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Human Progress CREATION has evolved.
That is to say, there has been a growth and unfoldment and progress. From
nebulae to humanity the march cannot but be called an advance, a progress, in
more senses than one. But the question is about man. Has man advanced,
progressed since his advent upon earth? If so, in what manner, to what extent?
Man has been upon earth for the last two million years, they say. From what has
happened before him in the course of Nature's evolution, it is legitimate to
infer that man too, in his turn, has moved forward in the line towards growth
and development. In fact, if we admit that man started life as a savage or
jungle-man or ape-man, and look at him as he is today, we have perforce to
acknowledge that he has not merely changed but progressed too. The question to
be answered is in what sense this progress has been made. Modern
knowledge has taught us that what marks the growth of man is his use of tools.
An animal has nothing else than its own limbs as its all-serving tool. Man emerged
as man the day he knew how to use tools as an extension of his limbs. And the
cycles of human growth have, in consequence, been marked off by the type of
tools used. As we all know, anthropologists tell us, there have been four such
cycles or ages: (1) the Old Stone Age, (2) the New Stone Age, (3) the Bronze
Age and (4) the Iron Age. In the first age, which is by far the longest period, a period of slow and difficult preparation, man had his first lessons in a conscious and victorious dealing with Nature. The day when he first started chipping a stone was a red-letter day for him; for, by that very gesture be began shredding his purely animal vesture. And when he not only chipped but succeeded in
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and polishing a piece of stone, he moved up one step further and acquired
definitely his humanity. Again, ages afterwards when his hand could wield and
manipulate as it liked not only a stone but a metal, his skill and dexterity
showed a development unique in its kind, establishing and fixing man's manhood
as a new emergent factor. In this phase also there was a first period of
training and experiment, the period of craftsmanship in bronze; with the age of
iron, man's arms and fingers attained a special deftness and a conscious control
directed from a cranium centre which has become by now a model of rich growth
and complex structure and marvellous organisation. The impetus towards more
and more efficiency in the making and handling of tools has not ceased: the
craftsmanship in iron soon led to the discovery of steel and steel industry.
The temper and structure of steel are symbolic and symptomatic of the temper
and structure of the brain that commands the weapon-strong, supple, resistant,
resilient, capable of fineness and sharpness and trenchancy to an extraordinary
degree. This
growing fineness and efficiency of the tool has served naturally to develop and
enrich man's external possession and dominion. But this increasing power and
dominion over Nature is not the most important consequence involved; it is only
indicative of still greater values, something momentous, something subjective,
pregnant with far-reaching possibilities. For the physical change is nothing
compared with the psychological change, the change in the consciousness. In
taking up his tool to chip a stone man has started hewing out and moulding
entire Nature: he has become endowed with the sense of independence and agency.
An animal is a part and parcel of Nature, has no life and movement apart from
the life and movement of Nature – even like Wordsworth's child of Nature – Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.¹ An animal
does not separate itself from Nature, exteriorise it and then seek to fashion it
as he wants, try to make it yield things he requires. Man is precisely man
because he has just ¹ "A slumber did my spirit seal", Miscellaneous Poems Page-132 this sense
of self and of not-self and his whole life is the conquest of the not-self by
the self: this is the whole story of his evolution. In the early stages his
sense of agency and selfhood is at its minimum. The rough-hewn flint
instruments are symbolic of the first attempts of the brain to set its impress
upon crude and brute nature. The history of man's artisanship, which is the
history of his civilisation, is also the history of his growing
self-consciousness. The consciousness in its attempt to react upon nature
separated itself from Nature, and at first stood over against it and then
sought to stand over and above it. In this process of extricating itself from
the sheath in which it was involved and fused, it came back upon itself, became
more and more aware of its freedom and individual identity and agency. The
question is now asked how far this self-consciousness – given to man by his
progress from stone to steel – has advanced and what is its future. The crucial
problem is whether man has progressed in historical times. Granted that man
with an iron tool is a more advanced type of humanity than man with a chipped
stone tool, it may still be enquired whether he has made any real advance since
the day he learnt to manipulate metal. If by advance or progress we mean
