WE ARE NOW on the threshold of an ancient mystery. There is a stirring and stimulating aspect of the scientific discovery of relativity which has not been allotted its proper significance and its adequate value by the West, but which was known, understood, and valued by the Indian thinkers of antiquity. And this mystery is the relation between the things of our experience, the senses, and the mind. For we have come to see at this stage that every separate thing of which man is or can be aware of is apparently a product of two ingredients, the mental and the material, and not of the material alone. But in what proportions the two are mixed is a question which we have yet to answer. How much of a thing is supplied by the mind and how much is received from the external world is a riddle which has puzzled men from Kapila to Kant, more because its right answer is too unexpected and unsuspected to be acceptable than because its difficulty is too insuperable to be overcome.
We know that there is around us a world of common objects such as brick houses and leafy trees. But what we really know of this world depends on how we come to know it. Talkative ignorance can assert that we see it, that certain corresponding images register on our eyes and are somehow grasped by the mind. Sight, however, is not such a simple matter as it seems, for it will yield surprising revelations when subjected to analytic treatment. The average untutored mind with usual and unquestioned habit is satisfied that its awareness of the world, its personal experiences and environmental changes, are simple affairs, but the scientific mind knows how complex and elaborate they really are.
The forms which we see on every side do not explain themselves. If we want to know the truth about them we have to make rigorous inquiry. The world that is “given” to the mind is not given with its easy explanation accompanying it. We have to hunt and ferret the latter down with all the energy we can muster. Otherwise it will not be forthcoming and we shall remain in the kindergarten stage of thought.
Before we should credit or discredit the testimony of our senses we ought to understand properly how they come to offer such testimony. We need not deny that they will tell us of a world without, but we ought to ascertain what it is precisely that they are trying to tell us. Those who have the patience to take up these inquiries in an earnest spirit are taking important steps to awaken from the dream of ignorance which holds almost all mankind in its heavy folds; they will have begun to break up the universal illusion in the only way that it can be broken because they will have begun to interrogate it. They will be the forerunners of a rightly educated and nobly elevated populace.
We must start like modern science, lucidly and logically from the standpoint of the known, and only then may we work our way to the unknown. Therefore we must for the moment triply turn ourselves into physicist, physiologist, and psychologist. We must examine our bodily apparatus, watch the way in which it behaves when sensing things and search our field of awareness. And if a few technical scientific terms will have to be introduced into this account they will be found simple and well-known to most readers; nevertheless their full explanation will also be given so that none may be unclear to anybody.
Physical and physiological inquiry should come first, for the body is better understood than the mind. Such study will reveal some peculiar facts about the working of our senses. All experience passes into awareness through the portals of the sense-instruments: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin. It is hardly necessary to point out that perception of and intercourse with the world would be impossible if we did not possess these five sensitive bodily instruments which keep us informed about the world of surrounding things, five channels of sense: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. A life without any of the senses is a tragically limited one. That is why we instinctively feel pity for the blind, the dumb, and the deaf, who live in colourless, speechless, or silent worlds.
The skin is crowded with the sensitive bulb-like terminals of numerous delicate nerves which lie beneath its surface. Through these terminals we get our senses of touch, of temperature, and of pressure, which are simpler reports than those of the other sense-instruments. The tongue and part of the mouth are lined with hair-like nerve endings which tell us about the taste, the sweetness, and the sourness of things. The upper part of the nose contains a nervous membrane whereby we smell the fine gaseous particles of odours which enter the air. The flap-like ear we see is not the real instrument of hearing but a kind of shield for it. We really hear waves of sound through a drum-like membrane which lies inside the head at the end of an inch-long channel.
A sixth sense is the awareness of our own muscular movements, a seventh is the sense of keeping bodily balance, but it will suffice to restrict ourselves to grasping the essential principle which runs through all the senses.
Our senses tell us something about an object but never tell us more than a fraction of the facts concerning it. For they function within a well-defined and limited range of vibrations. Were they able to tell us everything, were the ears bereft of the capacity to cut out sounds with high frequencies or the nostrils fully sensitive to every odour, life would become intolerable, if not unlivable. This should be a serious warning to us not to be overconfident about the adequacy of sense-gathered knowledge. And it should be a plain hint that whatever we know from this source should not only be supplemented by the use of reasoned inquiry but also checked by it. Something of this was learnt in the last chapter in our study of the principle of relativity, a study which showed the imperative need for setting up a double standpoint, and something more will be learnt about it in the present chapter. Philosophy is therefore not recalcitrant in being discontented with our first view of the world as it immediately presents itself to the senses. It perceives mystery where the ordinary mind perceives none. It seeks in fact to unravel the mystery behind sensed appearance.
Of all the five senses, that which tells us of an external world is chiefly the sense of sight. We usually apprehend the existence of each individual thing through the instrumentality of vision. All the other senses are subordinate to it. Sight, therefore, is the most important of all our senses, and only after it comes hearing. And it is also the most useful of all the five, for we mostly think of the world in terms of visual images, while the larger number of the pictures which enter into memory and imagination are visual ones also. Moreover, the function of the eyes is far superior in scope to the function of any other sense. Thus they can perceive a large number of different things both far off and quite near within a few moments, whereas touch, for example, is restricted to those immediately at hand. Finally, sight is the subtlest and most like the mental of all our senses.
