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An Age of Revolution
THERE has been a revolutionary change in the scientific outlook in recent times. A very fundamental principle – the very postulate on which the whole edifice of physical Science has been built up – is now being called in question. We thought that the unity and uniformity of Nature is a cardinal fact and nothing can shake it. Well, it appears that solid basis too has proved to be no more than an eidolon.
The search for a universal principle of Nature is a
meta-physical as well as a scientific preoccupation. In ancient days,
fo example, we had the Water of Thales or the Fire of Heraclitus as
the one original unifying principle of this kind. With the coming of
the Renascence and the New Illumination we laughed them out and
installed instead the mysterious Ether. For a long time this
universal reigned supreme and now that too has gone the way of
its predecessors. We thought for a time that we had found in Electric
Energy the one sovereign principle in Nature. At a time when we had a
few elements – discrete, different, fundamental units – that in
their varying combinations built up the composite structure of
Nature, apart from the fact that they reposed finally on the ultimate
unifying principle of Ether, it was found also that they all behaved
in a uniform and identical and therefore predictable manner. The time
and the place (and the mass) being given, everything went according
to a pattern and a formula, definite, fixed, mathematically rigid.
Even the discovery of one element after another till the number
Feached the famous figure 92 (itself following a line of
mathematically precise and inevitable development) did not materially
alter the situation and caused no tribulation. For on further
scrutiny a closer unity revealed itself: the supposed disparity in
the substance of the various
Page – 329 elements was found to be an illusion, for they all appeared now as different organisations or dispositions of the same electric energy (although the identity of electric energy with radiant energy was not always very clear). Thus we could conclude that as the substance was the same, its mode of working also would be' uniform and patterned. In other words, the mechanistic conception still ruled our view' of Nature. That means, the ultimate units, the particles (of energy) that compose Nature are like sea-sands or water-drops, each one is fundamentally similar to any other and all behave similarly, reacting uniformly to the same forces that act upon them. Well, it is now found that they do not do so. However same or similar constitutionally, each unit is sui generis and its movement cannot be predicted. That movement does not depend upon its mass or store of energy or its position in a pattern, as a wholly mechanistic conception would demand: it is something incalculable, one should say even, erratic. In a radioactive substance, the particle that is shot out, becomes active, cannot be predetermined by any calculation, even if that is due to a definitely and precisely arranged bombardment. So we have come to posit a principle of uncertainty, as a very fundamental law of Nature. It practically declares that the ultimate particle is an autonomou unit, it is an' individual, almost a personality, and seems to have a will of its own. A material unit acts very much like a biological unit: it does not obey mechanically, answer mechanically as an automaton, but seems to possess a capacity for choice, for assent or refusal, for a free determination. The mechanistic view presented is due to an average functioning. The phenomenon has been explained by a very apt image. It is like an army. A group of soldiers, when they are on parade, look all similar and geometrically patterned: each is just like another and all move and march in the same identical manner. But that' is when you look at the whole, the collectivity, but looked individually, each one regains his separate distinct personality, each having his own nature and character, his own unique history: there no two are alike, each is non pareil and behaves differently, incalculably.
That is how we have been led almost to the threshold of
a will, of a life principle, of a consciousness, however rudimentary,
Page – 330 imbedded in the heart of Matter. All the facts that are now cropping up, the new discoveries that are being made and which we have to take into cognisance lead inevitably towards such a conclusion. Without such a conclusion a rational co-ordination of all the data of experience is hardly possible. A physiCal scientist may not feel justified to go beyond the purely physical data, but the implications of even such data, the demand for a fair hypothesis that can harmonise and synthesise them are compelling even a physicist to become a psychologist and a metaphysician.
Looked at from below with the eye of reason and sense
observation straining at it, the thing that appears only as a
possibility-at best, as a probability – is revealed to the eyes of
vision surveying from above as a self – evident reality, a reality
before which the apparent realities posited by sense and reason
become subsidiary and auxiliary, far-off echoes. The facts of
sense-perception are indeed the branches spread out below while the
root of the tree lies above: in other words, the root-reality is
consciousness and all that exist are vibrations of that consciousness
extended and concretised. This is the truth which modem science, in
its farthest advances, would like to admit but dare not. Page – 331
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