{"id":120,"date":"2013-07-13T01:26:03","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:26:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=120"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:26:03","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:26:03","slug":"13-rebirth-evolution-heredity-vol-16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16\/13-rebirth-evolution-heredity-vol-16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16","title":{"rendered":"-13_Rebirth – Evolution – Heredity.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n


\nRebirth,
\nEvolution, Heredity<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/span>       
\n<\/span><\/span>    T<\/span><\/b>WO
\n<\/span>truths, discoveries with an enormous periphery of luminous result and of
\nconsiderable essential magnitude, evolution and heredity, figure today in the
\nfront of thought, and I suppose we have to take them as a well-established
\nunquenchable light upon our being, lamps of a constant lustre, though not yet
\nvery perfectly trimmed, final so far as anything is final in man’s constantly
\nchanging cinematographic process of the development of intellectual knowledge.
\nThey may be said to make up almost the whole fundamental idea of life in the way
\nof seeing peculiar to a mind dominated, fashioned, pressed into its powerful
\nmoulds by the exact: curious, multifariously searching, yet in the end
\nsingularly limited observation and singularly narrow reason of our modern
\nscience. Science is in her own way a great seer and magician; she has both the
\nmicroscopic and the macroscopic, the closely gazing and the telescopic view, a
\ndissolving power of searching analytic resolution, a creative power of revealing
\nsynthetic effectuation. She has hunted to their lair many of the intermediate
\nsecret processes of the great creatrix, and even she has been able, by the
\ninventive faculty given to us, to go and do one better. Man, this midget in
\ninfinity, locomotive yet nailed to the contiguity of a petty crust of soil by
\nthe force of gravitation, has certainly scored by her a goodly number of points
\nagainst the mother of the universe. But all this has been done in some
\nperfection only in the limits of her lowest obtrusive physical field.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n  <\/span>          
\n<\/span>Face to face with psychic and spiritual secrecies, as in the open
\nelementary world even of mind, Science has still the uninformed gaze and the
\ngroping hands of the infant. In that sphere she, so precise, illuminative,
\ncompelling in the physical, sees only the big blazing buzzing confusion which
\nJames tells us, with a possibly inaccurate vividness of alliterative phrase, is
\nthe newborn baby’s view of the sensible world into which he has dropped down the
\nmysterious stairs of birth. Science, faced with what are still<\/p>\n

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to
\nher the wonderful random accords and unexplained miracles of consciousness,
\nprotects herself from the errors of the imagination, – but stumbling
\nincidentally by that very fact into plenty of the errors of an inadequate
\ninduction, – behind an opaque shield of cautious scepticism. She clings with the
\ngrasping firmness of the half-drowned to planks of security she thinks she has
\ngot in a few well-tested correspondences, – so-styled, though the word as used
\nexplains nothing, – between mental action and its accompaniment of suggestive or
\ninstrumental physical functionings. She is determined, if she can, to explain
\nevery supraphysical phenomenon by some physical fact; psychological process of
\nmind must not exist except as result or rendering of physiological process of
\nbody. This set resolution, apparently rational and cautious of ascertainable and
\nfirmly tangible truth, but really heroic in its paradoxical temerity, shuts up
\nher chance of rapid discovery, for the present at least, in a fairly narrow
\ncircle. It taints too her extensions of physical truth into the psychological
\nfield with a pursuing sense of inadequacy. And this inadequacy in extended
\napplication is very evident in her theories of heredity and evolution when she
\nforces them beyond their safe ground of physical truth and labours to illumine
\nby them the subtle, complex, elusive phenomena of our psychical being.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n  <\/span>          
\n<\/span>There are still, I dare say, persons here and there who cherish a secret
\nor an open unfaith in the theory of a physical evolution and believe that it
\nwill one day pass into the limbo of dead generalisations like the Ptolemaic
\ntheory in astronomy or like the theory of humours in medicine; but this is a
\nrare and excessive scepticism. Yet it may not be without use or aptitude for our
\npurpose to note that contrary to current popular notions the scientific account
\nof this generalisation, like that of a good number of others, is not yet
\nconclusively proved, even though now taken for granted. But still there is, on
\nthe whole, a mass of facts and indications in its favour so considerable as to
\nlook overwhelming, so that we cannot resist the conclusion that in this way or
\nsome such way the whole thing came about and we find it difficult to conceive
\nany more convincing explanation of the indubitable ascending and branching scale
\nof genus and species which meets even our casual scrutiny of living existence.
\nOne<\/p>\n

