THE STUDENT WHO has determinedly and understandingly followed this thread of thought thus far will have raised himself above the primitive consolations of religion and the unsubstantial conjectures of imagination; he will have awakened from the blissful dreams of mysticism, the systematic self-deceptions of logic, and the profound slumber of verbalism; he will have sharpened his understanding and shaped his feelings to engage in the loftiest adventure to which any man can be called—the quest of final truth. He will be well prepared for the first trial of strength which must now be undergone. The problem of the world confronts him first because it is the problem of that which is most familiar and most visible. Whereas the problem of self seems nearer it is actually more remote, and although it seems simple it is really harder to solve than the riddle of this inescapable universe that surrounds him. Therefore it is right to start with an inquiry into the nature of this curious world into which we humans are suddenly thrust and from which we are slowly removed without anyone consulting us in the matter!
It has already been explained why the initial attitude of a philosopher is one of doubt. He must carry this attitude with him not only when seeking a satisfactory source of knowing truth but also to mental distances which may well stagger the complacency of the ordinary man. He must be bold enough to begin his inquiry by seeking to go behind his conventional knowledge of the universe itself!
The alarmed reader may, however, be immediately reassured. He is not asked to doubt the existence of this world which is the first fact that confronts his eyes every morning and the last one that he shuts his eyes on every night. He is asked to question the truth of the sights, sounds, and feels of which he is aware and the reality of the objects thus seen, heard or felt, all of which nobody but a lunatic would think of dismissing as nonexistent. These are two separate and distinct questions which demand different treatment; it will suffice therefore to consider in this chapter how far our knowledge is basically true and to reserve for the following chapter how far what is known is also basically real.
The student, like everybody else, experiences the “given” world all right, but has he ever paused to question the validity of this experience? If not, it is his business to do so now. For if he pushes such inquiry to its deepest point he will make the queerest and most startling of intellectual discoveries.
What was one of the few supreme events in the scientific world during our generation? What revolutionary principle was then established which threw sensational new light on old problems? Without a doubt Albert Einstein’s formulation of the Theory of Relativity not only summed up two thousand years of mathematical research and passed in review three hundred years of physical research, but it opened new pathways and expanded enormous vistas for pioneer thinkers. The reasoned proof of this complicated conclusion is filled with formulas which are beyond the brain of the average layman, nor can the doctrine itself be fully explained except in abstruse mathematical equations. Einstein himself confessed once, when asked to put it in a few understandable words, that it would take him three days to give a short definition! However, without losing ourselves in a difficult tangle of complex technical symbols and such indigestible intellectual foods as the calculus of variations and the theory of invariants, we may and must simplify and illustrate certain aspects of Einstein’s hypothesis of special interest to philosophers. That he himself looks somewhat askance at philosophy is a natural if regrettable consequence of the prejudice born of his scientific specialism; but it also arises because he confounds mere speculation with verified philosophy, a misconception for which some so-called philosophers and many half-philosophers are themselves responsible. In his abhorrence of metaphysics he has sought to confine his thought upon his work within well-defined limits, but he could never have evolved his hypothesis by mere experiment alone, and to the extent that he indulged in rigorous reflection he was willy-nilly an unconscious philosopher. It is impossible for the physicist to contemplate the question of relativity with the thoroughness such an important principle deserves without rising into ultimate questions and hence without turning himself for the time into a member of the philosophic fraternity. But Einstein is a mathematician and a physicist and wishes to keep strictly to his trade. Hence he refuses to consider the further implications of his work, i.e., he refuses to philosophize. But all his disciples are not so limited. Eddington and Whitehead have ventured to follow up the consequences of carrying his doctrine to realms where thought runs deeper, the first in philosophical psychology and the second in philosophical logic, both regions where the master will not venture. But only in the ancient Asiatic thought is the path of analysis which both have begun to travel been followed to its fullest extent.
We need not let the highly mathematic character of Einstein’s calculations depress us or frighten us away from the hypothesis itself. For mathematics is only a kind of logical shorthand whose symbols yield conclusions from given data with a quickness unknown to logic. It abbreviates syllogistic procedure by the substitution of formulas and equations. The conceptual essence of Einstein’s discovery was known to the vanished sages of Hindustan, who were not, however, like Einstein, trained mathematicians, while Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle realized its profound importance. The Jain thinkers of India formulated a similar philosophic doctrine, Syadvada, which resembles Relativism, more than two thousand years before Einstein formulated his scientific doctrine. Thus the Indian and Greek thinkers anticipated a principle which was not to be experimentally tested and finally proved till many centuries had passed away. What Einstein really did was to corroborate it scientifically, to place it on a foundation of original mathematical observation and experimental proof by illustrating its practical application to a special sphere. He formulated relativity in order to fit the hypotheses of physics to observed data. He made science responsible for the testing and verification of a principle which had hitherto lived precariously either among the arguable speculations of ignored metaphysicians or amidst the antique doctrines of unknown aliens. And it was the growth of such technological sciences as optics and electrodynamics that made his experimental work, in the investigation of the sun’s gravitational influence on light rays, for instance, at all possible. Hence this proof could not have been arrived at earlier in history than it was!1
Relativity has taken the unalterable fixity out of time and turned it into a variable dimension. Put in plainer language, time has no particular meaning that is always fixed and the same for all human beings. Those who would limit it to their measurement of clocks or of the revolutions of starry bodies are merely airing a prejudice. For the sense of time is not an absolute actuality but an interpretation of both clock and star made by a conscious being. It is the way sensations arrange themselves in the mind. There is no such thing as an absolute measure of time. Close analysis will reveal that all our measurements based on planetary revolutions are ultimately nothing else than our relative impressions. Einstein began to point this out, but he did so without realizing its fullest consequences.
The doctrine teaches that movement merely means the positional change of relation between one thing and another, and therefore physical change, as movement, is never absolute but always relative. Once we admit that standards of time and space measurement may vary, then we have to abandon our conventional ideas of the sciences of physics, geometry, and astronomy. Astronomy talks glibly of the constellations of “fixed” stars. Yet this is a relative term only, for without doubt they too are hurrying through space when seen by somebody who is situated on what is to him a point of comparative rest. We treat the Pole Star as if it were always at rest, yet the phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes proves that it too is a moving body. Therefore our use of the word “fixed” is quite arbitrary. The fixed stars are thus named not because we really know that they remain stationary in space but because astronomy has not yet been able to devise instruments which will bring them close enough to our perception conclusively to detect any movement in them. When Einstein said that there was no position in the universe which was absolutely at rest, and therefore no position from which the shape and measurement of an object could be ascertained and hold good under all other conditions of observation, he said in effect that science was impotent to come to a final calculation about the world.