What happens when we gaze out at the host of surrounding objects? What do we mean by announcing that we have “seen” something? Vision is by no means the simple process that it seems to be. It is a highly complicated process. First in the series to be noted is that it shares with the other senses the need of a physical stimulus which will arouse it into activity. Waves of sound will arouse the ear when they touch its drum and it is waves of light that beat upon the eye and arouse it into action. Light is its actual stimulus. The nerve tissue of the eye is sensitive to light as nothing else.
Here is a fountain pen. Rays of light must therefore take their point of departure in this object by being thrown back from its surface and then they must travel and stimulate those amazingly effective mechanisms which are nature’s optical instruments—the eyes.
Two balls of fibrous tissue are set inside deep recesses of the skull. There are three coats of nerve fibre upon each eyeball and it is the innermost one that is so sensitive to light and therefore to colour. This coat is technically called the retina. It plays the same part that a sensitive film or a ground-glass viewfinder plays in a photographic camera, for it registers images of outside objects. But whereas a camera film can be used only once and must then be discarded, the retina can be used countless times and still render good service. The light rays meet in it and affect numerous little rod-like and cone-like nerve endings, whose activity starts the second link in the chain of connected processes stretching from the fountain pen to our knowledge of its existence. Every other sense-instrument, such as the ear and the skin, also contains the terminals of suitable nerves, and if it did not possess them it would be utterly useless.
This retinal structure possesses microscopic fineness and consequently permits detailed pictures to form upon its surface of a precision and clearness unequalled by the data furnished by any of the other senses. We must not forget that the presence of such a picture is nothing more than the mere influence of light upon the retina.
In order to see any external object at all it must have a background of colour, for it is by the contrast of one colour against another that we distinguish the shape and size of the object, but in order to be coloured it must be lighted, for colour is a product of the rays of light. It is only when we can make a comparison between two colours that we can even assert that an object is before us. We recognize the flaming glory of the flamingo because of the duller tints of the place wherein it is set. We perceive the massive pyramid because its brownish stones rise out of yellow sands and because its ruddy apex is thrust into the limpid blue of an Egyptian sky. If only a single colour surrounded us or were before us no object could take shape at all for our eyes, because the perceived shape of a thing is the consequence of having a second colour or several more colours against which to contrast it.
It is these rays that are broken by the objects into the browns and greys and greens that popular superstition puts into the things it sees. The rind of an orange, for instance, reflects and breaks white light in such a way that it appears to us as golden yellow. It is a schoolboy’s experiment to prove that white light can break and divide itself into several other colours, technically termed the colours of the spectrum, for he has but to set up a prism of glass near the window of a shaded room and lovely hues like violet, yellow, red, blue, et cetera, will then appear.
Thus we do not see things directly but rather the light which they reflect or emit. It is not the pen that actually impinges upon the eyes; it is the light rays alone which travel from the pen and impinge upon the eyes. The superstition which science explodes is that colours are part of the things themselves. They are not. They are the result of waves of white light broken up. The light is not in the things themselves. It is only reflected by them. Scientific experiment has effectively proved this, but a simple instance will well illustrate its truth. Sunset lessens the light inside a house and with it things change their hues and darken. Brown tables become black and green curtains become grey. For their colour is not really their own essential property.
It might be said with actual truth that the only world we ever see is a mysterious world of light, as was once mystically affirmed by ancient cults and as is now experimentally demonstrated by modern science. But philosophy cannot stop there. It must penetrate to the very root of things. It must ascertain whence even light itself derives its own existence.
Let us return to our fountain pen. The impression of having seen it starts with light entering the eye, which, in response to this stimulus, forms an image on the retina. Nature turns artist, as it were, and paints a picture in coloured light on a canvas of nervous stuff. But we are not conscious of it as existing there, a proof of this being that the picture which appears upon the retina is inverted just as it is on the negative film of a camera. If we knew this picture alone the pen would appear upside down also! It is clear, therefore, that the picture passes through some further process of change and even transformation before we become correctly aware of the pen.
All that has happened is a chemical and structural change in the upper layer of the retina. No awareness of the glistening colour, the long slender shape, and the golden head of the pen has yet managed to penetrate our ignorance of it. For us there is still no pen. The news of its existence has not yet reached the mind and has to be brought a stage farther than the eyes, has to be brought indeed to some central spot in the body which can act as a clearinghouse for all the sense-reports sent in from various points distributed throughout the body’s length and breadth. Such a spot exists in the brain.
Nature has therefore made admirable provision to carry out this task. The entire body is really a nervous receiving apparatus which reacts variously to each physical stimulus received. Enormous numbers of white nerves thread their way from the surface of the body to the brain and constitute a comprehensive system of communication, a kind of nervous and cerebral telegraphic system, in fact.
A general process of interaction between the external objects and the internal brain exists through the working of the medium between them, the five bodily sense-instruments. Certain events occur in the instruments and, through vibrations which pass along connecting nerves, initiate nervous impulses which diffuse themselves over a particular part of the brain.
The pen, which makes an “impression” on the eye, as it is technically termed, has aroused an activity in the numerous rodlike and conelike parts of the retina and through them in the nerves which run from their bases. This current of wavelike movement is transmitted by them to the main nerve which leads out of the eyeball, called the optic nerve, and the latter again in its turn passes its response along its own entire length to its birthplace at the back of the brain. Here a portion of the brain surface called the cerebral cortex becomes acquainted with the vibrating activity which constitutes the message sent by the eye.