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\n
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thing
\nat least seems now intellectually certain, we can no longer believe that these
\nsuns and systems were hurled full-shaped and eternally arranged into boundless
\nspace and all these numberless species of being planted on earth ready-made and
\nnicely tailored , in seven days or any number of days in a sudden outburst of
\ncaprice or Dionysiac excitement or crowded activity of mechanica1 conception by
\nthe fiat of a timeless Creator. The successive development which was summarily
\nproposed by the ancient Hindu thinkers, the lower forms of being first, man
\nafterwards as the crown of the Spirit’s development of life on earth, has been
\nconfirmed by the patient and detailed scrutiny of physical science, – an aeonic
\ndevelopment, though the farther Hindu conception of a constant repetition of the
\nprinciple in cycles is necessarily incapable of physical evidence.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n  <\/span>          
\n<\/span>One thing more seems now equally certain that not only the seed of all
\nlife was one, – again the great intuition of tile Upanishads foreruns the
\nconclusions of the physical enquiry, one seed which the universal self-existence
\nby process of force has disposed in many ways, ekam bijam bahudh<\/i><\/span>\u00e3
\nsakti-yog<\/span><\/i>\u00e3t, <\/span><\/i>–
\nbut even the principle of development is one and the structural ground-plan too
\nas it develops step by step, in spite of all departures to this, side or that in
\nthe workings of the creative Force or the creative Idea. Nature seems to start
\nwith an extraordinary poverty of original broad variative conceptions and to
\nproceed to an extraordinary richness of her minuter consequential variations,
\nwhich amounts to forging of constant subtle differentiations of species and in
\nthe individual a startling insistence on result of uniqueness. It almost looks
\nas if in the process of her physical harmonies there was meant to be some formal
\neffect or symbolic reproduction of the truth that all things are originally one
\nbeing, but a one who insists on his own infinite diversity, and even a
\nsuggestion that there is in this eternal unity an eternal pluralism, the
\nInfinite Being self-repeated in an infinite multiplicity of beings, each unique
\nand yet each the One. To a mind on the look-out for the metaphysical suggestions
\nwe can draw from the apparent facts of being, that might not seem altogether an
\nimagination.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n  <\/span>          
\n<\/span>In any case, we have this now patent order in the profuse<\/p>\n

