Where the eye and forms encounter one another, and the antecedent
conditions are such that each acts upon the other, there arises
visual consciousness. Where the ear and sounds encounter one another,
there arises aural consciousness. Where nose and odours encounter
one another, there arises olfactory consciousness. Where tongue and
flavours encounter one another, there arises gustatory consciousness.
Where bodies and objects come in contact with one another, there arises
tactile consciousness. Where thinking and things (known abstractly)
encounter one another, there arises thought-consciousness.
“If the inward eye is undamaged, and external objects do not come
within the range of vision, and (as a consequence) no corresponding
interaction takes place, then a corresponding moment of consciousness
does not result. If the inward eye is undamaged, and external
objects come within the range of vision, and (nevertheless) no
corresponding interaction takes place, then also a corresponding
moment of consciousness does not result. If, however, the inward eye
is undamaged, and external objects come within the range of vision,
and the corresponding interaction takes place, then there results the
corresponding moment of consciousness.”[23]
Thus my entire individuality, the totality of individual experience is
a _becoming conscious_ at every moment of existence. Consciousness is
a Sankhāra, like all else, distinguished therefrom only in this, that
in it Kamma itself becomes perceptible to sense.
Were teleology and mechanistics to come before the Buddha and say,
“Decide thou! Which of us two is right? Is the eye born of seeing,
or is seeing born of the eye? Is the brain born of thinking, or is
thinking born of the brain?” the Buddha would reply with a smile:--
“My young friends, you are both right because you are both wrong.
Your question is not correctly put. There are no such things as ‘eye’
and ‘brain’ in the sense in which you use the words. There is only an
_I_-process, that unfolds itself by way of certain differentiations
which in themselves run their course at a pace sufficiently slow to
justify such separate verbal designations as the ‘eye,’ the ‘brain,’
and so forth. Your question, ‘Is the eye born of seeing, or is seeing
born of the eye? Is the brain born of thinking, or is thinking born
of the brain?’ would have sense and meaning only if the eye and the
brain were in themselves organs all finished and complete, to which in
that case a specific function also would have to correspond. All this,
however, is nothing but a phase, nothing but the form of development
assumed by a single process. It is not the eye that sees: _you_ see.
The eye is neither born of seeing, nor yet is seeing born of the eye;
the eye is simply _the form under which seeing exists_. You do not
see _with_ the eye but in virtue of the fact of eye-evolution, the
same as you think in virtue of the fact of brain-evolution, which is
only another way of saying that you are the form assumed by individual
energies.”
Here the physiologist breaks in: “That consciousness has its seat in
certain regions of the cerebral cortex may be proven by experiments
on animals.” But this is a conclusion as grossly mistaken as that of
the physicist when he imagines he can follow up energy throughout all
its ramifications.[24] What can be got at by experimental methods is
merely negative phenomena, and these furnish no warrant for coming to
conclusions as to the seat of consciousness. If I cut through the wire
connected with an electric light at any point at all in the circuit,
the negative phenomenon “darkness” assuredly supervenes; but to say on
that account, “The point of section must be the seat of the electric
energy; here is ocular demonstration,” would be sheer foolishness. Yet
the physiologist is guilty of just such foolishness, and at its behest
does not stick at the perpetration of all those cruelties such as are
scarcely to be avoided in experiments upon animals. If only the time
would come when true ideas about life would take possession of science,
the laboratories of physiologists would no longer be those places where
every day sacrifice is made to error as in the temples of blood-stained
idols.
All these researches on the subject of the seat of consciousness are
only possible where one is working with empty concepts. If one thinks
in terms of actuality consciousness is just that with regard to which
a reading, a working hypothesis of an inductive nature, is utterly
impossible; for here the reading is precisely the form assumed by the
consciousness, by that which is to do the reading, by the problem
itself, and thus itself again requires a reading, and so on _ad
infinitum_.
But there is another point involved in this problem of “consciousness”
which, so far as I know, has never been taken account of, and yet is of
the utmost significance.
As the Darwinian idea does not embrace in its purview the case
of hybrid formations--it does not react upon it at all--so the
scientific mode of envisaging things does not take in the case of the
physiological negative phenomena of consciousness, does not at all
react upon it. With the apparatus of science there is no possibility
whatever of getting at such facts as “faith,” “illusion,” “error,”
“forgetting.” Science requires something sensible and objective,
something so constituted that I can rank it along with other things.
In no respect, however, are any of these negative phenomena objective
things. Here no possible point of entry offers for science with its
instrument, induction.
I may indeed _read_ consciousness under the figure of associative
occurrences, but only in the form of recollection. Applied to the
corresponding dissociative event, forgetting, this explanation is
as impossible as that a molecular mixture which has once come to
equilibrium within itself should again spontaneously return to
dissolution, to dissociation. As the natural adjustment of differences
of molecular tension may be explained or read as a fall, so in its
associative activities consciousness may be explained or read as a
fall, but never so in its dissociative activities. This, however,
involves the utter worthlessness of the former explanation; for every
mixture, every association, presupposes separation, dissociation, and,
called upon to indicate the _essence_ of consciousness, what I should
point to is not so much the associative as the dissociative, not so
much recollection, conjunction, as forgetting, disjunction. Once the
stone is raised from the earth’s surface its return fall forthwith
ensues. But it is the separation from the earth’s surface for which
effective causes must be found. In like manner, it is dissociation,
forgetting, that really demands elucidation; association, recollection
can as easily be read mechanistically as the fall of a stone once it
has been raised. Dissociation is the physiological miracle, in presence
of which science stands altogether helpless.