Let us consider an aspect of this last point. That which makes the image possible and throws its form upon the retina is the combination lens furnished by the cornea of the eye and the crystalline lens. The surface of this lens is convex, and had nature increased its convexity we would always have seen the pen with exaggerated dimensions and distorted shape. Everything else in the universe would have taken on the same grotesque appearance, whether it be a glacial mountain range like Himalaya or a tiny insect like an ant. From birth to death we would have firmly believed that the objects and people surrounding us were really possessed of such appearance. The so-called distorting mirrors of fairs and exhibitions provide comical illustrations of the kind of queer faces and figures our fellow men would then have had.
Why is this possible? Because the brain is entirely dependent on the image furnished by the eyes. It can obviously never come into direct contact with any external thing.
Again, some people are born colour-blind. Until their attention is called by others to this peculiar defect in their eyes they may not even know that their vision is peculiar. They may assert of two differently coloured things placed before them that they see the same colour in each thing. They may blandly assure you that a pink rose possesses the same colour as a yellow marigold, merely because they are incapable of seeing. They are unable to distinguish between unripe green strawberries and ripe red ones, or between the green lamp on a railroad signal which indicates the safe passage and the red lamp which warns of danger. For this reason the companies require their engine drivers to pass a strict examination in distinguishing colours. The lesson to be got from analysing this defect is that the wrong colour, not being a part of the lamp or the strawberry, must be a part of the image which falls on the retina, and that the brain is limited to the material found in the retinal representation, not to that which is available in the external thing itself. The essential point here is what we do see, not what we should see according to ordinary observation.
All that the eyes can offer, in the case of our fountain pen, is contained in the sensitive portion of the retina and consists of a picture which is less than one inch in diameter, which is upside down and which has the two dimensions of height and width only. But the pen which is actually there is six inches long and not one inch, is upright and not upside down, and possesses the three dimensions of height, width, and depth, so that it stands out in solid relief. Here are three pointed hints that the external pen present to our sight is not the perceived pen of which the mind becomes aware and that the popular belief that we see things-in-themselves is sheer illusion. For the image with which the brain deals is within our eyes, i.e., within our body, hence within ourselves! We cannot even get beyond it. This means that we see pictures, appearances, and that these are always relative to the observer—a lesson which we learnt in the previous chapter from other data, as well as from reflection upon Einstein’s work. For everyday practical purposes we must assume that we perceive a thing exactly as it purports to be, but for philosophic inquiry we must penetrate beneath the surface of such an assumption.
The eyes’ message of the pen’s existence is the only account which the brain can hope to receive, for it is too remote from the pen. Yet, physically speaking, quite clearly it offers only an inverted miniature. Such an imperfect message does not square with the external pen and cannot be taken literally. It must be worked upon until the pen is accurately represented by what is seen, i.e., it must be interpreted. The message reached the brain therefore in the form of a physiological Morse code. To imagine that the visual image itself travels along the optic nerve is equivalent to imagining that actual words and not corresponding short or long electrical impulses travel along a telegraph wire. These impulses splutter out at their destination in the form of meaningless sounds until taken up and interpreted according to the Morse code by an operator, a human being whose mind translates them into significant alphabetical letters and words. Moreover, a telegram itself is nothing more than a series of black marks on a sheet of white paper. These marks have to be deciphered and converted into thoughts by the person who reads it. The mind must similarly set to work to decode the wavelike nervous impulses which the brain has received and translate them back into awareness of the corresponding impressions of their original physical stimulus, which in this case is a pen. It is extremely difficult to define the word mind, as most recent scientists and philosophers have confessed. The hidden teaching thoroughly understands the significance of what lies behind this little word, but that significance can only be fully revealed near the end of this course, not when we are less than halfway as now. However, for present purposes we may briefly, simply, and tentatively define mind as being that which makes us think of anything and which makes us aware of anything.
Such interpretation must necessarily be a mental activity. It must transpire in the mind, for it demands the positive activity of intelligence rather than the passive receptivity of eye, nerve, and brain. Intelligence implies consciousness of some kind, and as we are normally unaware of such a process we must conclude that it occurs beneath the threshold of ordinary consciousness and is wholly subconscious. We know only the results of this unseen work. They appear to us as an accurate vision of this beautiful writing instrument.
This is the instant when awareness has stepped into the process and determined the birth of an observation for us. This is the crucial point when we first begin to know that the pen is there. Until this moment we are unaware of its existence, despite the picture in the retina, despite the vibration that passes along the optic nerve and despite the brain’s response.
A proof of this is found in the annals of surgical science. The skin of each finger is linked with the spinal cord by bundles of fibrous nerves. If the latter are severed close to the spine the fingers may be cut or smashed, but no pain will be felt in them. The messages from them can no longer reach the brain and unless they reach the brain they cannot be taken up into consciousness. When therefore we speak of having a feeling of pain in an injured foot we are uttering misleading words for the feeling ought to be referred to the point where it is actually experienced, i.e., subsequent to the movement of a vibration in the brain. We localize feelings of sweet or bitter taste on the tongue when they really occur after the brain has responded. But in both the cases the foot and the tongue can only receive the impressions of painful pressure and sweet fluidity respectively, whereas the impressions are not transformed into bits of conscious experience until after the nerves have vibrated them as far as the proper cerebral centres. To place these feelings locally at the nerve endings is to fall into gross illusion, albeit perfectly pardonable illusion.