We make our space-time measurements of position and motion in relation to some standard which we assume is permanent, unalterable, and immutable; in short, ever at rest. But Einstein has convincingly demonstrated that there is nothing in the universe to which we can finally apply the description of “rest.” For aught we know it may be moving around a second thing also supposed to be at rest. How can we know that anything is perpetually at rest and never moving when our range of perception is so limited? We habitually judge by plausible outer appearances, by what the limited five senses tell us, and commonly but ignorantly take solid stones for matter at rest. Yet the truth is plainly revealed by modern physical investigation into the wonderful world of atoms and molecules. For the whole of stationary matter is built up out of electrons and protons and neutrons which are incessantly moving like swarms of restless bees. We must revise our simple notion of the world.
If we sit for some time in a running train watching the green landscape slide past the glazed windows our eyes become accustomed to the motion and take it to be a normal condition. If the train stops there is a temporary illusion that the landscape is moving forward or that the train is moving backward. In certain relations to the universe all mankind is like the passenger in the train.
A man who is walking along a bend in the railroad will not notice, if he continually keeps his eyes directed toward his feet, that the very track he is passing over is curved. It will appear quite straight to him. It is only when he lifts his eyes, looks a little distance ahead, and thus alters his perspective that he will see that the rails are really curved. The same object therefore looks different from a different perspective. How much of our worldview would be altered if we could alter our perspective?
A caravan of five hundred camels resting in a valley appears to an observer who is standing on a precipice overhead to be wholly at rest. But this holds good only of the customary ideas of space belonging to prerelativity physics, and hence ignores the fact that the earth is travelling around the sun and carrying the caravan on its movement too. The observer, being quite unable to detect this motion, unconsciously deceives himself into the belief that what is true from his standpoint is also true from every other standpoint within the universe. This is obviously incorrect, for a second observer would certainly witness the caravan’s passage through space were it possible to overcome the practical difficulties of placing him on the sun, and were he to survive the ordeal, devise and be provided with an optical instrument adequate to the purpose. All that the first observer is entitled to say is that the camels are at rest relative to the earth; more he may not say with truth unless he is able to shift his point of vantage. Yet neither observer is wholly right nor wholly wrong. The fact is, as Einstein points out, each moving body possesses its own standard of time and its own system of space with which an observer will always be in relation. He will not know ordinarily that the other standards and systems may differ from his and that if he persists in sticking to the latter he will be unable to explain the presence of utterly incomprehensible and completely irrational factors in the universe.
These statements are the logical consequence of our knowledge that the earth revolves round the sun. But the movement of any planet can only be measured and described by mutual comparison with something else that is quite still, say with the totality of fixed stars. Hence relativity teaches that we can know only the relations between bodies in space and that the description of them is only comparative. We can only compare one thing with another. We are compelled to deal in dualities. For our conception of space is meaningless without a given standard of reference.2
If somehow we were so closed in that it was impossible to see the other stars and planets in the sky we could not know that our earth was moving forward through space. We would feel sure that it was fixed immovably in the firmament. For we would possess no standard of reference. Thus motion is quite relational.
The earth is dynamically working its way through space around the sun at the enormous velocity of nearly 67,000 miles an hour, yet nobody feels the slightest pulse of this movement; everybody upon it, on the contrary, feels that the earth is standing perfectly still!
We glibly use the word “here.” Yet even while we point out the spot so designated the earth has whirled at a gigantic speed through space, taking the spot with it, so that in a few minutes the latter is many miles distant from where it was before. The “here” becomes therefore a relative term, relational to some point or person on the earth but meaningless when applied to space. Moreover, the earth turns on itself and then revolves around the sun. But the latter is itself moving relative to the Milky Way, and although it is a matter at present beyond our measurement the Milky Way may most probably be speeding through space too. When all these movements are taken into account we must realize that we can form no probable estimate of how far the same spot has really shifted in the course of these few minutes. Nor could any experiment ever detect the speed with which it is really moving through space, for there is no body that is absolutely at rest with which its movement could be compared. We can only determine its relative place and relative rate of movement. And this will be the result wherever we station ourselves.
Thus we arrive again at the basis of Einstein’s doctrine, which is that space has no ultimate standard of measurement in itself and that it is not the same under all circumstances. Space in the ultimate analysis does not possess the properties implied by Euclid in his postulates and axioms. Such is the conclusion of relativity. But long before Einstein, both Zeno and Pythagoras in Greece and several sages in India had found the contradictions which inhere in the idea that space has a characteristic existence, an unalterable fixity of its own. They saw that from one point of view it is measurable, purely relational, and finite, but from another it is quite immeasurable and infinite in every direction. From the first we may limit it to its parts, which can easily be marked out from the other parts in the extension occupied by physical objects, but which from the second viewpoint have no independent existence separated from the whole, and we can impose no limits on its indefinite continuance. For when we try to put all its parts together we can never arrive at an aggregate which is the whole of space; whatever we think of as being the whole will always have some more space extending beyond it, and so on in an endless regress. Thus if you think of space as a lesser part you deny its existence as a whole. If both views cancel each other out in this way, then we must conclude that space is more a subjective idea than an objective element.
Moreover, if we apply some of the valuable lessons learnt in the sixth chapter to certain words which are used whenever the absolute existence of space is taken for granted, the words here and there, a curious situation has to be faced. For space is supposed to be that in which something exists or that in which the world-order differentiates itself.
Now think of a point here upon this white sheet of paper. Geometry defines a point as being a position without magnitude. It has no dimension at all. This means that a point has nothing inside it and has no place for anything to be put inside it. Carry this analysis still further and you will see that the point is not spatial at all and therefore space, as represented by its “here,” both is and is not, contradictions which thus again cancel themselves out.
Think again of something that is out “there” in space, say the distant continent of Australia. That means it is “not here.” But by “here” you may imply here in this city, or here in this country, or here in this continent; or you may widen its embrace to the whole of this world. You can go no farther, because you can no longer have a special standpoint whereby one place can be distinguished from another. The narrowness of attention which restricts your definition of “here” will then be abolished. But in going so far you have included Australia in your “here.” Thus “here” and “there” contradict each other, and with that the very notion of space as a separate reality which rests upon them collapses altogether.
What becomes of our ordinary notion of space when radioactive investigation tells us that the sharp point of the sharpest needle made is a minute world where millions of moving bodies incessantly circulate without ever touching each other?
Those who object to the analysis of such paradoxes as mere word-quibbling do not understand the important role played by words in secretly constructing our thought, nor do they comprehend that semantic problems are really logical ones, and quite often they are even epistemological ones. And they do not understand that the meaning of a thing is inseparable from what we ourselves think it to be; it is not only what some dictionary prints concerning it. And they do not understand that the hidden working of the mind in the viewing of the world is something quite other than they usually suppose it to be.