efficiency and multiplication of tools, then surely there can be no doubt that
Germany of today (perhaps now we have to say Germany of yesterday and America
of today) is the most advanced type of humanity-indeed they do make the claim
in that country. So it is argued that man may have built up more
and more efficient organisation in his outer life, he may have learnt to wield
a greater variety and wealth of tools and instruments in an increasing degree
of refinement and power; but this does not mean that his character, his nature
or even the broad mould of his intelligence has changed or progressed. The
records and remains of Pre-dynastic Egypt or of Proto-Aryan Indus valley go to
show that those were creations of civilised men, as civilised as any modern
people. The mind that produced the Rig Veda or the Book of the Dead or
conceived the first pyramid is, in essential power of intelligence, no whit
inferior to any modern scientific brain. Hence a distinction is sometimes made
between culture and civilisation; what the moderns have achieved is progress
with regard to civilisation, Page-133 that is to
say, the outer paraphernalia; but as regards culture a Plato, a Lao-tse, a
Yajnavalkya are names to which we still bow down. One can
answer, however, that even if in the last eight or ten thousand years which, they
say, is the extent of the present cycle, the civilised or cultural life of
humanity has not changed much, this does not mean that it cannot, will not
change. The paleolithic age, it appears, covered a period of thirty to forty
thousand years; the neolithic age also must have lasted some fifteen thousand
years. The metal age is now not more than ten thousand years. So it does not
seem to be too late; perhaps it is just time for another radical and crucial
change to come as the chronological scheme would seem to demand. We
propose, however, to reopen the question and enquire if there has not been some
kind of radical change or progress in the make-up of human nature and
civilisation even within the span of historical times. This reminds us of the
remarkable conclusion or discovery made by the much maligned and much adulated
Psycho-analysts. Jung speaks
of two kinds or grades of thinking: (1) the directed thinking and (2) the
wishful thinking; one conscious and objective, the other automatic and
subjective. The first is the modern or scientific thinking, the second the
old-world mythopoeic thinking. These two lines of mental movement mark off two
definite stages in the cultural history of man. Down to the Middle Ages man's
mental life was moved and coloured by his libido
– desire soul; it is with the Renascence that he began to free his mind
from, the libido and transfer and transform the libido into non-egoistic and
realistic thinking. In simpler psychological terms we can say that man's
mentality was coloured and modulated by his biological make-up out of which it
had emerged; the age of modernism and scientism began with the development of a
rigorous rationalism which means a severance and transcendence of the
biological antecedent. In other
words, it can be said that the older humanity was intuitive and instinctive,
while modern humanity is rationalistic. Now it has been questioned whether
this change or reorientation is a sign of progress, whether it has not been at
the most a mixed blessing. Many idealists and reformers frankly Page-134 view the
metamorphosis with anxiety. Gerald Heard vehemently declares that the
rationalism of the modern age is a narrowing down of the consciousness to a
superficial movement, a foreshortening, and a top-heavy specialisation which
means stagnation, decay and death. He would rather release the tension in the
strangulation of consciousness, even if it means a slight coming down to the
anterior level of instinct and intuition, but of more plasticity and less specialisation:
it is, he says, only in conditions of suppleness and variability, of life
organised yet sufficiently free that the forces of evolution can act
fruitfully. It has also been pointed out that homo sapiens is not a direct descendant of homo neanderthalis who was already a
far too specialised being, but of a stock anterior to it which was still
uncertain, wavering, groping towards a definite emergence. Now, these
two positions – of Jung and of Heard – offer us a good basis upon which we can
try to estimate the nature of man's progress in historical times. Both refer to
a crucial change in human consciousness, a far-reaching change having no
parallel since it invented the metal tool. The change means the appearance of
pure intelligence in man, a change, as we may say, in modern terms, in the
system of reference, from biological co-ordinates to those of pure reason. Only
Jung thinks that the reorganisation of the human consciousness is to happen
precisely round the focus of pure reason, while Gerald Heard is doubtful about
the efficacy of this faculty – of "directive thinking", as Jung puts
it-if it is to lead to overspecialisation, which means the swelling of one
member and atrophy of the rest; a greater and supreme direction he seeks
elsewhere in a transcendence of intelligence and reason which, besides, is
bound to happen in the course of evolution. We
characterise the change as a special degree or order of self-consciousness.