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complexities
\nof the natural harmony of living things, – one plasmic seed, one developing
\nground-plan, an opulent number of varieties whose logical process would be by an
\nascending order which passes up through fine but still very distinct gradation
\nfrom the crude to the complex, from the less organised to the more organised,
\nfrom the inferior to the superior type. The first question that should strike
\nthe mind at once, when this tree of life has been seen, is whether this logical
\norder was indeed the actual order in the history of the universe, and then, a
\nsecond, naturally arising from that problem, whether, if so, each new form
\ndeveloped by variation from its natural predecessor or came in by some unknown
\nprocess, a fresh, independent and in a way sudden creation. In the first case,
\nwe have the scientific order of physical evolution, – in the other one knows not
\nwell what, perhaps an unseen Demiurge who developed the whole thing in the
\nearlier period of the earth evolution and has now wholly or almost entirely
\nstopped the business so that we have no new physical development of that kind,
\nbut only, it may be, an evolution of capacity in types already created. Science
\nstands out for a quite natural and mechanical, a quite unbroken physical
\nevolution with many divergent lines indeed of developing variation, but in the
\nline no gap or interstice. It is true that there are not one but a host of
\nmissing links, which even the richest remains. of the past cannot fill in, and
\nwe are not in a position to deny with an absolute dogmatism the possibility of
\nan advance per saltum, <\/i>by a rapid overleaping, perhaps even by a crowded
\npsychical or biopsychic preparation whose result sprang out in the appearance of
\na new type with a certain gulf between itself and the preceding forms of life.
\nWith regard to man especially there is still an enormous uncertainty as to how
\nhe, so like yet so different from sons of Nature, came into existence. Still the
\ngaps can be explained away, there is a great mass of telling facts in favour of
\nthe less physically anarchic view, and it seems to have on its side the right of
\ngreatest probability in a material universe where the most perfectly physical
\nprinciple of proceeding would seem to be the just basic law.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n  <\/span>          
\n<\/span>But even if we admit the most scrupulous and rigorous continuity of
\nsuccessive determination, the question arises whether<\/p>\n

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the
\nprocess of evolution has been indeed so exclusively physical and biological as
\nat first sight it looks. If it is, we must admit not only a rigorous principle
\nof class heredity, but a law of hereditary progressive variation and a purely
\nphysical cause of all mental and spiritual phenomena. Heredity by itself means
\nsimply the constant transmission of physical form and biological characteristics
\nfrom a previous life to its posterity. There is very evidently such a general
\nforce of hereditary transmission within the genus or species itself, as the tree
\nso the seed, as the seed so the tree, so that a lion generates a lion and not a
\ncat or a rhinoceros, a man a human being and not an orang-outang, – though one
\nreads now of a curious and startling speculation, turning the old theory
\ntopsy-turvy, that certain ape kinds may be, not ancestors, but degenerate
\ndescendants of man! But farther, if a physical evolution is the whole fact,
\nthere must be a capacity for the hereditary transmission of variations by which
\nnew species are or have been created, – not merely in the process of a mixture
\nor crossing, but by an internal development which is stored up and handed down
\nin the seed. That, too, may very well be admitted, even though its real process
\nand rationale are not yet understood, since the transmission of family and
\nindividual characteristics is a well observed phenomenon. But then the things
\ntransmitted are not only physical and biological, but psychological or at least
\nbiopsychic characters, repetitions of customary nervous experience and mental
\ntendency, powers. We have to suppose that the physical seed transmits these
\nthings. We are called upon to admit that the human seed, for Instance, which
\ndoes not contain a developed human consciousness, yet carries with it the powers
\nof such a consciousness so that they reproduce themselves automatically in the
\nthinking and organised mentality of the offspring. This, even if we have to
\naccept it, is an inexplicable paradox unless we suppose either that there is
\nsomething more behind, a psychical power behind the veil of material process, or
\nelse that mind is only a process of life and life only a process of matter.
\nTherefore, finally, we have to suppose the physical theory capable of explaining
\nby purely material causes and a material constitution the mystery of the
\nemergence of life in matter and the equal mystery of the emergence of mind in
\nlife. It is here that<\/p>\n