Relativity shows at least that we have got to alter our inherited habits of thinking about the world. Space and time demand examination because they enter into every conception of the external world. They are the forms in which our experience is given us. A complete understanding of this world completely involves them too. Our objective life on earth obviously moves within the conditions imposed upon it by space and time; all our experience is indeed inseparable from them. All measurable bodies and all living creatures are presented to our senses as existing spatially or temporally and we cannot help representing the entire universe to ourselves within a specific frame of space and time. We cannot think of the myriad facts and manifold events of nature without thinking of them as filling a position somewhere in space and somewhen in time. But the meaning of the latter is always relative and changes with changing circumstances. Therefore these phenomena of nature can themselves only be thought of relatively. If we change our frame we shall change familiar characteristics of our universe too. It will lose its fundamental fixity, its unalterable absoluteness. There can be no such thing as unique spatial relation or unchangeable time observation. When we look more deeply into space it tends to change its character from what appears to be an outward fact to what is really an inward mental factor. We must, in short, begin to mentalize space and spatialize mind. So far from being a property of the external world, space begins to appear as a mysterious subjective element which conditions our perception of the entire external world.
But this view abandons the old conceptions of physics. It is in line with Einstein’s mathematical deductions which have made the mass of a body variable. The old idea of matter was that its most prominent and most tangible characteristic—technically termed mass—was also its most enduring one. This is true of the low rates of movement of everyday objects, but it is no longer true of those beyond ordinary experience where extremely high rates of movement prevail, for Einstein has forced science to discard the old belief inasmuch as he has proved that the mass of matter may vary. Thus physical objects become transformed into fields of electrical force, of pure energy assuming forms dictated by velocity. The belief in a separate something, a solid material substance, has been seriously affected. Hitherto we could not speak of matter apart from the space it occupied, whereas we can speak of energy with far less need to put it into space.
This new notion that energy has mass and that the mass of a material body can change proportionately above certain rates of movement renders the material character of a thing no longer its cardinal one. The imagination cannot here easily catch up with reason, but that must not be taken as an excuse for allowing the former to obstruct the latter. The new scientific view must necessarily offend common sense in thus destroying the static nature of an object. It is impossible for the mind to present to itself in any adequate imagery the idea of how relativity strangely affects the mass of our material universe. We must be content to know, without knowing how.
The strange light which relativity has thrown on our beliefs about space is quite similar to that which it has cast on our beliefs about time. Our confidence in dating a single event is shattered when we learn that it will be seen at different times by two observers who are placed on bodies with different rates of movement; we start in surprise on hearing that two occurrences which are simultaneous in occurrence for one witness will appear to have a lapse of duration between them for the other.
The earth does not spin so fast through space as it did during the earlier days of its hot youth and consequently the length of our day is more than double what it then was!
Such is the relativity of time that the slow turtle which lives for a century may not feel that it has endured more than the swift insect which appears, grows, mates, and dies in a single week, for it determines its experience from a different standpoint. The point is how many sensations pass through the mind: if the number is equal in both cases then years do not count. Whoever has experimented with certain drugs knows that one consequence will be the unfoldment of an abnormal sense of time so that a simple act like lifting a hand will vividly take a half hour to perform in consciousness, yet to a watching person it is but the deed of a moment. Some who have escaped death from drowning by a hairsbreadth report that during the brief period preceding unconsciousness the history of their life flashed like lightning before their mind’s eye.
We fall asleep only apparently to awake again soon after in dream, but we know later that we actually awoke only next morning. We feel as much awake during dream as during the day. Yet in five minutes of dream time we complete a journey that takes three weeks of waking time. We live in dream through a long sequence of dramatic events, often highly detailed, and hours or days seem to have passed in the experience, but inquiry reveals that the whole series of events has occupied only a fraction of a minute! Thus experience reveals the strange fluctuations of our sense of time when we approach the same fact from different points of view.
A man differently situated, say on the planet of Venus, would necessarily have a different time-sense from ours. The notion that twenty-four hours will be twenty-four hours always under all conditions and in all places is not correct. Such a disclaimer may give a deep shock to our most familiar habits of thought. Yet consider the case of a young man who has spent three or four hours with an ardently loved sweetheart. The period will seem to him to be shortened to less than a single hour. Consider as contrast the case of an invalid who has accidentally fallen on a hot stove, and is unable to lift himself up quickly! To him each intensified second will seem as long as an hour! Each man has his individual time perception, as such abnormal instances make clear, and it is illusory to believe that it is any other than his own unique experience. He sees events in the perspective of his own special standpoint, because time itself is only a relation. We never really measure time itself. Even clock time is only a measurement of a motion in space, i.e., a relation between two things.
We are compelled by nature to see everything as existent in space and time. Time is immutably presupposed in the thinking process. Space is a necessary condition of the perceiving process. We can never separate a single thing from them. Yet we never see space and time themselves! We get no direct sense-impression of pure space or pure time. We cannot clothe the bare idea of space in any mental image; we can only think of a thing occupying distance, extension; hence we know space only as a property of things and time as a property of movement.
The ordinary way is to regard time as being like a flowing stream or like a constant succession of ticked-off moments. This is perfectly natural, for the human mind cannot even imagine a time which is devoid of the passage of happenings or in which no “before,” “now,” and “after” of events exist. It is in time that one thought follows another as it is in time that events occur. Can you form any idea of time at all unless you conceive it in beginnings and endings or with breaks and changes? But unfortunately this leads us into an illusion. For we suppose time to be divided into moments, but try to get precise hold of them and they vanish. Analysis discovers no separate parts, no independent moments; there is no interval between present and past. How can anyone distinguish when the present moment begins or when it ends? Try to find the recognizable point of separation between the past and the future, between “before” and “after.” Whatever you take as such a point will no longer remain such the moment you have distinguished it. Yet what is the present moment except such a hypothetical point? It is one of the illusions of time that we perpetually believe ourselves to be living in the events of the present time when no such division really exists. Whether it be a single second or one-thousandth of a second or one-millionth of a second later, the so-called present moment will already have lapsed into the so-called past. Our glib talk of the present, past, and future phases of time is talk of something which nobody can determine and of which nobody can form an appreciable idea that will be correct enough to defy all analysis. What then becomes of our whole notion of time when no notion can be formed of its separate constituents? Thus what seemed to be a reality seems more likely to be to some extent at least an idea harboured by our minds, i.e., the movement of time is largely within ourselves.
Observe anything that grows, a grass seed for example. Can you state at what precise moment the seed becomes a plant? This is quite impossible. Then where is that moment when the seed was no longer a seed but a plant? If it exists anywhere, it must be in your mind or imagination. Thus the time-changes are really your own experiences. Moments do not really exist. Time is not an addition of nonexistences. Add nought to nought and the total sum is still nought; therefore time is not an independent reality but an abstraction which is made from reality. Time, like space, is an abstraction. But when an abstraction is taken to be something real it contradicts itself.
