All the seeming explanations furnished by science are nothing else but
more or less ingenious and special forms of description founded solely
upon skilful adaptation. They assume the semblance of explanations
from the fact that an impression of continuity is produced by an
ever more closely packed accumulation of momentary forms. Such
continuity, however, resembles the continuity of a circumference
made up of a number of the smallest possible single parts: the
greater the appearance of continuity, all the greater in reality, the
discontinuity. The impulsion which furnishes the actual connection
between events--the energies at work in occurrences, the real laws of
formation--are thus never touched on at all, nay, they are deliberately
ignored.
These eternally repeated attempts at adaptation on the part of science
may very well be likened to the voyage of a vessel up stream through
locks. When one has come to a stand-still in a lock--that is, when
one has completed one act of adaptation--one waits until sufficient
water--that is, sufficient new material in the shape of facts--has
accumulated to enable one to reach a new lock--that is, a new act of
adaptation.
This process of adaptation displays itself in its most characteristic
shape when it assumes that epochal form known as “inversion of point of
view.”
An example of such an epochal form of adaptation to new factual
material is to be found in the inversion that took place in the
astronomical idea of the world when Copernicus displaced Ptolemy. A
similar inversion, but in the epistemological domain, was effected by
Kant, in terms of which the conformity to law observed in phenomena was
lifted out of the occurrences and placed in the mind observing them.
Another such inversion, but in the realm of biology, is the transition
from the old teleological view which said, “The eye leads _to_ seeing,”
to the modern mechanistic view which says, “The eye results _from_
seeing.”
It is one of the most striking proofs of how little science is
acquainted with her own nature that she extols these inversions as
the greatest of her achievements. Far from that, they are nothing but
the clearest possible expression of the fact that the human mind can
do nothing but limp along in the wake of events; and as it does so,
the incongruity, the lack of consonance, ofttimes becomes so very
pronounced that nothing short of a complete revolution--some such
inversion to wit--is needed every little while to relieve the situation?
Even the most successful of these inversions ever remains but an effort
at adjustment. The Copernican inversion also is nothing but a useful
“reading” of the facts of the astronomical world. When a sufficiency of
new factual material has accumulated, then just as men perforce were
swept away out of the Ptolemaic system, so in turn will they be swept
away perforce out of the Copernican.
That whereby science finds herself constrained to make ever fresh
adjustments, is experiment. With reference to this latter she resembles
the neophyte in magic of Goethe’s poem, with his broom. One is in
danger of drowning in the superabundance of material, and knows not the
magic word wherewith to bring the irresistible inflow of results to a
stand-still.
Were the fresh facts which science is continually bringing forward real
stages on the way to knowledge, then in the hour of death we could not
help but feel like the expiring caravan animal in the desert, as with
dying eyes it gazes after the caravan that wends its way there before
it towards the longed-for goal now to itself for ever lost. Death to
the thinker would be a most terrible occurrence, the hugest of all
catastrophes. But science does not wend its way towards any goal at
all. That question which science from her own resources can never
answer, as to whether her endless series, converging, tend towards any
goal, finds answer thus in the Buddha-thought: We can do naught save
react, inexhaustibly react to the external world, and so doing we alike
remain eternally near and eternally far from knowledge.
Science occupies herself with problems in variation and permutation.
How were it possible for us to know so terribly much if we actually
knew anything? Exact science has to do only with relations. She does
not wish to know anything at all about things themselves. Any such
knowledge would be as inconvenient to her as would be to an advocate a
too far-reaching confession on the part of his clients. It is only this
utter absence of misgiving as to things themselves which really makes
possible scientific methods of procedure.
It is men of science themselves who are responsible--partly
intentionally and partly unintentionally--for the mistaken, exaggerated
ideas as to the nature and value of science current among the laity.
One does not quite like to let people peep into pots. One much prefers
to appear before an astounded public with results imposing by reason
of their completeness. With a certain kind of diffidence--intelligible
enough, by the way, to him who can see behind the scenes--which,
however, with no little skill is so managed that along with the simple
keynote quite half a dozen overtones vibrate in unison,--hopes,
allusions to the future--one tenders one’s gift to the world, but
does not at all care about acquainting that world with the fact that
at bottom this gift is the simple product of a scientific game of
blind-man’s buff, and “shut-your-eyes-and-hit-the-pot!” If it does not
suit one way perhaps it will the other. Every theory is the outcome
of trying, of testing. It was thus that Galileo himself adjusted his
intuition with respect to the law of falling bodies. Thus did Kepler
all his life “play” against nature and finally--once for all--win the
game; and so to all eternity will this playing against, and these
efforts at adjustment, go on. So to all eternity will descriptions
in the form of explanations be brought forward--descriptions which,
strictly speaking, will convey no more than Reuter’s _bon mot_ about
destitution to the effect that it is the result of “poverty.”