The important places assigned by nature to the nerve paths and brain centres may now appear clearer. So long as the nerve connection with the brain continues unimpaired so long does the sense-instrument continue to function. But a leper whose nerve communication between hand and brain has been eaten away will have no sensation of touch. His leprous hand may be burnt or cut off yet he will feel no pain. Destroy the nerve, paralyse it, or let a lesion appear in the appropriate brain centre and the sense-instrument fails to perform its work—sight goes or feeling in the fingers vanishes. Therefore our knowledge of an object cannot be got without nerve and brain. The eyes might be perfectly unharmed and show all their normal physical response to light and yet a man might see nothing more than a blind man could see if the cortical section of his brain were injured, diseased or cut or if the optic nerve were severed midway. No sight is possible without the vital cooperation of both brain and nerve with the eye—thus making a triple partnership. The plain meaning of this is that knowledge of an object’s existence does not arise in the bodily eye, ear, skin, tongue, or nose which lie at the ends of the nerves but rather only after the message has reached the brain centres which lie at the starting points of the nerves. For only then does that mysterious element called consciousness reveal itself. We first come into cognition of a thing in sense-experience by noting the particular characteristics that distinguish it from other things, such as its special shape, particular size, and degree of hardness, for instance; we can become conscious of it only through knowing these qualities of it.
Now we know that a thing called clock is before us because there is a tiny picture of the clock in the eyes, the sound of its rhythmic ticking in the ears and the feeling of its resistant touch in the fingers; all these impressions combine and corroborate each other. An orange is known to us because it looks round and yellow, tastes sweet, and feels pulpy. These are its well-known characteristics. But how do we become aware of them? We can do so only by experiencing the immediate effects which the orange produces in our mind through the senses. Each individual effect, such as the pulpy feeling of the orange alone and not the whole orange itself, which arises in our consciousness is technically called a sensation.
Whatever is perceived by the senses or thought of in reflection becomes an object in the field of awareness. We may therefore attach the technical term of “object” to it. Every object possesses certain recognizable qualities which are presented to the mind as sensations. The latter are greatly varied: they tell us where the object is, how small or how large it is, what its shape is like, how sweet, sour, or salty its taste is, or how disagreeable its odour, how much weight or how much warmth it possesses, and whether it is lying still or actually moving.
When transmitted nervous impulses originating in the ears complete their journey and reach the brain they arouse sensations of sound. The latter will vary in pitch, strength, and character. The pitch may be high or low, the strength loud or soft, and the character mere noise or musical tone, but each sound effect will be a separate sensation.
From impressions made on the skin at one end and the processes consequently occurring in it related processes are excited at the other end in the brain, wherefrom we receive sensations of touch which fall roughly into three classes: those of contact, of temperature, and of surface pain. These appear as recognitions of distinct qualities such as warmth or cold, smoothness or roughness, heaviness or lightness, pain, movement, or pressure. The largest number of touch sensations are received through the skin of the hand because it is the most active of man’s limbs. Hold this book in your hand and you will experience the sensations of pressure on its skin as well as the sensation of strain on its sinews. These two sensations taken together form the combined sensation of the book’s weight. When you pick up a piece of iron your hand comes in contact with its surface and a sensation of hardness is then felt. And your fingers will tell you that the fountain pen’s barrel is round and smooth, which means that you are getting sensations of roundness and smoothness. When you hold it tightly in the palm both finger and pen begin to repel each other and further sensations come to you, those of resistance and hardness. The tighter you hold it, the stronger will these sensations become.
The lights and shades which play upon and around things provide us with sensations of coloured shapes. When we pick up the pen and look more closely into its beautiful appearance we experience sensations of purple, grey, gold, and black. The science of physics knows that the different rates of vibration of one and the same light ray are read by the eyes as different colours. The colour of a thing is therefore an optical interpretation. What we perceive as colour is not perceived separately from ourselves.
When we speak to a man and hear him reply, what is really happening? Sound, a vibration in the air, acts on both bodies, and certain movements then occur in the nerve endings at the tympanums of the ears; while light forms certain retinal pictures in the eyes. These stimulations are propagated as commotions along the main nerves to the brain where corresponding sensations subsequently arise. If we touch the man’s body we shall garner in the form of muscular sensations of pressure and relaxation the results of impressions made on the skin.
Where do the sensations of hardness and roughness, for instance, originate? Are they in the thing or in the observer of the thing? A little analysis will show that they are in the observer, superficially in his body but actually in his mind. Similarly the sensations of heaviness and roundness are not to be found in the material things themselves but in our sensations of them.
Where is the point when a man becomes conscious of having smelt the rose? Is it when the rose approaches the nostrils? Is it when the minute particles of perfume touch the inner membrane of the nostrils? Is it when the olfactory nerve registers the disturbance? Is it when the disturbance reaches the brain? No! He does not know and he cannot know what the rose smells like until his mind takes up the registration, until he thinks it into existence. Only at this point does the physiological intercourse which has taken place between the rose and himself assume meaning for him. The interpretation of the impressions of physical experience communicated by the nerves is followed by a reconstruction of the resultant sensations in mental experience. Each sensation is therefore, speaking in terms of physiology only, a purely mental response into which a material nerve stimulus has somehow translated itself. Each sensation is a mental affair; it is within consciousness, whereas sense-impressions are within the body.