Self-consciousness, we have seen, is the sine qua non of humanity. It is the faculty or power by and
with which man appears on earth and maintains himself as such, as a distinct
species. Thanks to this faculty man has become the tool-making animal, the artisan – homo faber. But on
emerging from the original mythopoeic to the scientific status man has become
doubly self-conscious. Self-consciousness means to be aware of oneself as
standing separate from and against the Page-135 environment
and the world and acting upon it as a free agent, exercising one's deliberate
will. Now the first degree of self-consciousness displayed itself in a creative
activity by which consciousness remained no longer a suffering organon, but
became a growing and directing, a reacting and new-creating agent. Man gained
the power to shape the order of Nature according to the order of his inner will
and consciousness. This creative activity, the activity of the artisan,
developed along two lines: first, artisanship with regard to one's own self,
one's inner nature and character, and secondly, with regard to the external
nature, the not-self. The former gave rise to mysticism and Yoga and was
especially cultivated in Now the
second degree of self-consciousness to which we referred is the
scientific consciousness par excellence.
It can be described also as the spirit and power of
experimentation, or more precisely, of scientific experimentation: it involves
generically the process with which we are familiar in the domain of industry
and is termed "synthetic", that is to say, it means the skill and
capacity to create the conditions under which a given phenomenon can be
repeated at will. Hence it means a perfect knowledge of the process of things –
which again is a dual knowledge: (1) the knowledge of the steps gradually
leading to the result and (2) the knowledge that has the power to resolve the
result into its antecedent conditions. Thus the knowledge of the mechanism, the
detailed working of things, is scientific knowledge, and therefore scientific
knowledge can be truly said to be mechanistic knowledge, in the best sense of
the term. Now the knowledge of the ends and the knowledge of the means (to use
a phrase of Aldous Huxley) and the conscious control over either have given
humanity a new degree of self-consciousness. It can be mentioned here that there can be a knowledge of ends without a corresponding knowledge of means, even there can be a control over ends without a preliminary control over means-perhaps not to perfection, but to a sufficient degree of practical utility. Much of the knowledge – especially secular and scientific – in ancient times was of this order; what we mean to say is that the knowledge was more instinctive
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intuitive than rational or intellectual. In that knowledge the result only,
the end that it to say, was the chief aim and concern, the means for attaining
the end was, one cannot perhaps say, ignored, but slurred or slipped over as it
were: the process was thus involved or understood, not expressed or detailed
out. Thus we know of some mathematical problems to which correct solutions were
given of which the process is not extant or lost as some say. Our suggestion is
that there was in fact very little of the process as we know it now – the
solution was reached per saltum, that is to say, somehow, in the same
manner as we find it happening even today in child prodigies. One can
point out however that even before the modern scientific age, there was an
epoch of pure intellectual activity, as represented, for example, by
scholasticism. The formal intellectualism which was the gift of the Greek
sophists or the Mimansakas and grammarians in ancient The old
intellectualism generally and on the whole, was truly formal and even to a
great extent verbal. In other words, it sought to find norms and categories in
the mind itself and impose them upon, objects, objects of experience, external
or internal. The first discovery of the pure mind, the joy of indulging in its
own free formations led to an abstraction that brought about a cleavage between
mind and nature, and when a harmony was again attempted between the two, it
meant an imposition of one (the Mind) upon another (Matter), a subsumption of
the latter under the former. Such scholastic formalism, although it has the
appearance of a movement of pure intellect, free from the influence of
instinctive or emotive reactions, cannot but be, at bottom, a mythopoeic
operation, in the Jungian phraseology; it is not truly objective in the
scientific sense. The scientific procedure is to find Nature's own categories –
the constants, as they are called – and link up mind and intellect with that
reality. This is the Copernican revolution that Science brought about in the
modern outlook. Philosophers like Kant or Berkeley may say
Page-137 another
thing and even science itself just nowadays may appear hesitant in its
bearings. But that is another story which it is not our purpose to consider
here and which does not change the fundamental position. We say then that the