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difficulties
\nbegin to crowd in which convict it, so far at least, of a hopeless inadequacy,
\nand the nature of that inadequacy, its crux, its stumbling-point leave room for
\njust that something behind, something psychical, a hidden soul process and for a
\nmore complex and less materialistic account of the truth of evolution.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n  <\/span>          
\n<\/span>The materialistic assumption – it is no more than a hypothetical
\nassumption, for it has never been proved – is that development of non-living
\nmatter results under certain unknown conditions in a phenomenon of unconscious
\nlife which is in its real nature only an action and reaction of material energy,
\nand the development of that again under certain unknown conditions in a
\nphenomenon of conscious mind which is again in its real nature only an action
\nand reaction of material energy. The thing in not proved, but that, it is
\nargued, does not matter; it only means that we do not yet know enough; but one
\nday we shall know, – the necessary physiological reaction called by us an
\nintuition or train of reasoning crowned by discovery having, I suppose, taken
\nplace in a properly constituted nervous body and the more richly convoluted
\nbrain of a Galileo of biology, – and then this great and simple truth will be
\nproved, like many other things once scoffed at by the shallow common sense of
\nhumanity. But the difficulty is that it seems incapable of proof. Even with
\nregard to life, which is by a great deal the lesser difficulty, the discovery of
\ncertain chemical or other physical and mechanical conditions under which life
\ncan be stimulated to appear, will prove no more than that these are the
\nfavourable or necessary conditions for the manifestation of life in body, – such
\nconditions there must be in the nature of things, – but not that life is not
\nanother new and higher power of the force of universal being. The connection of
\nlife responses with physical conditions and stimuli proves very clearly that
\nlife and matter are connected and that, as indeed they must do to coexist, the
\ntwo kinds of energy act on each other, – a very ancient knowledge; but it does
\nnot get rid of the fact that the physical response is accompanied by an element
\nwhich seems to be of the nature of a nervous excitement and an incipient or
\nsuppressed consciousness and is not the same thing as the companion physical
\nreaction.<\/p>\n

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When
\nwe come to mind, we see – how could it be otherwise in an embodied mind? – a
\nresponse, interaction, connection, a correspondence if you will; but no amount
\nof correspondence can show how a physical response can be converted into or
\namount to or by itself constitute in result a conscious operation, a perception,
\nemotion, thought-concept, or prove that love is chemical product or that Plato’s
\ntheory of ideas or Homer’s Iliad <\/i>or the cosmic consciousness of the Yogin
\nwas only a combination of physiological reactions or a complex of the changes of
\ngrey brain-matter or a flaming marvel of electrical discharges. It is not only
\nthat common sense and imagination boggle at these theories, – that objection may
\nbe disregarded, – not only that perception, reason and intuition have to be
\nthrust aside in favour of a forced and too extended inference, but that there is
\na gulf of difference here between the thing to be explained and the thing by
\nwhich it is sought to explain it which cannot be filled up, however much we may
\nadmit nervous connections and psycho-physical bridges. And if the physical
\nscientist points to a number of indicative facts and hopes one day to triumph
\nover these formidable difficulties, there is growing up on the other side an
\nincipient mass of psychical phenomena which are likely to drown his theory in
\nfathomless waters. The insuperability of these always evident objections is
\nbeginning to be more widely recognised, but since the past still holds
\nconsiderable sway, it is necessary to insist on them so that we may have the
\nclear right to go on to more liberal hypotheses which do not try prematurely to
\nreduce to a mechanical simplicity the problem of our being.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n


\n <\/span>          
\n<\/span>One of these is the ancient view that not only incidence of body and life
\non mind and soul, but incidence of mind and soul on body and life have to be
\nconsidered. Here, too, there is the evolutionary idea, but physical and life
\nevolution, even the growth of mind, are held to be only incidental to a soul
\nevolution of which Time is the course and the earth among many other worlds the
\ntheatre. In the old Indian version of this theory evolution, heredity and
\nrebirth are three companion processes of the universal unfolding, evolution the
\nprocessional aim, rebirth the main method, heredity one of the physical
\nconditions. That is a theory which provides at least the framework for a
\nharmonious<\/p>\n

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\n
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explanation
\nof all the complex elements of the problem. The scientific idea starts from
\nphysical being and makes the psychical a result and circumstance of body; this
\nother evolutionary idea starts from soul and sees in the physical being an
\ninstrumentation for the awakening to itself of a spirit absorbed in the universe
\nof Matter.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage
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Rebirth, Evolution, Heredity                TWO truths, discoveries with an enormous periphery of luminous result and of considerable essential magnitude, evolution and heredity, figure…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16","wpcat-5-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}