I can describe with increasing exactitude the fall of a body and
formulate the laws that govern the same. But all these descriptive
details only assume the character of an explanation through men in each
case interpolating as adequate cause the attractive force of the earth.
This latter, however, is purely the creature of thought, a working
hypothesis pure and simple, advanced with the sole object of making
possible the comprehension of all single instances of falling. From the
purely epistemological point of view, I am equally entitled to say that
the force of attraction results from the falling; for it is only from
this, from a definite number of single instances of the same, that the
theory of the “attractive force of the earth” is obtained.
With her working hypotheses science acts like a man who, in order
to relieve himself of troublesome daily disbursements, pays out one
lump sum of money for the settlement of all these petty claims. So
science, in the place of countless daily, hourly--yea, in the amplest
sense of the words--continuous incomprehensibilities of life, pays out
one single, great incomprehensibility in the shape of central forces,
atoms, ethers, out of which all the trifling requirements of the
day--the running expenses, so to say--can now be met. The knowledge
which science supplies us is the most pregnant possible expression for
our ignorance. Were a genuine comprehension in question, one would make
a speculation of it like a man who should buy up all the tickets in a
lottery in order to make sure of the first prize.
From the position which science takes up towards the play of
world-events--that of potential comprehensibility--she is obliged
to combat everything that would militate against this potential
comprehensibility. Hence the embittered fight over the axioms of
mathematics. Science, if she would remain science, may tolerate only
what springs from experience. But what springs from experience can
also be swept away again by experience. As the god Kronos devours
his own offspring, so, in reverse wise, does each young experience
devour its genitor. But it is just this mobility, this, the complete
relativity of her results, which lends to science her security. Were
she anywhere to strike against solid ground, against anything not
springing from experience, it would be with her as with a deep-sea
vessel gone ashore: she would be dashed to pieces by the crashing waves
of actuality. Of course there is no danger of any such thing happening
so long as science keeps to _her own domain_, the re-actual world. As
biology, however, where she must encounter life itself, face the fact
_consciousness_, she is such a stranded ship as long since must have
gone to wreck under the assaults of actuality did not physics time and
again come to her aid and support.
This is the interpretation of the fact “science” in the Buddha-thought:
We can do nothing but inexhaustibly react to a world which in its
every motion _is law itself_, and therefore offers the possibility of
a _reading in accordance with law_, but in regard to its own essential
nature for ever and ever remains utterly beyond our reach.
Whence then the possibility of the human mind ever and again adjusting
itself anew to this inexhaustible play of world-events?
Because thinking itself is energy, therefore it does not _have_ the
faculty, the power of adjustment, but _is_ this power itself. Thinking
in every form, even in the most vulgar, is a self-adjustment, and the
scientific form is distinguished from the lay form only in this, that
it is _directed_, set in play towards definite ends; hence, whatever is
troublesome is here dropped with more skill, and on the doing of this,
in the last resort, all scientific adjustment is founded. Rightly does
E. Mach say, in his _Erhaltung der Arbeit_: “Science has almost made
greater progress through that which she has known how to ignore than by
that which she has taken into account.”
Here for a first occasion I would bring that reproach against science
which in what follows in treating of her problems will be frequently
repeated: She deprives us of the sense of actuality_; or_, rather,
places it in a false object, the re-actual, whereby she does just
as much harm to honest thinking as faith does by placing it in a
non-actual, in the transcendental.
There is only _one_ actuality in the world--that which I experience as
such. To deprive us of this pure actuality, to direct our attention
towards a world that can be “read” in the form of work done--this I
call a turning of genuine thinkers into tradesmen whose one and only
concern is the establishing of advantageous relations with the external
world.
Gradually to win back the lost sense of actuality, gradually again to
arouse the feeling that there is a given something present which as
such cannot be proven, not because unprovable in itself but because
proving itself by itself--a given something representing no mere
_possibility_ but a _power_--this will be the first task of a time
which itself feels in every nerve and fibre that there’s something
rotten. It is this blind running against all the facts of life, this
courage of pure folly ever and again excited and supported by an
overheated scientific imagination lacking in all self-control--it is
this that we must leave behind would we make good our claim to be
mentally adult.