When we push our reasoning still farther we have to admit that our sense of time may contract just as our sense of space may enlarge, and that when we measure the flight of time the mind somehow and to some degree creates it. Relativity teaches that the forms which time takes in experience are never final. They are aspects which may alter in the wildest manner. Yet there is one inseparable element which persists through all their alterations and which unifies and holds them all. And that is the factor of mind.
All this shows that time is not the simple thing we take it to be but is actually pregnant with mystery. “Mankind perishes speedily by thinking time real. The little time I spend in asking, ‘Is there time at all?’ has revealed to me the perfect Peace, the very Deity Himself,” was the observation of Tirumular, a medieval writer in the Tamil language. And still more sagely he asked the question: “Do you not know that time vanishes when its origin is sought for? What then is the use of limiting yourself to it?”
It would be a great error to imagine that any attempt is being made to deny that man has any sense of time. Nothing of the kind need be denied. He certainly feels the passage of time and feels its reality strongly. The attempt made here is to cast a little light upon its nature. The hidden source of this feeling of its reality will become apparent as this course unfolds.
The value of Einstein’s work in proving the truth of relativity by physical facts instead of metaphysical fancies is immense. What he has unconsciously achieved has been a critique of knowledge albeit he has limited his inquiry to scientific methods of measurement. The entire principle of relativity raises a gigantic question mark against all our experience of the universe and hence against all our definitions of knowledge. What do we really know? The world is no longer a hard fact but a harder problem.
Relativity is a fundamental law which underlies all physical events, all objects in nature. Nothing is known that is not known in relation to other things. Hence the saying of Lotze, that to exist is to stand in relation. The idea that there are any closed systems in the universe disappears under the searching light of relativity. Each is only a tentative stage in the approach to truth and never the final step. The universe requires constant reinterpretation.
There may be as many relative truths in the physical world as there are possible positions or ways of looking at a thing. This is the anthropocentric flaw which vitiates ordinary knowledge. There may be as many views of truth in the world of thought as there are human beings. Such pluralistic and protean views are dependent on human limitations and are therefore always conditional and often liable to alter. Each is but an aspect, none is the entire truth. The mid-Victorian materialism, for instance, is now refuted by several leading scientists as vigorously as their predecessors had maintained it.
Here is our red signal of warning. An observation may be quite true when it is the consequence of fixing our attention on any particular point of view in the realm where relativity reigns and yet it may not be the truth in itself. The two are different.
All these factors are to be looked upon as men’s individual and incomplete views because they are dependent on the flexibility of human taste, the kinds of human temperament, the grades of human knowledge or the degrees of its capacity. This is why we see such wide differences of opinion, such strange conflict of experience, and so many varieties of belief, outlook, custom, and conclusion. Therefore these departments are called “relative truths.” So wide is the possible range of the individual views arising out of such dependence on relative truth that there can be no limit to their number. Each department, like biology or pharmacology, for instance, possesses its own particular view of life or deals with some fragment of it, but none possesses a view which is common to all, just as none deals with the totality of existence.
When the apparition of relativity appeared on the threshold of science it frightened the timid. Well might they fear to push its logical consequence to its farthest end. This they still hesitate to do, so philosophy must take up the task for them. From its lofty standpoint, which, it must be pointed out, is that of ultimate truth and not of practical value, all nonphilosophic knowledge, whether scientific or otherwise, stands on treacherous territory. None of its conclusions are or can ever be final. All depend on the parochial standpoint of observers on our insignificant planet, a mere speck among millions of other stars in space. All its results may be modified when with additional knowledge further standpoints become available. It may hope to discover distortions of the final reality by its present methods, but never reality itself. It moves ever from one provisional tenet to another.
We may therefore well become bewildered as to the nature of the perplexing world in which we live. It is as paradoxical as any that could be conceived. It is a world where reason does violence to experience and where fact offers denial to thought. All human intellectual knowledge suffers from being entirely relative and in the end is chasing its own tail. It travels in a circle from which escape seems impossible. It would seem that we can never get at the final truth of the universe, and that we are captives perpetually doomed to receive only the illusion of fresh knowledge but never the knowledge itself.
Truth has become a myth. Finality is a fiction. It merely means one out of countless possible views. Every outlook may thus receive its justification. No scientific observation may now be declared correct for all time and for all observation. No scientific theory exists but is incurably tainted with this all-pervasive relativism. These different and divergent appearances of one and the same thing when the observers or standpoints are themselves different may well make us despair at ever knowing what is the truth about the world. For men will constantly change their intellectual position and shift to newer notions, only to lose them again next time. Everything thus becomes in the last analysis either a fleeting appearance or an insignificant illusion! Nothing may make pretension to finality.
It means that we get only fragmentary views of the world and never see the world as a whole. It means that we get only an endless supersession of one doctrine by another. It means that the mind forever displaces one set of ideas by another. It means that the fact itself depends on the standpoint from which we approach it. What is appropriate to one standpoint will not suit another. For we get at aspects, not at independent entities. The sight of one aspect excludes all the others. There is no finality in metaphysics also because it equally with science is afflicted by the stubborn and persistent malady of relativity. The attempt to attain an irrevocable system of explanation has proved futile. In short, the picture of the world which we possess or which science possesses is not the final one.
In this world of relativism where all views are both false and true, where what can be affirmed from one standpoint can also be denied from another, there seems to be no final meaning. Those Indian seekers who perceived the inevitability of this consequence became dissatisfied. They wanted to know whether it is possible to arrive at a view which would explain all the facts and not only some of them. So the cardinal question again forced itself upon them. They sought an answer, like Pontius Pilate, to their supreme query, “What is truth? Can we get at the last word of truth in its integrity?” By this they meant something that was not so imperfect, that was no less universally valid for all men as that the addition of one plus two results in three. Nobody in any part of the world or in any century has yet questioned this arithmetical result. Such an unvarying principle of truth was sought by them. This they called the ultimate truth. Finally they found a satisfactory answer and then the hidden teaching was formulated. They proved that it was all a matter of standpoint, of climbing sufficiently high until the summit of all possible peaks was reached. They urged that the failure to find any absolute characteristic in the materials of our knowledge of the universe need not frighten us into despair. It should stimulate us to listen to the voice of the hidden philosophy which explicitly says that a fresh approach to the problem should be sought for and may be found.
Euclid showed that parallel lines never meet; Einstein showed that they may. Yet both may be considered as right provided we remember that they differ according to the different standpoints taken. The inhabitant of another planet using a watch marked in exactly the same manner as our watches would apparently measure time in the same way, but actually the similarity would be fictitious. His day might be longer or shorter than ours, therefore his three o’clock might not be equivalent to ours. For the standards of spatial reference would be different and the time systems would necessarily differ too. The difference of standpoint will always be fatal to uniformity of observation; the appearance of what the earthman sees cannot be separated from his own position in space. The shape of a thing, the position it occupies and the place in time and space which it possesses are after all appearances presented differently to different observers. This is the implication of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
The need of taking fresh standpoints to secure expanded outlooks is thus an essential and important lesson of relativity. The relativity principle does not put Newton in the wrong nor make it necessary to discard old measurements. It draws a line of limitation around every kind of result and within each such system of reference the old measurement and the Newtonian notions hold good. It shows that we must not expect them to be always applicable, because they are only relative to a particular standpoint.
