In the position it assumes towards actuality science resembles a man
who has reduced all language to mere grammar and now finds himself hard
put to it to explain how purely grammatical signs and formulæ could
ever have given rise to actual speech. As grammar presupposes actual
speech--is secondary, derived from it--so the mechanical, re-actual
view presupposes actuality--is secondary, derived from it--and it
is against all common-sense to seek now to turn the tables with an
endeavour to prove the possibility of the living language “actuality,”
assess its title to existence, by the “grammar” of the scientific
conception of things. From this position, the fact that anything ever
happens at all, remains an eternally unfathomable mystery.
The first claim upon the genuine thinker is that he should understand
clearly that a something given is present, whose simple existence
represents also the _power to exist_; whose activity has no need of
being proven, since proving itself by itself. The endeavours of science
from its re-actual position, to govern and administer actuality itself
also, betray a limitedness and crudity of thought at which later
generations will stand amazed. So long as science fails to understand
and respect her natural limitations, so long as she keeps trying to
interpret the actual mechanically, so long is she as serious a danger
to the world as faith.
In the treatment of the problem of physiology that follows I can be
brief, because all the details here relate to a technical domain to
which the majority of my readers are unlikely to bring either interest
or ability to understand.
Just as physics--in the widest sense of the word--may be briefly
designated as the teaching that informs us of the relations existing
between “bodies,” so physiology may be succinctly termed the teaching
that instructs us as to the relations existent between living beings
and the external world.
Where living beings are comprehended as processes of combustion pure
and simple, every relationship betwixt them and their environment
becomes a _form of alimentation_. The intellectual as the vegetative,
the psychic as the physical life, are here comprised under the one
common, all-inclusive concept of alimentation. Whether I appropriate,
assimilate something to myself through the organs of sense and thought
or through the tongue and the digestive apparatus, both proceedings are
the same--forms of alimentation.
Accordingly we find the Buddha calling living beings “āhāraṭṭhitikā,”
_i.e._ “existing through alimentation,” and placing this expression--as
synonymous--alongside “sañkhāraṭṭhitikā,” _i.e._ “existing through
Sankhāra,” compounded, conditioned.
Here in their every movement the entire existence of living beings
becomes a _laying hold of the external world_--a gross laying hold with
hands and teeth as well as that subtle _mental_ laying hold which we
generally denominate “comprehension.” As the whole existence of a flame
is a laying hold of the external world, as it subsists solely by reason
of this prehensile activity, even so is it with the _I_-process.
Buddhist psychology distinguishes between four varieties of aliment.
First, there is aliment in the common, vulgar sense of the word, be it
in gross growth-promoting form as solid or liquid food, be it in fine
growth-promoting form as respiration. Second, contact, as the mutual
encounter of the senses and their corresponding objects. Third, mental
apprehension; and fourth, consciousness; these two latter being the
working up, the assimilating of what issues from contact.
From the commanding height of the position which Buddhist thinking
takes up towards the process of life, it cannot possibly encounter
that “problem” with which scientific physiology finds itself forced to
wrestle.