“How can it ever be possible for a living being to appropriate
something to itself, assimilate something, take up something into
itself, whether this ‘something’ be of the gross growth-promoting
variety--nourishment in the vulgar sense of the word--or of
the intellectual sort, as sense impressions and the content of
consciousness?”
There was a time in the history of natural science, more particularly
in the history of the healing art--and that time is hardly past yet;
we still stand within its fringes--when to work at all with the concept
of a “vital energy” was regarded as synonymous with being unscientific,
indeed, was esteemed mere blind faith. At every opportunity, seasonable
and unseasonable, it was declared that “to-day” we had no longer any
need of a “vital energy,” that the mechanical view explained all that
very much better; yet, in actual truth, one only showed how wanting one
was in the sense of actuality when one could accept as satisfactory a
“reading” of life which presented it under the figure of endosmotic and
diosmotic processes, and such like.
Here, however, is abundantly proved true that saying of Horace that
nature is something which man cannot drag out even with a pitchfork;
and it was with a pitchfork of the biggest sort that the mechanists
took the field against actual life. To-day the antithesis of the
mechanical view--the teleological--has found its way back into medical
thought, and begins again to move about naturally and without restraint
in the domain of therapeutics.
Beyond all else, it was the progress made in physiological chemistry,
the peculiar, seemingly inexplicable facts here observed, which
perforce impelled towards this inversion of positions.
Here in the domain of physiological chemistry there come to light
processes, reactions, which make a mock of all the rules and laws got
from reagent tubes. Here in the living organism it is found that the
“strongest” acid--sulphuric acid--is crowded out of its combinations
by the “weakest”--carbonic acid; which means nothing else but that the
concept of “strength” as it has been taken over from inorganic nature
does not apply here at all. By reason of such experiences it has been
found necessary to introduce a new concept, that of “avidity”; in other
words, here as everywhere, one hobbles along at the heels of the facts
of actuality, being obliged ever and again to adapt oneself to them
anew as best one may.
Here in the living organism, albumen, fats, and carbohydrates are
worked up at temperatures at which they undergo no change under the
action of the oxygen of the atmosphere. The most marvellous thing of
all, however, is the action of the glands, which, in taking up the
material to be elaborated, display a power of choice that, so far as
our ideas go, defies all explanation. Not the least regard is here paid
to chemical and physical laws as abstracted by science from inorganic
nature. Complete arbitrariness prevails. The epithelium of the stomach,
for example, possesses the power of always despatching the hydric
chloride set free from sodium chloride in one direction--namely, into
the excretory ducts of the rennet glands, and of always sending the
sodium carbonate formed in another direction, back into the lymph and
blood circulation.
Examples such as this might be multiplied to almost any extent, did we
here aim at completeness.
The key-word to it all, as revealed to us by the latest researches in
physiological chemistry, is--arbitrariness!
Of course, as everywhere so also here, only give her time enough and
science will come round to adjustments in thought, and with that to the
formulation of all such facts into laws. In respect of such facts,
however, it must clearly be understood that the purely mechanical view
is no longer able to hold the field; that the teleological view has
broken through the artificial embankments of the mechanical view and
again poured forth over the level lands of scientific thinking.
That which has hitherto given such weight to the mechanical view in
physiology is the possibility, up to a certain degree, of reading the
physiological facts mechanically. One can “read” the eye so far as its
external apparatus is concerned, according to the laws of catoptrics
and dioptrics; but the bearing of this upon the faculty of seeing or
upon an explanation of that faculty is simply nothing. This is not the
fitting place to deal with the revolting outrage upon sound thinking of
which the scientific theory of vision is guilty in its interpretation
of the reversed retinal image: that demands a chapter to itself.