One standpoint which is higher than another will reveal a wider horizon. Even the shallowest experience of life shows that many things are not what they seem at first sight, that the naive immediate impressions of them prove to be insufficient when we move to a deeper inquiry into them. It is the first lesson of philosophy and the last lesson of experience. It is the difference between what actually is and what only appears to be, between what is substantial and what seems to be substantial; we meet this contradiction of experience everywhere. It is to be found in human society as well as in planetary processes. The course, size, and distance of a starry body do not yield to the gaze, look at it as long as we will. We must put forth intellectual effort, take instruction from astronomy, and then only can we wrest its secret from the seen. If everything revealed its whole nature to first uncorrected impression, science would never be needed and philosophy would never have to fatigue itself by following on the heels of science. The wide discrepancy between experience and the truth of experience compels us to press onward beyond the plausible fact to challenging reflection upon the fact.
To stick always to a single position and take things from that position only because it is troublesome to find a fresh one or because everybody else sticks to that position is ultimately unsafe and philosophically unwise. From what point of view are we seeking truth? On what point of vantage do we stand when gazing at what we deem truth? For all that will determine both what we see and how far what we see is true. The meaning of what we believe to be truth and the value of a judgment are entirely conditioned by the standpoint we take up. Thus the possibility of ascertaining more truth in the scientific sphere increases by the mere upward shifting of standpoint. Philosophy absorbs this lesson and then carries it still further, for it says: let us therefore rise to the highest possible, the ultimate standpoint, where there is no relativity, and make our final conclusions about the world only then. It points out that we cannot escape from the need of a double viewpoint, the first being inclusive of all possible and relative positions embraced by ordinary practical life and experimental science, the second being the remote, austere and unique one of purely universal reason free from all relativity. For the view which will be obtained from the latter will be absolutely independent of those personal human characteristics which render all results partial and relative. They may be most useful for immediate and practical purposes, but they cannot serve the more exacting quest of final truth.
A mind that tires easily will, at the sight of unaccustomed paths, be content with the first and most immediate standpoint, that of practical utility, taking things just as they are perceived by the senses, whereas one that is well imbued with the love of truth will exert itself to rise above first appearances or the homely surface of things and reach their explanation by taking up a critical and inquiring position. This is what the scientist does. But he stops there. Hence the plaint of hidden philosophy. It welcomes the forward march of the scientist. It is not, like religion, afraid of him. Only it would urge him to rest at nothing short of a position from which he can affirm the ultimate truth or uncontradictable judgment. Such a position can belong only to the rigorous activity of pure reason put on its widest stretch, and is not to be disclosed by physical observation or laboratory experiment.
The primitive standpoint is a necessity of day-to-day living. It may prove quite successful for practical as opposed to theoretical purposes and thus require no other sanction from the average man. It is generally based on the crude and naive reports of the five senses; the fact of these reports is there and everybody must accept it. The simpleton is satisfied with the face value of his fact and in his mental poverty refuses to go behind the actual experience, but both scientist and philosopher will accept it only tentatively and then proceed to question it for its meaning. Both perceive that it is essential to pass in thought beyond immediate experience into wider and deeper inquiry into the way in which the fact came into being. If popular thought were always right thought, instruction would not be required; if immediate impressions were sufficient to know the whole truth about anything, education would not be called in to correct them; and if men naturally perceived the meaning of the universe and of their own lives the work of philosophy would be quite superfluous. Men are, in fact, born in original and native error; they win through to sound knowledge only by laboriously rectifying their common and spontaneous judgments. Yet popular abhorrence of mental effort is usually content with the easier view, ridden with numerous fallacies though it be, and often suspicious of the philosopher’s, although the latter’s represents the long struggle and final victory of reason.
Thus we arrive at the conclusion that there will always be two possible ways of looking at the world. The first standpoint is multiple and may include innumerable degrees of what is believed to be real or true, but it is always involved in what is technically called in logic the fallacy of simplicity. It may be described as being primitive, inferior, relative, ordinary, simple, practical, common sense, empirical, immediate, partial, finite, phenomenal, local, ignorant, and obvious. The second viewpoint may be described as being absolute, ultimate, philosophic, unified, highest, noumenal, reflective, universal, true, full, unique, superior, final, and hidden.
We have already seen how science offends the commonsense standpoint. Then how much more will the latter be offended by whatever takes up a stand which is higher even than that of science? This higher view is not only unquestionably necessary but happily possible. Philosophy alone provides it because it alone climbs to the very summit and refuses to limit itself to “compartmentalism,” but surveys the whole of existence, including the surveying mind itself. Philosophy seeks to fill the lack created through the compartmentalism of practical life and scientific research by taking the utmost care that no aspect of mental and material existence—however insignificant it be regarded by others—shall be omitted from its wide purview and unique coordination.
Science can never complete its task alone. Its adventure is a grand one but it can come to no terminus. When it gets weary of this circle-travelling it shall seek for respite; not by weakening into the soothing arms of dogmatism but by rising into the arctic air of philosophy shall it find enduring peace. This vicious round of relativity has no outlet unless science has recourse to the help of the philosophic view. Two separate standpoints thus arise and bifurcate our view of nature. There can be only one ultimate truth and one final standpoint whose character will be both unalterable and invulnerable. The philosopher seeks to discover them and is satisfied with nothing less. The concept of the world which arises out of the utmost pure reflection is different from that which arises out of the first sensual impression. We must distinguish sharply between them. For the first is perfect while the second is premature. The first standpoint is that of the universe itself, the second is that of man. The first sees from the viewpoint of the whole universe and not merely from that of the knowledge of any particular man, hence it is absolute and true, whereas the second sees only anthropocentrically, hence always relatively.
The changeover from the lower to the higher standpoint taken by the hidden teaching can come only after one climbs up the scaffolding of long experience of life or after one struggles across the river of deep reflection about it. For it is the change from first love to final mating. It is often heralded when circumstances present hard problems which conflict with preconceived beliefs and perplex the unenslaved mind. This evokes the dark wraith of doubt, which in its turn calls for further and deeper investigation. But investigation soon causes pointed questions to arise. Knowledge resulting from adoption of the higher standpoint can alone proffer a satisfactory answer to these questions because it alone deals in ultimates, whereas all other standpoints offer answers which may serve for the moment, which are useful pragmatic working views for a time, but they too are bound to fail one later under the pressure of hard facts. History proves how governments, religions, theories, and institutions break down in the end, despite their onetime invincibility. For there is no permanent settlement except in ultimate truth. It is far less important to travel from Canada to Cape Town than to travel from the primitive point of view to the philosophic.
