driven in crowds to the baptismal font, to take Christ's yoke upon them'

[[19]]: The 'best for me' need not be 'truest absolutely' as judged by absolute metaphysical standards. Nevertheless, the metaphysician will not suggest that the follower of a 'second best' religion should abandon it for another (cf. Bhagavad Gītā, iii.26, na buddhibhedam janayed ajnānam), but rather that he go farther in where he already is, and thus verify as 'true' his own images, not by those of another pattern, but rather by the prior form that is common to both

[[20]]: 'Diverse dogmatic formulations', i.e. dharma-paryāya as this expression is employed in the Saddharma Puṇdarika

[[21]]: In this context, the reader is recommended to René Guénon, L'Orient et l'Occident, 1932

[[22]]: Cf. Erigena, De div. naturae, i, 66, Ambo siquidem ex una fonte, divina scilicet sapientia, manare dubium non est, and Bhagavad Gītā, v.4-5, 'it is the children of this world, and not the men of learning who think of gnosis and works as different...He sees in truth who sees that gnosis and works are one' (for Sāṁkhya and Yoga as meaning gnosis and works respectively, see ibid, iii.3). That the Way of Gnosis and the Way of Participation have one and the same end becomes evident when we consider that love and knowledge can only be conceived of as perfected in an identity of lover and beloved, knower and known

[[23]]: 'Even we ourselves as mentally tasting something eternal, are not in this world': St. Augustine, De Trin. iv.20

[[24]]: Therefore incapable of 'proof', whether the phenomena adduced be 'scientific' or 'spiritualistic'

[[25]]: While it is shown here how the formulations of different religions may express the same conceptions in almost verbal agreement, it must not be supposed that we therefore advocate any kind of ecclecticism, or conceive the possibility of a new religion compounded of all existing religions. Ecclecticism in religion results only in confusion and caricature, of which a good example can be cited in 'Theosophy'

[[26]]: St. Thomas, Sum. Theol. i, q.10, a.5. He says 'states of being' in the plural deliberately (cf. René Guénon, Les États multiples de L'Être, 1932), although for purposes of generalization it has been necessary to speak of only three, viz. the human, angelic and divine, that is to those which the literal, metaphorical and anagogical understandings pertain respectively.
With the Christian 'aeviternity', Indian amrtatva, and the traditional concept of 'humanity' and Perfect Man (e.g. Islamic insan ul-kamil), cf. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p. 215: 'If it were permissibe to personify the unconscious, we might call it a collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death, and from having at its command a human experience of one or two million years, almost immortal. If such a being existed, he would be exalted above all temporal change... he would have lived countless times over the life of the individual, or the family, tribe and people, and he would possess the living sense of rhythm of growth, flowering and decay. It would be positively grotesque of us to call this immense system of the experience of the unconscious psyche an illusion'. Here it may be noted that 'unconscious' presents an analogy with 'Deep-Sleep' (susupti = samādhi = excessus or raptus); on the other hand, the use of the word 'collective' betrays a purely scientific, and not a metaphysical conception

[[27]]: 'Intellect is the swiftest of birds' (manah javiṣtam patayatsu anah, Rg. Veda, vi.9.5). It is as birds that the Angels 'celebrate in the Tree of Life their share of aeviternity' (yatra suparnā amartasya bhāgam...abhi svaranti, ibid. i.164.21). The traditional expression 'language of birds' (which survives in 'a little bird told me') refers to angelic communications

[[28]]: Nāma is the correlative of rūpa, being the noumenal or intelligible part and efficient cause of the integration nāma-rūpa, viz. the individual as he is in himself; and therefore to be rendered not by 'name' (for this is not a nominalist but a realist doctrine), but by 'idea', 'archetype', 'form' or 'soul' (as when it is said 'the soul is the form of the body'); ātman on the other hand being 'essence' rather than 'soul' (essentia, that by which a substance has esse in whatever mode)

[[29]]: Bréhier, Les Idées philosophiques et religieuses de Philon d'Alexandrie, 1925, p.240

[[30]]: Boehme, On Heaven and Hell (in Everyman's Library, volume entitled Signatura Rerum, etc.)

[[31]]: It is the good purpose, for example, which operates in the return of a Bodhisattva, who is otherwise fit for Nirvāna

[[32]]: In Bhagavad Gītā, vi.41, for example, śāsavtī samā is very far from implying 'forthwith'. We doubt very much whether any Upanishad passage could be cited as implying a re-embodiment otherwise than at the dawn of a new cycle, and then only as the growth of a seed sown in the previous aeon, or as a tendency with which the new age can be said to be pregnant

[[33]]: See Aitareya Āranyaka, iii.2.6; Aitareya Brāhmana, vi.27; Satapatha Brāhmana, vii.1.2.1 and passim. Cf. also Guénon 'L'Initiation et les Métiers', Le Voile d'Isis, No. 172, 1934

[[34]]: Saddharma Pundarika, v. 74. Similarly, the true end of the ritual acts and appointed sacrifices of the Veda is not the attainment of a temporary heaven, but an awakening of a desire to know the Essence (ātman) (Siddhāntamktāvalī, xxxiii, with Venis' note 'Paradise is as it were but the half-way house')

[[35]]: Similarly in Dante, Paradiso, xxix, 79-81, 'there sight is never intercepted by any new perception, and so there is no need of memory, for thought has not been cleft

[[36]]: Agni(-Prajāpati), who in the Vedas is the Herdsman of the Spheres (gopā bhuvanasya), Waywise Leader (vidvān pathah puraeta), Messenger and Herald (dūta, arati), and stands as the Pillar of Life at the Parting of the Ways (dyor ha skambha...pathām visarge, Rg. Vedā, x.5.6) is cosmic crucifixion (dharuṇeṣu sthitah, ibid.), corresponding to the 'dogmatic' Buddha, Christ as distinguished from Jesus, and to the 'Idea of Muhammad'

[[37]]: Nicholson, Shams-i-Tabriz, p.61

[[38]]: Cf. Tarjumān al-Ashwāq, xl.2, 'She was exalted in majesty above time' and Rūmī, ''Tis love and the lover that live to all eternity' (xiii, in Nicholson, Shams-i-Tabriz). Another example could be cited in the Shepherd of Hermas

[[39]]: Whom Ibn 'Arabī met at Mecca in 1201, see Nicholson, Tarjumān al-Ashwāq, 1911

[[40]]: Cf. 'Sahaja' in Ananda Coomaraswamy's Dance of Śiva, 1917

[[41]]: Similarly, Satapatha Brāhmana, x.4.3.1-3 Esa vai mrtyur yat samvatsarah...prajāpatih, 'He, the Father, who is the Year and likewise Death'. The Darkness and Light, belonging to His asuratva and devatva respectively, remain in Him, who is both asura and deva, Titan and angel, sarpa and āditya; at the same time that from the Wayfarer's point of view their reflections in time and space are evil and good. In Hinduism, 'the Darkness in Him is called Rudra' (Maitri Up. vi.2), and is represented in the names and hues of Kālī and Krishna; in Christian yoga, the Dark Ray or Divine Darkness, Eckhart's 'sable stillness' and 'motionless dark that no one knows but He in whom it reigns' (cf. the 'Clouds and thick darkness' of Deut. 4:11), is spoken of already in the Codex Bracianus and by Dionysius, and becomes the subject of the contemplatio in caligine. Regarding the propriety of the expression 'Christian yoga', we need only point out that St. Bernard's consideratio, contemplatio, and excessus or raptus corresponds exactly to dhārana, dhyāna, and samādhi