It is easier to grasp this point by considering what happens when we cut a finger with a knife. A feeling of pain arises. That feeling is indubitably within ourselves and in nobody else; moreover, it is a state of our consciousness and not a state of the knife. It is, in short, a sensation of pain. Similarly, if we place our hand upon a book the act gives rise to a sense of resistance as the surface of the palm meets with resistance from the surface of the book. We then say that we feel the book, but this is not the case; what we actually feel is that part of our skin which the book touches and from the skin a message is sent to the spinal cord and thence to the brain until a sensation of resistance is born into our individual zone of awareness. Hence we do not feel the book but rather what is happening to our own self. All the other kinds of sensation—whether the smells, the tastes, or the sounds of daily experience—are likewise states of our consciousness.
Where is the bitterness that we taste on eating an unripe fruit? Actually, like all tastes, it is a sensation derived from the tongue, for it is primarily an awareness, an item furnished by consciousness. It must be identified with our mind. Therefore as an experience it is in us, yet we unconsciously project it outside on the fruit. The fruit produces the sour taste in us but we wrongly say it is itself sour. A state of consciousness is thus erroneously ascribed to an external thing! Such an instance shows how faulty language misleads our thought. We learnt in earlier chapters to beware of words and to watch for the pitfalls and snares they prepare for our understanding of the world.
Do we know anything more of a clock than these sensations which tell us what it looks like and what it sounds like? If we pause to analyse the position and if we make our analysis correctly and deeply we are compelled to confess that it is these sense-reports alone which make up for us the actual clock that we know. Take away the brown, gold, and black colours, the hard, round, cool, and smooth feels, and the rhythmic ticking sound—how much of the clock will remain? Without these there can be no clock at all in anyone’s experience. Yet without exception these are all sensations, they are all events in the mind, ideas if we wish to call them so. What we see, what we hear and what we feel are the first things that we become aware of in relation to every object. The movements within sense, nerve, brain, and mind are made with such lightninglike speed that we are unable to notice the process at all. The sensations are therefore not only the first things we know about the clock but actually the last things also. It is this incredible rapidity of mental action which creates what is nothing less than an illusion of having entered into direct contact with something outside when in fact we have only entered into our own sensations. Similarly the sight of somebody standing near is a composite result of various sensations, i.e., the sum of what the senses represent to our mind, but nothing more. Every separate thing that we see or experience possesses therefore an assemblage of qualities and characteristics and each quality impresses itself individually on the senses, thus yielding a separate sensation of colour, sound, taste, and so on. When we cut deep down into the foundation of our knowledge of the world we find this primal fact of sensation is its support and origin. No such knowledge is at all possible unless sight, hearing, touch, and other sensations or their revived memories are first present. For each is an item of human experience.
We may know many things but the only things we know for certain are the conditions of our consciousness, i.e., our sensations and nothing else. It is our five senses alone that tell us about the existence of this familiar world and provide us with information about it. It is impossible to get directly at the object as an independent existence. We get only at the sensed interpretation of it; that is to say we get at a physiological condition in ourselves.
Every sensation is a private and individual matter because it is an activity originating in one’s own self. It is not shared in common with others; we cannot ordinarily see directly into the mind of another. Every man can normally only observe what is passing within his own consciousness. He experiences sensations which are separate and may even be somewhat different from those of another man viewing the same object. These personal impressions of light and sound and touch which tell us of the external object are what we know at first hand, what we are immediately aware of, and what we are alone sure of experiencing.
The point which must be grasped—and it will need a concentrated subtlety of thought to grasp it—is that we never know the panoramic external world in itself. We see that world only through the immovable spectacles of the sense-reports which we receive concerning it. We cannot bring it under direct observation. What we directly observe is—our mental reaction to it, i.e., ourselves! Without ever being conscious of this certain and simple truth we live day and night in no other world than that whose form is figured for us through what is termed sensation. Unscientific and unphilosophic persons never suspect the existence of this truth. Let it not be forgotten that these statements are drawn from a long series of observations in the storehouse of modern science and that they are based on experiments made on living persons no less than on dissections performed on dead ones.
Let none become impatient with these pages for repeating scientific facts already known to the world. They are certainly known, but chiefly to the narrow circles of students of medicine and psychology. They are not generally known to the wider circles of layfolk. They are important to our purpose for two reasons. First, they amply confirm a crucial tenet of the hidden teaching which must be absorbed at this stage of our studies. Second, because we are appealing to facts, because we are interrogating Nature in the spirit of Francis Bacon, the founder of modern science. A modern presentation of the ancient Indian teaching must be based on science because the latter is the dominant trend of modern culture and because the new scientific discoveries are beginning to support and vindicate the old Indian discoveries. But whereas science is bewildered by the facts it has gathered and does not quite know what to make of them, the hidden philosophy has a perfect grasp of those facts, for it fully understands their place and significance. Whereas science must sooner or later become philosophical or continue in perpetual bewilderment, the hidden teaching has worked out every tenet in a form which is finished to the last syllable. It knows no uncertainty, no doubts, no bewilderment. It has ascertained truth and can lead willing votaries straight to truth. If therefore we take science in our stride here we shall not stop with science. We shall move fearlessly on and far outstrip it until we reach a verified knowledge compared with which the utterances of science are but broken stammerings before the universal mystery. Let readers be patient therefore, for we are keeping something quite new in reserve for them. Let them await the further final volume in which shall be presented for the first time in any modern form or any Western language the advanced and secret teachings of the oldest philosophy known to Asia, the home of this world’s oldest culture.