Thus philosophy alone can become the sole apex at which all lines of the pyramid of knowledge and action must meet. Its deliverances are adamantine, they may be ratified by time but not rectified by it.
The unique virtue and incomparable value of such an attitude displays itself in the daring claim which the hidden philosophy alone ventures to make, viz., that it arrives at completeness of results, uncontradictability of truth and the verified principle underlying all phases of experience and knowledge which, when attained, makes everything else understood. This claim must be tested, however, like all others, and the hidden philosophy will fearlessly and gladly submit to every imaginable test because having been always its own severest critic it is conscious of having reached a basis as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. If everywhere that which passes for philosophy differs with the philosophers themselves, nowhere can the genuine philosophy vary in essential principles by one iota from what it always has been and always must be.
Thus in our quest we must learn to apply the proper standpoint. Do we want the last word in truth? Then we must approach the world from the philosophic position. Do we want a practical working view? Then we may take the limited and lower view. But whatever we do we ought not to confuse our categories. For the penalty will be distortion of truth and inability to find a working rule. The philosophical viewpoint must be kept distinct and separate from the practical, otherwise we shall get a blurred and muddled outlook, says the hidden doctrine.
Moreover, it must not be thought that to take this higher view is to destroy the lower one. The antithesis between them belongs to the world of elementary thought and does not dislocate the springs of everyday action. They can be coordinated according to individual circumstances. The two viewpoints can be distinguished but cannot be separated, cannot be divorced. We may study one apart from the other, but in doing so we make a mere abstraction of both, whereas the real is the whole. They are not to be taken as rigid divisions but as necessary distinctions. Nobody can be negligent of the first without ceasing to be a human being, while nobody can be negligent of the second without condemning himself to remain outside the realm of truth. Nobody can dispense with the more primitive outlook because practical life has to be based on belief to a larger extent than on truth. We have to take our cook on trust, for instance, for there is no time to investigate or supervise every minor detail of the cooking every day. This means that we must be content never to know the truth about it, never to prove that everything is as it purports to be. Active life would be impossible if we had to wait and collect all the facts before every single deed or movement, so we are compelled to take much or most of it on appearance value. Application of the higher standpoint to every petty concern of the day is neither desirable nor necessary. It would make every ordinary business a nuisance. It would be as foolish and as impossible as the attempt to apply the canons of common sense to the questions of pure philosophy. Thus it is enough that we keep perpetually present in knowledge the roundness of our earth and not demand that sight and touch should also tell us of it. It is enough that the philosopher remain a sensible human being, so long as he holds firmly to the principles that generalize the truth behind all the changing scenes of his daily diorama.
Such a method, however, as the practical one is alone too defective for philosophy, which must thoroughly test every inch of its forward progress. When man begins to think of what life means and what the world means he must leave the little compromises which make up popular existence and ascend to Himalayan mental altitudes. When he philosophizes let him be done with all such compromises, all easy concessions to the infirmities of our adolescent race, and let him be loyal to his mistress.
The movement of thought within both stages is inescapable. They are complementary. We have to coordinate them. But to confuse or to compromise the two standpoints is to mix up the issues of life and thought. From its unique standpoint philosophy seeks to provide the final and consistent explanation of everything that exists, yet it does not deny the value of the work accomplished by those who are confined to the ordinary standpoint alone nor the experience of those who can find truth only in what they see. But it shows up the purely relational character of such work, experience, judgment, and knowledge as being quite inadequate to a comprehensive view of life which omits nothing from its survey.
Thus we can adjust the claims of practical life with the claims of philosophical truth and harmonize all knowledge. For experience, science is the starting point of genuine philosophy. When it can summon up sufficient courage to make the leap, when the revelation of relativity forces it to confess it can never alone attain certitude, it will elevate itself to the mantled dignity of philosophy. It need not abandon the pursuit of practical achievements if it does this, for the two can and should be coordinated. And thus it must labour amid the turmoil of earthly strife while holding to the inner silence of unearthly being; it must reconcile the limitations that surround man on every side with the freedom that dwells deep within him; it must dissolve the false opposition between the practical and the philosophical and take them up into a higher unity. For whereas the first standpoint provides views of truth, the final provides truth itself! The latter rests on the twofold basis of reason and experience. It is impregnable because it carries both to an undreamed-of extent.
Those who graduate from the relativity of thought in the first view to the rigidity of certitude in the other undergo the supreme revolution of the human mind. The new position becomes crucial for their thought about the universe and for their attitude toward their fellow men. When such reflection is carried to its utmost degree, which demands as much patience as courage, the relativity of all their psychological knowledge will emerge. This principle, applied in its proper place at the very opening of the second volume which shall complete this work, will act like a surgical operation for cataract on a blind man. Then will it be possible to arrive at staggering results which are unique in the history of world knowledge, and which reveal an unsuspected world of being wherein the loftiest hopes of the human race can find fulfilment as its grandest intuitions gain perfect realization.
It was pointed out in the opening pages of this book that recent inventions were compelling mankind to widen its space sense and expand its time sense. Some further important implications of this development may now be stated. Do we realize that man came to the new notion that the earth was round through expanding his space sense? When medieval navigators made longer journeys and finally circled the globe, when astronomers devised superior instruments and became aware of more distant stars, the belief that the earth was flat became ludicrous and untenable. Copernicus introduced the idea of relativity of direction to European thought. When the medieval flat-earth notion prevailed there was only one absolute and fixed worldview possible. When the rotating-earth notion triumphed, the discovery of Copernicus changed the direction of European thinking and set forces going which gradually revolutionized its culture. The hypothesis of relativity was born out of investigation in a spatial field of a vastness that was beyond precedent in such experiments. This enabled Einstein to find that rays of light which are apparently straight are actually curved and that a straight line, if drawn far enough, would turn out to be a curve! Straight lines seem straight only because we do not follow light for a course of millions of miles and during a sufficiently long period of time. Could we but do so we should find them curved. But such a discovery is subversive of all the axioms of Euclid, of all the geometry that had been based on those axioms, of all the old concepts of fixed material bodies arranged in space according to the old Euclidean laws. Euclid’s geometry worked well provided it was applied only to limited portions of the universe. But when a vaster field was brought into consideration it became unsatisfactory and non-Euclidean systems such as Riemann’s were found more adequate to the measurement of the world. Here again the expanding space sense has revolutionized even the character of mathematics. If it has demanded the giving up of limited notions it has offered more comprehensive and more generalized explanations of physical phenomena in their place.