That science can furnish no real explanations she herself admits with
her calculation of probabilities on the one hand and her philosophy of
probabilities on the other. Both require compromises with actuality,
the ignoring of minimum values, the equating of an endlessly great
probability with truth itself: in fine, an intellectual act of
violence. Whoever has his need of a world-theory satisfied by Herbert
Spencer’s deductions, I should imagine he might also find it relieved
by those of Thomas Aquinas. And if any one maintains with particular
pride that his world-theory is based on strictly scientific axioms, he
perpetrates an involuntary joke, inasmuch as he thereby says that his
world-theory is based upon an exact calculation of probabilities; for,
when all is said and done, the only exact thing about science is her
calculation of probability--that is, the freedom she takes to herself
to be inexact.
“What of mathematics?” it may be asked.
But the higher mathematics which, in the consideration of the world
from the physical point of view, comes into question before everything
else, is just the calculation of probabilities itself. And it is with
no actualities that geometry and algebra deal, but with ultimate
values--that is, values that are neither actual nor non-actual, but
are given with actuality, as for example, the horizon and the ideal
plane betwixt the air of the atmosphere and the surface of a sheet of
water are neither actual nor non-actual, but merely things given with
actuality.
This is a point of the highest epistemological importance which, so far
as my knowledge goes, has nowhere been taken into consideration; to go
into it more fully, however, would here be out of place. The Euclidean
instruments--point, line, superficies--are simply, ultimate values of
like kind; hence, neither actual nor non-actual. To operate with such
ultimate values where the problem of life, actuality, is concerned, and
in such operations to set out from mathematical truths, as does the
Kantian philosophy for instance--this just means that one has failed
to understand actuality.
Mathematics is only possible where there are identities. These,
however, are to be found only in the realm of ultimate values.
Actuality has no identities. Where there are nothing but combustion
processes, there each moment of existence is a thing unique that never
before has been and never again will be.
Whoso has comprehended the play of world-events after the manner of
the Buddha, to such an one it becomes ever more clear that science,
with her pretensions to furnish us at some future date with a genuine
world-conception, resembles that penniless wag who affixed a notice
outside his door bearing the inscription: “To-morrow I will pay my
debts.” Science, to the question as to when she finally means to pay
what she owes to humanity, a genuine world-conception, has always but
this _one_ answer, “To-morrow!”
Science might easily obtain a clear idea of her own nature if only she
would venture to think out to a conclusion her own trains of thought.
The nature of every scientific world-conception consists in
comprehending the play of world-events in its entirety, without
residue, as relation values. Herewith she remains stuck fast in what
may be called conclusionless comprehension. The Buddha explains
this fact in the manner already shown; science confronts this fact
all uncomprehending of its import, and therefore with some show of
justification can argue in this strain:--
“We are undoubtedly making progress in comprehension, as is shown by
our increasing capacity for determination in advance. Hence we are
justified in presuming the final link in our train of thought--the
entire play of world-events as a summation of pure relation values--and
in building up for ourselves already the world-conception which we are
sure to reach in practice some time in the future.”
This is the world-conception which modern physics calls her cosmogony
of energetics--that is, that ideal world which is wholly subject to
the law of the conservation of energy, and thus is conceived of as
consisting entirely of reversible processes not dependent upon time.
Of course, the more discerning among modern physicists now clearly
perceive that the law of the conservation of energy merely represents
from the limited standpoint of physics a _reading_ of the play of
world-events. If one forgets that, if one attempts to make it cover
actual processes, tries to work it up into a world-theory, then not
only does the real nature of the law of the conservation of energy come
to light, but also the real nature of the whole of science. For--
The law of the conservation of energy has sense and meaning only in
a closed system. In this fact alone its purely hypothetical nature
already stands revealed; for never under any conditions whatsoever can
actuality have a closed system. Thus at the very outset one has to make
a compromise with actuality, a proceeding that is justified only where
it is a question of achieving some practical result.
If now one makes the law of the conservation of energy into a universal
law and on this erects a world-theory, one is bound to posit the
universe itself as a closed system; otherwise, to speak of a universe
in which the sum of all existent energies remains constant were
altogether meaningless.
With this, however, science puts herself in such a position that, so
soon as she ventures to think things out to a conclusion, she robs
herself of the possibility of her own existence, as the following
considerations will make evident.
A universe such as this, consisting entirely of relation values without
residue, would be one huge process of compensation, an endlessly
diversified fall from positions of higher to positions of lower
tension. It is just this mode of representation which makes it possible
for the physicist to calculate, to determine in advance. He cannot set
about this his work at all until first after such a fashion he has
given a new interpretation to the play of world-events. He must also,
in similar wise, mechanise the invisible matter of the molecules,
before he can master, so far as calculation goes, what takes place
internally. In thought, one must loosen the existing connection between
the molecules in order to be able to establish the internal falls. It
is here as it is in a minuet: one takes a step backward in order to be
able to take a step forward!