Any fact or event which is actually observed becomes entitled to the term experience. We ordinarily think of objects and happenings without ever realizing that we are thinking of sensations. Such realization can come only afterward, when thoughtful analysis endeavours to understand the actual experiences. Ordinarily we are more concerned with an object than the mental content immediately referring to it or than the way in which we become aware of its existence. For this is the specialized business of the psychologist.
At the moment of looking at a pen we are quite unaware of the extraordinary complexity of this seemingly simple act. It might be believed that when we are conscious of all the sensations produced by the pen we perceive it. Uninstructed opinion usually believes that recognizing the existence of a pen is a perfectly simple matter of passively receiving all the sensations it yields and nothing more. Scientific investigation reveals, however, that the operation is much more complicated than that.
A sensation is not further divisible by analysis, since it distinguishes a single basic quality of the object. But we are not normally aware of a single isolated sensation. That is to say we never see the golden colour of our fountain pen nib apart from its shape as a nib. Colour, for instance, does not come into consciousness divorced from size and form. Nobody can examine one apart from another by the light of consciousness. Such a thing exists for us only in theoretical study and is the consequence of theoretical analysis. This is because what we are aware of is a variety of different experiences at one and the same moment, a rush of several sensations simultaneously. Thus the feeling that here is something that is hard to the touch arrives simultaneously with the feeling that here is something that is smooth-surfaced and with the visual recognitions that it is purple-coloured and round-shaped. All these separate qualities, if taken in isolation, would not tell us that the object is a pen. Just as a jumbled heap of bricks produces nothing more than a sense of chaotic confusion until they are built up to make a house, so the sensations have no rational value until they are brought into related and intelligible order. We must not only form sensations; we need to be able to distinguish one thing from another, we need to be able to discriminate the form of the pen from the form of a bottle, for instance.
We see a flower. We also touch it and smell its perfume. The sight, feel, and smell of the flower are single sensations. The entire group of sensations must combine before they can constitute the flower for us. The simple stimulus of the coloured surface of a rose may result in a sensation of redness, but only the reaction of the mind, not only to this but to all the other sensations received—such as softness, fragrance, and lightness—is what finally determines our understanding that here is a rose.
And what is true of the rose is true of all things experienced. To see anything is to think of it, to feel a piece of soft cloth or a log of hard wood is to think of it, and to hear any sound, whether it be the softest whisper or the roll of thunder, is likewise to think of it. All sense-experience is impossible without the association of an equivalent act of thought. Everything from infinitesimal microbe to infinite space is first an object of thought, an image or an idea.
Thus bare sensations remain meaningless until they are gathered up, not in series but simultaneously, and constructively put together to form a perceived thing by the mind which experiences them. A multitude of individual impressions may crowd in upon the eyes from a single pen, but not until the mental operations of associating and welding them are complete do they attain the stage of definite recognition as being the pen itself. Not until then do they divulge their meaning and their significance get appreciated. The identification of any object involves a creative process of implanting adequate meaning and giving significant association to the elementary sensations. This can arise only after all the salient sensations have been brought together in a single united experience. This is precisely what does happen and thus sensations are converted into the thoughts of things or events as we ordinarily know them. Mind arranges, synthesizes and constructs these single and simultaneous sensations into complete thoughts or images.1 Each thought is contemporaneously compounded from two or more associated sensations. Each separate sensation is an element in the orderly building up of perception so that the perceived picture of the pen is really a group of such elements brought into the full light of consciousness. We have a sensation as the first subconscious reaction to a physical stimulus from outside things and we have a conscious thought as the first conscious reaction to the sum of sensations. The whole series appears, then, as a stimulus to the sense-instrument by an outside object, then a sense impression, next a nerve transmission, fourth, a brain response, fifth a subconscious mind response (sensation), and finally a fully conscious response (mental picture, idea of event, image, thought). We ordinarily know only the sixth stage in this series because it is the finished and familiar conscious experience, whereas the fifth is only the raw material for such experience.
But we must not fall into the error of regarding such a perceptual thought as the mere adding together of new sensations: they certainly make its core, but it is necessarily supplemented by something more if every experience is to be adequately filled in. The mind must first interpret and then creatively form its own image of the pen not only out of the impressions gathered by the senses but also out of those associated with the memories of earlier experiences of seeing and handling pens. It must imagine and add something to the bare message received from the senses if it is successfully to reinterpret the inverted, undersized, and two-dimensional retinal image. Hence three other mental contributions inevitably enter into each act of perception and mingle with the material supplied by sensations, thus elaborating the whole into a final thought of recognition: (1) association with past similar experience, (2) anticipation of new experience, (3) personal interpretation peculiar to the experiencing individual. The most important of these elements is the first.