The expansion of the time sense of mankind is equally important to thought and culture and has shown itself in various ways. Men do not get giddy nowadays at this striking change, as they would surely have done five hundred years ago. The gramophone brings to their ears a voice which spoke a decade ago, the radio enables them to hear immediately speech or song which would formerly have required several days or some weeks of journeying to hear. The world of time has contracted whereas the sense of time has enlarged.
This widening of the space sense which brought the discoveries of Copernicus and of Einstein in science has also brought other new truth in its train. It is affecting the practical policies of statesmen and the theoretical principles of economists. It is influencing the major departments of human life and human culture. And to the extent that this alteration is bringing men to realize the unity of existence, to that extent it conforms to the practical teaching of philosophy concerning social life and ethical conduct. Both science and philosophy here tend to meet and their paths become increasingly less divergent. Moreover, all these new truths about space and time are bringing a great growth in the thoughts of men and a great growth in their conception of the world. They are thus preparing the public mind for more favourable reception of the truths of the hidden Indian philosophy, toward which they tend strikingly and inescapably to lead. As people get used to thinking in this newer way it will be easier for them to appreciate the higher philosophic outlook.
Relativity has provided a new worldview as the background for all future thought about things. A thorough grasp of the meaning of relativity cannot but bring to birth a new outlook for thoughtful men and emancipate their minds from dead ideas, for hitherto the characteristic of the external world was its inevitableness, its mechanical status. We were constrained and compelled by our feelings to accept it as it seemed to be. We instinctively felt that it was not a case of what we wished to think about it but of what we must think about it. Hence everybody, even the scientists, had cherished the belief that whatever was seen to occupy a certain shape possessed a separate appearance and measurement which was objectively its own precisely as perceived. They had also believed that whenever an event happened its duration was likewise precisely something that inhered within itself, as Newton had said, and all the scientists who followed after him had said, everywhere absolutely unchangeable and uniform and consequently quite independent of human experience of them. The stellar universe which we humans believed to be “out there” in space and enduring through time was quite unaffected by our position, presence, or absence and continued a uniform existence whose fundamental characteristics were the same for all observers in all ages. Space and time were once and for all “given.”
With Einstein’s advent these views are shown to be fallacious, imperfect, and misleading. He demonstrates that the conventional standards of measurement, as made in space and time, are not at all absolute and irrevocable. They are entirely dependent on factors, such as the position of an observer, which in themselves are variable and relative. What we really know of the world is not stereotyped for everybody and everywhere but is entirely relative to a particular standpoint which we have taken up. By changing the standpoint we shall visualize the same world in a different way. But, be it noted, to turn space into a variable is to deprive it of its Euclidean character and to make a mental factor enter it.
Through the whole of last century science, as if it were an observer who had scrutinized the world, did not know that the data it had thus gained was more useful for getting things done than for getting at ultimate truth. It was like a man in a closed astronomical system unable to tell that the earth was moving because he had nothing else with which to compare it. But the mental sleep of the race was ending. History had marked the twentieth century as the century of sudden awakening. Science began to scrutinize its own position, itself, and thus become conscious of a missing element in its observation of other movements—its own movement!
Science had absorbed itself in the study of the external world but omitted to take into reckoning the student himself, the conditions under which he worked and the preconceptions with which he worked; yet all these were factors which entered into the observations themselves and consequently modified the results obtained. To think of the objects apart from the men who study them is to think of abstractions. It is like two ends of the same stick—you cannot have one without the other, do what you will. Somebody must be there to know the object; so far as human knowledge of them goes they exist as known things. To treat them otherwise is to abstract one end of the stick and pretend that the other is not there. Relativity plainly states that the observer cannot be separated from his observations, that space is not a wide void in which objects are hanging nor time a broad stream in which they are standing. The shapes we perceive, the measurements we make, depend on the position of the one who perceives and measures. Let him shift his position and new shapes and new measurements will present themselves to his gaze. Therefore empirical knowledge is perpetually exposed to revision. We can never arrive without philosophy at a determination of the character of the universe which shall be and shall remain absolute.
The inner meaning of relativity is that the world may be known differently in the experience of different human beings. The principle may be applied to the particular way in which an object appears to us from a particular position or it may be applied to the fact that the object itself is known also as an idea in relation to a knowing mind. An object is never independent of the conditions affecting a particular observer.
The universe has been deprived of unalterable entity. Relativity has converted it into a universe of individual or collective interpretation. Even if the observations of a million persons agree more or less with each other they still remain interpretations. The principle of relativity does not forfeit its truth because a million people grouped together in a town find no difference in their general observation of a particular object; it still applies to them, albeit collectively, because they have used the same general position or set up the same general standard of reference.
Apart from its practical value, which is not under consideration here, the worth of Einstein’s work to the cultural world is that it gives a jolt to the smug scientific tradition which tried to make a fixed representation of the universe. It inaugurates a new era of comprehension for thoughtful minds. For the aspect of it that matters most proves conclusively that the observed universe, i.e., the known universe, as apart from the one supposed to be outside, depends partly at least for its appearance upon the observer himself. And anyone may enter into this comprehension, however, without turning mathematician and trying to master the technicalities of relativity, if only he will set out to study his own world more closely for what it is rather than what he feels it to be. He will then perforce see that the space and time sides of his human experience are not so objective as everyday thought holds them to be.
If nothing exists in isolation, independently of its relation to the one who perceives it, then, without actually stepping into the shoes, the body, and mind of another man, i.e., without becoming the other man, it is an impossible feat to observe any object precisely as he himself observes it. Thus we stubbornly carry our worldview with us wherever we go. The observations which we make are really made within it, are inseparable from it. Our world of observed facts is also a world of judgments! We separate out by abstraction some special aspect and call that the thing itself. We isolate special appearances of the object, we make an abstraction from all its possible appearances and then proceed to assert that we have seen the object! The logic which proves that the object known can never be separated from the knowing subject as an independent entity, that the observer is part of every observation which he makes, and that the world is describable only in terms of relations is unanswerable.
When Einstein shows that there is no space and no time common to all groups of human beings, it is like showing that various spectacles are in use, each group’s glasses being tinted differently and hence producing a different-coloured picture. Where do these changes of aspect really occur? The resultant pictures when traced to their ultimate abode are not “out there” in the object but in the observers themselves. If five men studying the same thing from five different positions find that it differs in size, mass, rate of movement, and so on, who but themselves are responsible for the changes in the observed object? This is the only possible way of construing such relativity. Throw the observer out of your calculation and the whole system of relativity collapses. The observations are to a large extent at least dependent on the observer. The world of massive continents and majestic oceans appears to be set out in space, and yet when we reflect upon the matter, the space-relations themselves are somehow inextricably mixed up with the observer who is looking at it. If the earth looks flat and is actually round, seems stationary but is continually rotating, where is the error to be sought for? Obviously in the observer himself, for his senses are at work in moulding and presenting the picture of the earth to him.