But this is what the physicist dares to do. All he is concerned about
is to calculate, measure, determine in advance. As a general rule he
not only says, “_Après nous le déluge_,” but also “_Avant nous le
déluge_.” He rejoices in his power of being able to interpret and make
use of the re-actual play of world-events to suit his own ends, and for
the rest does not care a straw whence this power comes or whither in
the future it may go. _He does not think: he only works._
Now, so long as he preserves as physicist an attitude of strict
impartiality towards this universe, the attitude of simple spectator,
he may reach by calculation, by technique, whatever so is reachable.
He stands before his universe as before an open piece of clock-work in
which with increasing accuracy he observes the style and manner of its
running and formulates the laws of the same. If, however, he allows
himself to be led away into working at a world-view, into putting the
question “Where will this clock-work run to?” he cuts the ground from
under his own feet.
For in such a universe there remains as actuating impulsion nothing but
the distinctions given with the separate processes. It is just like a
pendulum ever hastening on towards a condition of rest.
Now, since under the assumption in question--a universe as a closed
system--an influx of force from without is excluded, what we have here
is a process of mutual borrowing, so to speak, and cosmic bankruptcy is
only a question of time.
This logical necessity is taken account of by science in her entropy
concept--the concept of the whole universe as a process hastening
towards equilibrium, though that consummation be distant by millions of
years.
Therewith, however--presuming that she is honest--science stands
confronted by the following question:--
Every difference of tension demands a something that has established
this difference. Where there is a swinging pendulum it must originally
have received a push. If, however, the entire universe is one single
mass of differences in tension, the impelling force can only lie
outside the universe. In other words: this force could only have
been the finger of a god. He it was, the Father-god, who put all his
capital of force into this universe, upon which capital everything now
feeds and will continue to feed until at length all is consumed, and
the great world-death comes which “He” alone again can bid depart in
communicating a fresh impulsion of motion--_if He should happen to feel
so disposed_.
Of course science does not say, “Energy disappears.” Instead she says,
“Energy only becomes inert; _as such_, however, remains conserved.”
This, however, is about as sensible as if one should say, “Heat does
not disappear, it only becomes cold; _as such_, however, it remains
conserved”--an absurdity rightly denounced by thinking minds among
physicists, such as E. Mach, for example.
And the conclusion of the whole matter?
The colossal achievements of science upon which is erected her
cosmogony of energetics, have served no other purpose but to look after
those interests of faith which faith itself dare not look after if it
wishes to retain its vitality. In her audacious attempt to make light
of the “imperceptible in itself,” the god-idea, as a mere rudiment of
atavism, science has made a pitiable shipwreck. By such an attempt she
only shows that she herself is an apostate from the god-idea; and to be
honourable, nothing is left her but to return as contrite vassal to
the ancient and sovereign race of those that are “of Jehovah.”
Should she, however, attempt to interpret the play of world-events not
as a fall, but try instead to interpolate forces, then of necessity
she must resort to the hypothesis of central forces; and, as above
she plays into the hands of the extra-cosmic deity of monotheism, so
here she plays into the hands of the intra-cosmic deity of pantheism;
for this central force, if really believed in and not a mere working
hypothesis, would be nothing else but the world-spirit of pantheism
translated into physical terms.
These two, faith and science, at their deepest roots, share in one
common nature, since both in truth represent that grandest form of
symbiosis in which is made manifest the instinct of self-preservation
on the part of the universe--the universe considered as the totality of
all living beings. When faith thinks things out it falls back into the
lap of science. When science thinks things out it falls back into the
lap of faith. And both by their simple existence demonstrate the truth
of the Buddha-teaching that all mental life perforce operates under the
encumbrance of ignorance. For let science, or rather the scientist in
person, place himself, if only temporarily and for a specific purpose,
at the artificial standpoint of the mechanistic world-view, and so soon
as he really begins to think he gives the lie to his own scientific
view, inasmuch as he everywhere works with the concept of identity.
Nay, he is never even in a position to maintain a clear distinction
between the two points of view. This is proven by the problems of
science, which, without exception, are of a purely dialectical nature,
inasmuch as they all presuppose the erroneous concept of things as
_identities_.
Our task here is to throw the light of the Buddha-thought upon these
problems, and to this task we now proceed to address ourselves.