One may “read” the heart and the vascular system as a pumping
contrivance, and the osseous system and its joints as an arrangement
of levers. One may reckon in heat-units the nutrition-values taken in
and given off, and equilibrate them with tolerable success, as can also
be done with a calorimeter; that is to say, one can “read” the living
organism in accordance with the formula of the law of the conservation
of energy. But nothing thereby is gained that is of the slightest
assistance towards a comprehension of the _actual_ energies at work in
all these functions, except in so far as to the genuine thinker all
this makes more vital and pressing the question as to what precisely
that wonderful something is which pulls the strings. And if one
school of science would like to make us believe that on the basis of
an ever-increasing facility in “reading” the organism mechanically the
question as to actuating energies may in the end be completely disposed
of, as referring to quantities so minute as to be negligible, it need
not be taken seriously; it only resembles a man who would account for
the revolution of a wheel solely from the shape and texture of the wood.
That which along with the results of physiological chemistry helped
towards the overthrow of the mechanical view, was the new tendency in
therapeutics--serum therapeutics, to wit--which, put briefly, amounts
to a working out of specific affinities between the living organism and
certain organic substances.
As the physiological chemist was forced to note that he had fallen
out of the realm of crude but easily-handled quantities into the
realm of unaccountable qualities--that is, out of re-actuality
into actuality--so was it with the experimenter in these specific
remedies. One was obliged to take note that in this field the grossly
quantitative according to mass and weight no longer went for anything.
Ehrlich calls the antitoxins “magic bullets” which hit their mark
_immediately_. Here it is no longer a question of the mere more or less
by which one has hitherto been accustomed to gauge effects, but of an
attunement more or less fine and delicate. In short, one has forced
one’s way into the domain of actual energies and seeks gropingly after
one or another method of accommodation. For the quantitative position
may not be abandoned entirely if one would remain scientific. One
must be able to measure. Actual energies, however, do not admit of
being measured by dead material. They are only to be measured through
themselves, _i.e._ through their working.
Already more than a hundred years ago, Hahnemann, the founder of the
homœopathic method of treating disease, consciously and completely
abandoned the crude quantitative position in the field of medical
science. He had freed himself entirely from the quantitative conception
of curative effect. He called his remedies “potencies,” and this
potency was determined not according to mass but according to the
fineness, the delicacy of the mutual accord between the organism and
the remedy. This mutual accord, however, grows subtler, more acute,
with progressive dematerialization, with the freeing of the active
energies resident in the remedies from the burden of their ballast
of material. Hence the apparently paradoxical idea that the curative
effect augmented with the diminution of the dose--an idea which has
given the doctors of the orthodox schools such abundant occasion
for misunderstanding and barbed raillery. The effectiveness is not
increased with the lessening of the dose, but with the subtilization
of the unique accords concerned. Hahnemann had the courage to bring
his thinking into line with the actual energies and their manner of
working--a courage which modern serum therapeutics does not possess,
and quite likely never will possess, so that we may look to see the
wave of actuality which here has burst upon therapeutic life again
crushed under by re-actual tendencies.
Wherever opposites are found, there mere dialectical problems form
the subject of contention. The contradictions between the mechanical
and the teleological views with respect to the living organism are
also of a purely dialectical nature. Both take up the position
that the organism is an identity, and accordingly a something so
constituted that it can take nutriment _into itself_. Both alike,
teleology as mechanism, looking upon the cell as life itself, make it
their endeavour to master the miracle of that life; the former, as a
result of its efforts, coming to the conclusion that a vital force,
an incomprehensible something in itself, must somewhere lie concealed
in this wonderful machinery; whilst the latter pushes on unswervingly
towards the goal it has set before itself--that of becoming, by ever
closer and closer description, master at length of the great riddle.
As everywhere, so also here, the Buddha stands between and above these
two opposites, inasmuch as he teaches:--
A living being so constituted that it must and can take up something
_into itself_ simply does not exist. Such a living being is only to
be found where one is dealing with the concept of identities. But
identities are nowhere to be found within the domain of actuality. Here
are only processes of combustion. If one sets out with the concept
of identities, one creates for oneself a problem whose insolubility
proceeds as much from its purely dialectical nature as the problem of
telekinesis in physics. If one abides by the _actual_, if one holds
strictly to the insight that living beings are individual processes
of combustion, then there exist nothing but energies which for a
certain period of time put a body of material specifically belonging to
themselves in a specific condition of tension, for a time maintain it
so, and then after a time again abandon it. Here the cell is not life
itself, but simply the most primitive structural expression of the fact
that certain materials find themselves in a certain state of tension,
in the same way that the ridges and furrows in a Chladni’s sound-figure
are a structural expression of the fact that a certain material--some
sand on a glass plate--finds itself in a certain state of tension.