When we recognize the sensation of hardness in handling a piece of wood our memory automatically connects and classifies it with the store of previously experienced sensations of hardness. The remembered hardness fuses, as it were, with the new sensation of hardness. We graft familiar old impressions or unconsciously reproduce past experience on the new sensations. Thus old experience is revived and put with the new, appearing to us in the form of an actual perception. The hand may yield impressions of something hard and smooth, while the eye may yield impressions of something round and brown-coloured, but all these sensations are merely the material to which the mind must add an element drawn from the wealth of past experience which it possesses subconsciously and then synthetically construct the whole into the image of a table. This it does by welding all these sensations and at the same time interpreting them in the light of remembered experience. The memory of previous and associated sensations is brought in. In this way it arrives at the meaning of the thing as the round top of a table.
The mind draws upon the apparently vanished past, thus rising above time’s limitation, and grasps at those experiences which are most likely to help it understand the present experience. The resurrected sensations influence the making of the new image.
Further proof of the contribution thrown by the past into the moulding of these mental images may be found in the relative swiftness with which an adult recognizes the size, distance, and shape of a thing as compared with an infant. The little creature has to learn to distinguish between one vague thing and another vague thing until both slowly begin to acquire clearer outline through familiarity and clearer meaning through experience. The infant stretches out its hand to grasp the moon, thinking it is quite close, whereas the adult sees the moon as being quite remote from his own body. But the infant’s eyes registered the impressions of the moon no less faithfully and accurately than the adult’s, for their construction is not in any way different. The infant’s failure to perceive its proper spatial relation to the moon is not to be blamed upon the eyes, but can only be accounted for by the feebler activity of its mind in constructing an image out of its visual sensations, due to the lack of sufficient former experience to draw upon. And a child who has only just learnt to read will peruse the printed page with slowness and difficulty, not infrequently mistaking one letter for another or even one word for another. The same child grown to maturity will read the same page with rapidity and accuracy. Yet the impressions and images registered by the retina are precisely similar in both cases. The eyes may be as perfect in the child as in the adult. Why then does this difference in result occur? The answer is that as the growing child reads printed books more and more frequently its mind remembers earlier images of letters and words and increasingly contributes these recollections to the operation of reading until finally each word is fully and correctly recognized, i.e., perceived for what it is. This is a plain proof of the complex and creative nature of every thought which refers to an experience.
Here is a simple way of grasping how powerfully the mind contributes to present experience by drawing on the past. Listen to the same person singing two different songs quickly, one of which is quite familiar and the other quite unknown. The words of the first song will be followed with ease, whereas those of the second will be followed with a little difficulty, so that it may be impossible to recognize some of them. The sounds will be heard but they will not be distinguished as recognizable words. On the other hand, memory has added something to the sensations of sound in the first case. The impression produced on the ears is of the same quality in both. And yet the hearing is confused when the song is unknown but perfect when it is familiar and recollected. It is defective in one case and accurate in the other. A mental factor is therefore present in all cases of hearing and makes its due contribution to what is consciously heard rather than what is actually impressed on the ears by sound vibrations.
A strange illustration showing how the past exists as an ingredient in human perception is to be found in the case of those who have lost a leg or arm through violent accident or surgical amputation. Medical annals reveal that such persons have in several instances complained of feeling pain in the foot or fingers of a missing limb as if the latter were still connected with the body! Thus the mind can even wreathe fictions into its experience under the powerful influence of memory. This indicates that the testimony of memory prepares the way for the entry of expectancy. Hence a further element which enters the making of an image along with the new and remembered sensations is anticipation of what the object is or ought to be. It is the final factor in shaping the thought. Not only do images of past experience enter into the train of mental activity, but so do personal emotions. Each mental construct is conditioned by our individual organization. This is well illustrated when certain optical illusions arise. We do not directly draw, therefore, entirely on new sense-impressions for all our awareness. Memory of the past supplies some of it in the form of revived mental images, while expectant imagination supplies others, but indirectly both of these are derived from earlier sense-impressions.
Thus deeply ingrained mental habits, strongly seated expectations, and aroused associations also take their share in this work of moulding a mental picture or the thought of an event. The passage from bare sensation to full perception is not only the passage to a group of sensations simultaneously uniting in consciousness to form the experience, but is also the passage to mental interpretation and mutual adjustment of the simple sensations.
The idea is a completed product when we actually recognize it as belonging to a particular class, as when a red-and-gold-coloured, smooth-feeling, oblong-shaped, six-inch-long object is recognized as being one of the class called books. However, its formation of a percept must not be thought of as one of merely arithmetical addition. It is much more a process of instantaneous fusion. The sensations do not merely interlace, they fuse. All these operations which go to the making of experience are not performed by us so far as we are aware, nor are they directly accessible to our observation. They are performed automatically beneath the threshold of conscious mind. They are demonstrated by their effects. If we are unable to unravel these single and separate elements and expose them individually to our gaze it is precisely because a thought is nothing other than their final and permanent fusion into a unit. During the time of manufacture the thought forms itself automatically and beyond the control of the conscious will. We are not personally aware of this ceaseless activity of the mind in giving birth to the thoughts, images, and ideas whose totality constitutes our world-experience, and therefore we are not aware of the fact that the pen as it appears to us is mind-made.
Thus the analysis of perception reveals that the form and size of any object which confronts us, no less than the feel and the colour of it, are qualities which ultimately exist for the mind alone. This is no less true of hard and heavy things like granite rocks, for they exist for us as fused groups of sensations. Only when we become conscious of the rocks can we regard them as being there. Only felt and seen rocks can exist for us at all. We know everything through the totality of the sensations, i.e., the awareness, it produces in us, through the colours, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds which make up our physical experience and which are ultimately experiences of the mind. What we see is not the thing-in-itself but the thing-in-our mind. The thought is more intimate than the thing.