The like holds good of faith, illusion, error. The purely mechanistic
conception of things, the view which regards the _I_-process simply
as an instance of the phenomenon of the compensation of tensile
differences, can never be accommodated to the possibility of such
things as faith, illusion, and error. But a similar impossibility also
exists for the teleological apprehension of the world. How should a
“force” ever acquire the faculty of deceiving itself or of falling
into error? To a compensation-phenomenon pure and simple, as to God,
illusion and error are wholly unattainable potentialities; they belong
to mankind alone, to the man whom the Buddha points out to us.
If I am nothing but an unceasing reaction to the outer world, if I
constantly adapt myself to things and things adapt themselves to me,
not as a mere adjustment but in virtue of specific energies, only then
are faith, illusion, error, and all other negative phenomena equally
possible with all positive phenomena. Beginningless process furnishes
the possibility of both.
Such things as actual illusion, actual error, science may nowise
recognize, for in so doing she would be recognizing something for
which there is absolutely no room in her cosmogony. One would thereby
introduce functions for which one could furnish no organized basis.
Only in the cosmogony of the Buddha, only in the concept of individual
beginninglessness does each find its necessary place. Here they are
the necessary preconditions of all existence. Science is powerless to
defend herself against them otherwise than by an attempt to “explain
away” such occurrences out of the order of world-events. Upon this
point E. Mach, in his _Analyse der Empfindungen_, expresses himself
as follows: “The phrase, ‘illusion of the senses,’ shows that man has
not yet rightly come to a consciousness, or at least has not yet found
it necessary to express such consciousness in fitting terminology,
that the senses indicate neither false nor true. The only ‘true’ of
which one can speak in connection with the sense organs is that under
different conditions they yield different sensations and perceptions.
Since these conditions are so extremely manifold in their variety ...
it may very well seem ... as if the organ acts dissimilarly under
similar conditions. Results out of the usual order are what men are
accustomed to call illusions.” This is to make illusion merely truth in
an infinitesimal form, to “read” it as a special form of truth, and so
be rid of it.
But the value of the Buddha-thought in this domain does not end here.
Over and above, it explains to begin with, the every-day fact of
experience, that not every pairing evolves a new embryo. This fact is
alike incapable of explanation whether from the standpoint of faith or
from that of science.
Faith, which sees a divine soul breathed into the material of
generation, permits of no standpoint at all, since for it everything
takes place according to God’s good pleasure. From the standpoint
of science, however, with every conjunction of ovum and sperm-cell,
conception also must be granted, since here both are already the form
of the new life, already contain in themselves all the ingredients
of this new life. It is only the Buddha-thought that explains why,
meanwhile, despite the union of ovum and sperm, conception does not
take place: it has not “struck in.” At the moment when both were
open to the inflow of the energy, the latter was not ready. In the
ceaseless, unbroken attunement, each to the other, of the happenings of
a world, the proper moment was let slip.[25]
The Buddha-thought further explains the else inexplicable fact of the
simultaneous resemblance and lack of resemblance between parents and
children. The view of the matter taken by faith supplies no argument in
favour of any kind of resemblance whatever between the two. The soul
is inbreathed by God whithersoever it pleaseth him. In the view of
science, on the contrary, there is found no argument for any failure
in resemblance betwixt progenitors and offspring. Ever and always
the characteristics of the latter can only be a combination of the
characteristics of both the parents. In the Buddha-thought _alone_ are
similarity and dissimilarity alike accounted for. I may have inherited
my father’s nose, his manner of blowing it indeed, since all lay
foreshadowed in the material, and was obliged so to evolve itself:
but the evolver is a stranger, hence one common starting-point yields
an independent evolving series. Here conception means no more than
that two paths, two lines, that of the material and that of energy,
intersect one another. We are as at some cross-road, where two highways
meet, only to lead further and further away from each other the further
we pursue them.
The third item that finds an explanation in the Buddha-thought is the
fact of innate aptitudes. Where the act of learning is envisaged from a
purely empirical point of view these are a standing, incomprehensible
miracle. Opposed to this, the defectiveness of the nativistic theory
resides in the fact that according to it every being must make his
appearance fitted out all complete with fixed, inborn abilities. Midway
removed from both extremes stands the Buddha. With equal ease he
explains the possibility of gradual development and that of appearance
all ready and complete, inasmuch as with him all depends upon the
_tempo_ at which the energy closing with the material enters upon its
unfolding process. Is the _tempo_ so fast that the organic recipients
are already developed upon leaving the womb, then the innate abilities
are there present; the organs can set to forthwith, the external world
acts immediately as liberating lure, and the nativists have the last
word. Is the _tempo_ slow, then there set in processes that admit
of being empirically interpreted or read as a gradual attainment of
faculty by experience.
Apart, however, from the biological facts, the Buddha-thought also
explains those lofty speculations that have haunted the minds of men
from the earliest times, such as “previous existence,” Plato’s idea
of learning as “reminiscence,” and so forth. “Many a time it has
seemed to me as if I must have been in existence once already,” says
such a clear, keen mind as Lichtenberg. Indeed here, if one likes,
even the Kantian “_a priori_ of all experience,” this pure _ens_ of
scholasticism, acquires sense and meaning. That which with Kant stands
out from reality as a blind end, destitute of any real foothold, like
the spirit moving upon the face of the waters, here balls itself
together into the _I myself_. My Kamma is the “_a priori_”; in a
sense, such as Kant never suspected, it is true. All these minds
lack guidance, lack light. In dim fashion they feel, but they do not
see. During my latest sojourn at Anuradhapura, in the course of a
conversation with the abbot of Ruanwelli, he said to me, “Every one who
is without the Teaching is like the blind elephant in the jungle: he
feels at every twig”--to find out if it is eatable. Here we have an apt
illustration of inquiring ignorance.
With this solution of the problem of procreation as furnished by the
Buddha are involved a few necessary questions which might have been
disposed of in our fifth essay, but may more fitly be dealt with here.