This whole body of phenomena is by physiology termed the “circulation
of matter.” But there is here no “_I_” as an identity that takes
up matter into itself, melts it down, and--so to speak--gives it
forth again as new coinage. Nowhere in the universe are there any
unstamped values, nowhere is there any raw material of substance, but
always and everywhere only a recoining: a continuous change in the
individual conditions of tension which as little warrants the idea of
“resorption”--taken literally--as the flame, or the wind that for a
certain space of time whirls up and holds a certain particle of sand in
a certain form. An appropriation, a taking up into oneself, can only
take place where there is a proprietor able to take something into his
house. But actuality does not permit of any such comfortable ideas.
Here are nothing but energies that continuously lay hold, pull to
themselves, and maintain what has thus been pulled, under the influence
of their individual tendency, until such time as other energies make
their presence felt in superior force, whereupon the tension is
dissolved here, only to assert itself anew elsewhere.
Whatever may be manifest as form in the living being, from the gross
forms of the limbs down to the cell, to its protoplasm, to its nucleus,
to the ever-new marvels of the structure of its body--it is all alike
one material, maintained by one individual energy in an individual
state of tension.
I do not _have_ the marvel of alimentation as my function, but I _am_
all this itself; and beyond this, nothing! That, however, I am this
individual, unique being--of this the antecedent conditions lie buried
deep in beginninglessness.
Kamma is an individual energy: as such it is a thing unique: as
unique it seizes hold of Kammic, _i.e._ unique material, whereof the
uniqueness is proven in the fact that Kamma evolves therefrom a unique
being, an individual. If all this marvel of alimentation, this marvel
of sight, hearing, and so forth, were obliged to come about as a
something entirely new only through external preconditions, never could
it come about at all. I learn to see, hear, taste, and so forth, as the
flame learns to burn, the flower to blow. All this, down even to the
minutest detail, lies ready, prepared beforehand, in the material; and
it needs but the stimulator--which, just because it is a question of
a unique material, must also be a thing unique--in order to have all
these properties brought into play, have them set in full activity.
The material lineage of the living being is perforce as beginningless
as the Kamma lineage; but whilst the beginninglessness of the
latter manifests itself only immediately in consciousness, the
beginninglessness of the former admits of being comprehended only
mediately as a logical deduction.
“Suppose, O monks, that a man were to cut down all the grass and
leaves in this Jambudīpa [India], and, gathering them together, take
one handful after another and say (at each handful), ‘This is my
mother; this is my mother’s mother,’ there would never be any end to
the mother’s mother of such a man; but all the grass and leaves in
Jambudīpa well might run out, well might come to an end.”[15]
Both lineages, the material as the Kammic, are a beginningless,
reciprocal, each-to-other self-attunement, in a universe that in its
every motion is law itself.
To this we shall have to return in the succeeding essay, in treating of
the problem of heredity.
The man of science will say, “It is no very difficult matter to explain
everything if one simply refers everything back to beginninglessness,
and assigns as reason for the fact that everything is as it is, that in
accordance with the natural conditions of growth it has been _obliged_
to come about thus and not otherwise.”
To this it may be said in reply that the Buddha-“reading” of the play
of world-events is productive of but little for science, being that
reading which is actuality itself--which takes and leaves actuality
as that which it is, thereby shutting off the very possibility of
all those learned and profound researches which accrue to science in
such abundant measure through its endeavours to have actuality become
actuality only under its own hands, so to speak; in somewhat the same
way that I, the living being, exist to a magistrate, not as myself, but
only in virtue of certain identification papers.
Besides, the Buddha-thought is an intuition. And the value of an
intuition is made manifest solely in its use as a working hypothesis.
As a working hypothesis, then, of what service is the Buddha-thought in
the domain of physiology?