The plausible assumption which inheritance and habit have engraved upon our minds that we enter into direct connection with a world independent and apart from ourselves can no longer be justified. Relativity drags from us the rueful admission that there are always different ways of looking at the world, that there are no fundamental characteristics which all observers perceive, and that alteration of position or reference standard will alter the sense-picture of the world in the observers themselves.3 And that sense-picture is the only one which they unquestioningly invest with reality, for they know no other.
We get our facts about the world ordinarily through the use of the five sense organs, those complicated structures which began in the far past as simple sensitive patches of skin. The scientist has to work on measurements which he has read off an instrument or an apparatus with his own faculty of sight. To that extent he is entirely dependent on the services rendered him by his two eyes. The chemist alters weights in the scale pan of a laboratory balance and then reads the figures indicated by a pointer which moves over a figured scale. Actually his consciousness has noted certain visual sensations, certain experiences which have occurred to nervous mechanisms in his own body. Science is said to be based on measurement alone, but this is evidently an incomplete statement; the human observer must be reckoned as a part of the results too. Science cannot be separated from the scientists. Therefore the pattern which science has created is also a pattern of human experience. This has been granted by Einstein, for he included a mathematical idea of an observer in his conclusions. And the observer in turn depends on his senses for information.
“But what has all this analysis to do with me?” some will ask. “Is it not the special preserve of scientists and mathematicians?” The answer is—everything! For you, dear reader, are yourself an observer with the world which you see and the environment around you as your field of observation. Einstein’s work is being used here only as an example, only to illustrate some most important tenets of the hidden Indian teaching. He has shown that we know nothing definite about reality and he has shown by implication the need of the higher philosophic standpoint. Moreover, although his discovery referred to quantitative measurements in space and time it may be extended to many other fields of inquiry. Relativity is a principle which holds good almost everywhere, and its philosophic study is of consequence to you. It will serve as a useful stepping-stone to a unique level of reference, where the true character of the world and later the true meaning of your existence can be unveiled.
Relativity reigns in the mental world equally as in the physical. Belief colours or conditions perception. Predilection is selective and shuts out whole strata of facts from observation. Egoism is deceptive and often sees only what it likes to see. Assumption falsifies even that which it does see. Emotion overweights the trivial, deflects the mental, and ignores the substantial. Imagination effortlessly manufactures the most improbable data.
Moreover, Einstein’s work not only strips both time and space of their independent reality, but leads logically to another point which should not be overlooked. When he makes it clear that a man on the moon would have a different kind of time to a man on the earth the time reference is shown to be somehow mixed up with the space reference. Relativity shows that you cannot separate space from the observer, that you cannot separate time from the observer, and that both time and space form part of a single thing. The space-time continuum is one thing, not two: there is no space without time as its inseparable coexistent companion. The “when” and “where” are forever in union.
All perceptions of time must involve reference to the external world and hence involve perceptions of space too. They are inseparables. The time at which an object occupies its three dimensions in space must be brought in to complete its measurement. All our knowledge of nature is the knowledge of things extended in space and occurring in time; all our experience is the experience of objects occupying a particular spatial position and a particular time-order. It is not only that we see the surrounding world but we see it in a space-time relation.
Time and space mutually imply each other, are dependent on each other. For we see objects in space separately and therefore successively and therefore in the total dimension of space-time. Conversely, if we could not separate the earth from the sun in space we would have no means of measuring time, nor any revolutionary movement wherewith to mark it. Thus all our sensations are co-related in space-time. We spatialize by arbitrary withdrawal from the fourth-dimensional continuum where both space and time lie perpetually united. The space-time continuum is the foundation which underlies all our experience of the world.
We need not let ourselves be intimidated by the formidable sound of this word “continuum.” It becomes explicable when we know that space and time are relative to the mind of the observer and that this continuum is somehow inextricably mixed with the mind itself. Space-time is after all a mathematical idea, a conceptual picture, and hence a mental thing.
How comes it that we seem to find space and time as separate realities? It is because the mind has unconsciously picked and partitioned them out to some degree from itself and then arbitrarily imposed them as objective discoveries upon itself. Thus the structure of the world depends partly on the structure of the mind. We must not overlook that the mind is constantly interpreting the world for us, constantly at work behind every measured movement in time and every measured thing in space. The farthest point to which science has gone is that space-time is the ultimate matrix which moulds the objects and events that emerge into being; it is both their mysterious source and the fourth dimension of matter. When, however, we come to realize that space-time is itself inseparable from the mind we shall see what direction science will be forced by further investigation and discovery to follow. The longer it hesitates to take this step the larger will be the accumulation of proof that will confront it.
From the moment that Einstein announced his discoveries, physical science could no longer stand aloof as it had done in the past from the problem of the relation of mind to the world. For relativity undermined the entire objective nature of such science and involuntarily introduced a subjective factor. Nothing therefore, according to relativity, is completely self-existent. This interpreted world is partially, at least, dependent on the interpreting mind of the observer. The old notion that space and time were containers in which things were exhibited must go. The new notion that space and time are contained within the observer must come in. The corollary to be drawn from this is that mind and sensation are inescapable factors in the making, as apart from the perceiving, of the world we know, for that world is as inseparable from space as it is from time.
Truth as it exists in itself, unconditioned, is in Einstein’s belief unattainable; truth as it exists in relation to the faculties of individual men is alone possible of attainment. The hidden teaching emphatically disagrees with this pessimism, pointing out that entity exempt from all relation can only be of a common mental nature and that it might be apprehended through a non-individual approach. Anyway, somehow and to some extent the principles which determine human knowledge exist within the human senses and the human mind and not definitely beyond them in the universe. Without the aid of mind we are unable to know anything at all. This proposition is irrefutable. Thus in the stage to which we have travelled the world hinges largely upon ourselves as observers of it. But what are we without our instruments of observation, without the five senses? Nothing! Everything is received through them. The earth on which we walk and the chair in which we sit enter into our awareness only because they are registered on the skin, the eyes, and the ears. The world we know is a sense-world, whatever else lies beyond it or outside it. It will vary as our fivefold sensations themselves vary. What they tell us constitutes our world. And they can tell different things to men who are differently placed. This is the fundamental lesson of relativity. Relativity introduces an individual or group character into all observations. Unreflective people do not understand that part at least of what they take to be outside themselves exists rather as sense-impressions within themselves. What is believed to exist beyond these impressions is not definitely known.
We are following a suggestive and exploratory trail which has led us back through the things of time and space to man himself, partly to his mind and particularly to the sensations which he forms of the world without. This raises the physiological and psychological question of how we get sensations and what they really are. We habitually accept the deliverances of the senses as true and therefore do not pause to consider how far they are true. It is the next task to investigate their precise nature, as well as to ascertain how much of what we see is dependent on this mental factor.