objectivity of the scientific outlook, as distinguished from the abstract
formalism of old-world intellectualism, has given a new degree of mental growth
and is the basis of the "mechanistic" methodology of which we have
been speaking. ' Indeed,
what we .lay stress upon is the methodology of modern scientific knowledge –
the apparatus of criticism and experimentation. We have
said that this "methodologism" – the knowledge of means and the
consequent control over means – the hall-mark of modern scientific knowledge –
is a new degree of self-consciousness which is the special characteristic of
the human consciousness. Put philosophically, we can say that the discovery of
the subject and its growing affirmation as an independent factor in a
subject-object relation marks the evolutionary course of the human
consciousness. A still
further unveiling seems to be in progress now. The subject has discovered
itself as separate from the observed object and still embracing it: but a given
subject-object relationship in its turn again is being viewed as itself an
object to another subject consciousness, a super-subject. That way lie the ever
widening horizons of consciousness opened up by Yoga and spiritual discipline. In other words, the self-consciousness which marks off
man as the highest of living beings as yet evolved by Nature is still not her
highest possible instrumentation. As has been experienced and foreseen by
Yogins in all ages and climes and as it is being borne in upon the modern mind
more and more imperatively, this self-consciousness has to be consciously
transcended, lifted, transmuted – worked out into the superconsciousness. Such
is Nature's evolutionary nisus and such is the truth and fact man is
being driven to face in his inner individual consciousness as well as outer
collective life. We can
thus note, broadly speaking, three stages in the human cycle of Nature's
evolution. The first was the period of emergence of self-consciousness and the
trials and experiments it went through to establish and confirm itself. The
ancient
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represented this character of the human spirit. The subject freeing itself more
and more from its environmental tegument, still living and moving within it
and dynamically reacting upon it – this was the character we speak of. Next
came the period when the free and dynamic subject feeling itself no more tied
down to its natural objective sphere sought lines of development and adventure
on its own account. This was the age of speculation and of scholasticism in
philosophy and intellectual inquiry and of alchemy in natural science – a
period roughly equated with the Middle Ages. The Scientific Age coming last
seeks to re-establish a junction and co-ordination between the free and dynamic
self-consciousness and the mode and pattern of its objective field, involving a
greater enrichment on one side – the subjective consciousness – and on the
other, the objective environment, a corresponding change and effective
reorganisation. The
present age which ushers a fourth stage – significantly called turiya or
the transcendent, in Indian terminology – is pregnant with a fateful crisis.
The stage of self-consciousness to which scientific development has arrived
seems to land in a cul-de-sac, a blind alley: Science also is faced, almost
helplessly, with the antinomies of reason that Kant discovered long ago in the
domain of speculative philosophy. The way out, for a further growth and
development and evolution, lies in a supersession of the self-consciousness, an
elevation into a superconsciousness – as already envisaged by Yogis and Mystics
everywhere – which will give a new potential and harmony to the human
consciousness. This super
consciousness is based upon a double movement of sublimation and integration
which are precisely the two things basically aimed at by present-day psychology
to meet the demands of new facts of consciousness. The rationalisation,
specialisation or foreshortening of consciousness, mentioned above, is really an
attempt at sublimation of the consciousness, its purification and ascension
from baser – animal and vegetal – confines: only, ascension does not mean
alienation, it must mean a gathering up of the lower elements also into their
higher modes. Integration thus involves a descent, but it has to be pointed
out, not merely or exclusively that, as Jung and his school seem to say.
Certainly one has to see and recognise
Page – 139 the aboriginal, the
infra-rational elements imbedded in our nature and consciousness, the roots and
foundations that lie buried under the super-structure that Evolution has
erected. But that recognition must be accompanied by an upward look and sense:
indeed it is healthy and fruitful only on condition that it occurs in a
consciousness open to an infiltration of light coming from summits not only of
the mind but above the mind. If we go back, it must be with a light that is ahead
of us; that is the sense of evolution.
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