How is it that the formation of a thought takes place with such unbelievable swiftness? We can only reply that originally it must have been a slow and conscious act which in the course of evolution through countless centuries was imperceptibly transformed by the individual and the race into an instantaneous and unconscious one. Familiar and frequently recurring experiences have rendered it easy for the mind to create its images practically instantaneously. The complex and complete act of seeing the object really occupies a number of successive steps, but they flash by with such unimaginable and incredible rapidity as practically to fuse into a single instantaneous operation. This rapid working is partly a result of the existing background of past sense-experience into which new sensations immediately merge, and partly a result of the mind’s innate power.
These separate steps in the awareness of a thing do not disclose themselves to ordinary consciousness but only to scientific analysis. Hence they may appear to the uninitiated as a farrago of nonsense. They belong to a process which is entirely below the surface; they are subconscious to a partial or complete extent. They are described here in the way they would unfold themselves to us could we but view them individually. Perception is ordinarily such a tremendously rapid, perfectly smooth, and automatic process that we do not pause to consider the great significance involved in its actual operation. Thus sight may be viewed from three distinct standpoints. The first is the physical stimulus and is a matter of the movement of light rays from the object to the eye. The second is the physiological process and is a matter of projecting an image upon the retina. The third is the psychological construct and is a matter of first becoming aware that the object exists. Physics investigates the light, physiology investigates the eye and brain, psychology has to study the arisal of a conscious percept, while philosophy must not only coordinate the results of all three sciences but evaluate them and ascertain their true worth in a grander system of world-explanation.
Thus we may come to perceive that so long as we confine our examination to the top of the picture, so long any understanding of the way we enter into awareness of the familiar things and persons that surround us seems a simple affair, but the moment we try to view the lower part also and to gaze at the picture as a whole, then only do we begin to grasp how difficult and how complex an affair it really is. Thus too we may realize why the scientist to some extent and the philosopher to the fullest extent are not satisfied with superficial explanations of what they see and touch every day, as are common folk, but seek rather to plunge into deeper water. For in the case of the subject of this chapter we have been led step by step to the surprising discovery that however tangible be the everyday material things themselves, their existence is ultimately revealed to us only by our mental experience of them, i.e., our knowledge of these things shuts us up within the four walls of thoughts alone.
Put into plainer language, what we undoubtedly know are our ideas of what are usually said to be external objects, whereas what we erroneously believe we know are the objects themselves. The difference between the two is the difference between a cinematographic photograph of the inimitable and genial Charlie Chaplin on a white screen and the living Charlie Chaplin in the flesh. But there the analogy must end. To stretch it farther is to falsify it. For whereas a photograph is after all but a copy of something, a thought is not a copy at all; it is a mental creation. It is new because it represents a new birth into consciousness, a new arisal of idea. It is an evidence of the mind’s wonderful power of constructing—and not merely exploring—what it perceives. And it is also an evidence of what was hinted in the opening lines of the present chapter—that the external world is entirely relative to the mind that perceives it, that the pregnant principle of relativity rules all our observations and all our experience. Here we carry this principle to a length which Einstein has not grasped and will therefore be unwilling to follow. Those who can understand this point have received an introduction to an infallible inoculation against the crude kind of materialism which prevailed last century among the proletarian camp followers of science, and against the sanctimonious materialism which prevailed among the unintelligent upholders of religion.
The fountain pen which began as a collection of sensed qualities has ended as a fragment of our mind. The last lesson of this chapter is that what we see is primarily seen as a thought, that what we touch is primarily touched as an image and that every human experience of the physical world is essentially a mentally produced experience. Our perceptions, which seem so physical, are prominently and paramountly mental events. All the coloured and odorous and felt things that we are acquainted with are ultimately experienced in the mind and nowhere else. In order to get in touch with the world of outside things we have to think them into existence; otherwise we remain totally unaware of them. The idea which the mind thus subconsciously brings to birth represents, rightly or wrongly, as much of the thing as we know and as much as we can ever know. For we cannot go beyond our thoughts. We cannot see what they do not picture forth for us. A pen itself may be six inches long, but if our mind were to play the trick of showing it to us as only one inch long we would continue in blissful ignorance to believe that the pen was only one inch long. Fortunately such tricks are rare, although they are certainly not nonexistent, as the next chapter will clearly show. And if our mind did not know that the eyes were seeing a mountain and the hands were touching it we would not know that the mountain existed at all.
We need more truth. There is no other anodyne for our troubled age. It is admittedly hard to believe that we are aware of thoughts of external things only, when all these years we have fondly believed we were aware of the things themselves. Most men are inaccessible to this tenet. It sets them down beneath a sky which is strange, cold, unfamiliar. It will therefore be hard to divest ourselves of the familiar conventional outlook—that is to say, the materialistic outlook. But it can be done if only we are willing to give a little time and much inquiring independent thought to the task. We must be pitiless and thresh out all error, all falsity, and all illusion from our mentality. Our bondage to popular ignorance need not last forever. It can grow weak and insignificant as our wrong thoughts grow weak and insignificant. Instructed and concentrated thinking can work miracles, for it can turn the water of error into the costly wine of truth.