It has been said that the individual loses himself in the ‘masses’ or at least that he tends more and more to lose himself; this ‘confusion’ in quantitative multiplicity corresponds, again by inversion, to ‘fusion’ in the principial unity. In that unity the being possesses all the fullness of his possibilities ‘transformed’, so that it can be said that distinction understood in the qualitative sense is there carried to its supreme degree, while at the same time all separation has disappeared;[36] in pure quantity, on the other hand, separation is at its maximum, since in quantity resides the very principle of separativity, and the being is the more ‘separated’ and shut up in himself the more narrowly his possibilities are limited, that is, the less his essential aspect comprises of quality; but at the same time, since he is to that extent less distinguished qualitatively from the bulk of the ‘masses’, he really tends to become confused with it. The word ‘confusion’ is particularly appropriate here because it evokes the wholly potential indistinction of ‘chaos’, and nothing less than chaos is in fact in question, since the individual tends to be reduced to his substantial aspect alone, which is what the scholastics would call a ‘matter without form’ where all is in potency and nothing in act, so that the final term, if it could be attained, would be a real ‘dissolution’ of everything that has any positive reality in the individual; and for the very reason that they are extreme opposites, this confusion of beings in uniformity appears as a sinister and ‘satanic’ parody of their fusion in unity.
10
The Illusion of Statistics
Returning now to the consideration of the more specifically ‘scientific’ point of view as the modern world understands it, its chief characteristic is obviously that it seeks to bring everything down to quantity, anything that cannot be so treated being left out of account and is regarded as more or less non-existent. Nowadays people commonly think and say that anything that cannot be ‘put into figures’, or in other words, cannot be expressed in purely quantitative terms, for that reason lacks any ‘scientific’ value; and this assumption holds sway not only in ‘physics’ in the ordinary sense of the word, but in all the sciences ‘officially’ recognized as such in these days, and as we have seen, even the psychological domain is not beyond its reach. It has been made sufficiently clear in earlier chapters that this outlook involves losing touch with everything that is truly essential, in the strictest interpretation of the word; also that the ‘residue’ that alone comes within the grasp of such a science is in reality quite incapable of explaining anything whatever; but there is one highly characteristic feature of modern science that deserves further emphasis, for it indicates with particular distinctness how far science deludes itself about what can be deduced from mere numerical evaluations; this feature is moreover directly connected with the subject of the previous chapter.
The tendency to uniformity, which extends into the ‘natural’ domain and is not confined to the human domain alone, leads to the idea, which even becomes established as a sort of principle (only it ought to be called a ‘pseudo-principle’), that there exist repetitions of identical phenomena; but this, by virtue of the ‘principle of indiscernibles’, is no more than a sheer impossibility. A good example of this idea is afforded by the current assertion that ‘the same causes always produce the same effects’, and this, enunciated in that form, is inherently absurd, for there cannot in fact ever be the same causes or the same effects in a successional order of manifestation; is it not quite commonplace for people to go so far as to say that ‘history repeats itself’, whereas the truth is only that there are analogical correspondences between certain periods and certain events? It would be correct to say that causes that are comparable one to another in certain connections produce effects similarly comparable in the same connections; but, alongside the resemblances, which can if desired be held to represent a kind of partial identity, there are always and inevitably differences, because of the simple fact that there are by hypothesis two distinct things in question and not only one single thing. It is true that these differences, for the very reason that they represent qualitative distinctions, become less as the degree of manifestation of the things considered becomes lower, and that consequently there is then a corresponding increase of resemblance, so that in some cases a superficial and incomplete observation might give the impression of a sort of identity; but actually differences are never wholly eliminated, and this must be so in the case of anything that is not beneath the level of manifestation altogether. Even if there were no differences left other than those arising from the ever-changing influence of time and place, they could still never be entirely negligible; it is true however that this cannot be understood unless account is taken of the fact that real space and time are not, as modern conceptions would have them, merely homogenous containers and modes of pure quantity, but that on the contrary temporal and spatial determinations have also a qualitative aspect. However that may be, it is legitimate to ask how people who neglect differences, and as it were refuse to see them, can possibly claim that an ‘exact’ science has been built up; strictly and in fact there can be no ‘exact’ science but pure mathematics, which happens to be concerned with the domain of quantity alone. That being the case, all the rest of modern science is, and can only be, a tissue of more or less crude approximations, and that not only in its applications, in which everyone is compelled to acknowledge the inevitable imperfection of the means of observation and measurement, but even from a purely theoretical point of view as welclass="underline" the unrealizable suppositions that provide almost the entire foundation of ‘classical’ mechanics, while these in turn provide the basis for the whole of modern physics, could be used to furnish a multitude of characteristic examples.[37]
The founding of a science more or less on the notion of repetition brings in its train yet another delusion of a quantitative kind, the delusion that consists in thinking that the accumulation of a large number of facts can be of use by itself as ‘proof’ of a theory; nevertheless, even a little reflection will make it evident that facts of the same kind are always indefinite in multitude, so that they can never all be taken into account, quite apart from the consideration that the same facts usually fit several different theories equally well. It will be said that the establishment of a greater number of facts does at least give more ‘probability’ to a theory; but to say so is to admit that no certitude can be arrived at in that way, and that therefore the conclusions promulgated have nothing ‘exact’ about them; it is also an admission of the wholly ‘empirical’ character of modern science, although, by a strange irony, its partisans are pleased to accuse of ‘empiricism’ the knowledge of the ancients, whereas exactly the opposite is the truth: for this ancient knowledge, of the true nature of which they have no idea whatever, started from principles and not from experimental observations, so that it can truly be said that profane science is built up exactly the opposite way round to traditional science. Furthermore, insufficient as ‘empiricism’ is in itself, that of modern science is very far from being integral, since it neglects or sets aside a considerable part of the evidence of experience, the very part that has a specifically qualitative character; for perceptual experience cannot, any more than any other kind of experience, have a bearing on pure quantity as its object, and the nearer is the approach to pure quantity the greater is the distance from the reality which nevertheless is supposed to be grasped and to be explained; in fact it is not at all difficult to see that the most recent theories are also those that have the least relation to reality, and most readily replace it by ‘conventions’. These conventions cannot be said to be wholly arbitrary, for it is not really possible that they should be so, since the making of any convention necessarily involves there being some reason for making it, but at least they are as arbitrary as possible; that is to say, they have as it were only a minimum of foundation in the true nature of things.
36
This is the meaning of Eckhart’s expression ‘fused, but not confused’, which A. K. Coomaraswamy, in the article mentioned earlier, very pointedly compares with the meaning of the Sanskrit expression
37
Where, for example, has anyone ever seen a ‘heavy material point’, or a ‘perfectly elastic solid’, an ‘unstretchable and weightless thread’, or any other of the no less imaginary ‘entities’ with which this science is replete, though it is regarded as being above all else ‘rational’.