CHAPTER VI.

THE MUTUAL RELATION OF THE SELF AND THE NOT-SELF (Continued).
It may perhaps be useful to the reader, especially the western reader, if a rapid sketch of modern European thought on the subject is given here, showing how its developments stand at the same level, though necessarily with very great differences of method and details, as the second form of Vedanta above given in essence, and the third form current thereof also, viz., the Advaita or non-dualistic. The nature of the Advaita view will also appear in the course of this sketch.
Indian thought — in all departments of research in which we possess tangible results of it in the shape of Samskrit and Prakrit works — has seldom lost sight of the fact that the end and aim of knowledge is, directly or indirectly, the alleviation of pain and the promotion of happi- ness ; the end and aim of the supreme know- 45
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ledge being the alleviation of the supreme pain of the fear of annihilation, and the promotion of the supreme pleasure of the assurance of immortality and self-dependence. The dominant motive of that thought therefore is ethico-religious. Even works on grammar and mathematics do not forget to state at the outset that they subserve the attainment of mukti, liberation, salvation, in some way or other.
Modern western thought, on the other hand, has, for various reasons, historical and evolution- ary, become disconnected with religion — which in its perfection and completeness is the one science of all sciences, knoivledge pre-eminently, the Veda as it is named in Samskrit. The mainspring of this western knowledge is mainly intellectual, knowledge for the sake of know- ledge— at least as that mainspring is described by some of those in whose hands it has made progress, especially in science. This fallacy, as it is, despite its brilliant results in science and philosophy, has its own good reasons for coming into existence, as may be understood later. That it is a fallacy may be inferred, in passing, even from the one single and simple fact that public common sense and public instinct and public need have declined to rest content with a mere subjective and poetical admiration of the
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scientific discoveries recorded and registered in bulky tomes and journals, but have assiduously applied them, and continue to apply them, with an ever-increasing eagerness and demand, to the purposes of daily life, for the amelioration of its pains and the enhancement of its pleasures ; and this, with a success in the mechanical arts and appliances of peace and war, conquest and commerce, which makes the western races the rulers of the surface of this earth at the present day.
In the meanwhile, that western thought has approached metaphysic proper from the side of psychology or rather epistemology, the theory of knowledge, almost exclusively. It examines the nature of the Self and the Not-Self in their relation to each other as cogniser and cognised, subject and object, knower and known, rather than in their other relations to each other of desiror and desired, and actor and acted on. In other words, it at first confined itself mainly to the relation of jnana, cognition, and did not take much more than incidental account of ichchha, i.e., desire, and kriya, i.e., action. These, in their metaphysical bearing, it left for long entirely to theology, though, of course, the later thinkers have not been able to avoid a survey of the whole field of life from the standpoint they ultimately reached.
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Thus it has happened that Berkeley, enquir- ing into the relation of the knower and known under the names of mind and matter, came to the conclusion that the very being of matter is its perceptibility by a mind. Its esse is its percipi. What matter is apart from its cognisa- bility by the mind, we cannot say ; indeed, we may well say, it is nothing apart from the mind. Thus that which we have regarded so long as out of us, apart from us, independent of us, is in reality dependent on us, is within us ; " without is within." l
Hume came after Berkeley and he may be said to have shown with equal cogency that, if the being of matter is perceptibility, the being of mind is percipience ; that if we do not know matter except as it is known — almost an Irishism (Bishop Berkeley was an Irish Bishop !), but with a special fulness of signifi- cance— we also do not know mind except as it knows, and apart from what it knows. What is mind but something cognising something ? Vacant mind, empty of all cognition, we know nothing about ; therefore within is without.
Thus then between Berkeley and Hume the status quo of the problem was restored, and the shopkeeper in his shop and the ploughman
1 J. H. Stirling's English Translation of Schwegler's History of Philosophy. P. 419 (annotations).
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at his plough might well feel delighted to think that these two philosophers in combination were no wiser than they, though each taken separately might have appeared something very fearfully profound ; that the net product of these mountains in labour was that mind was that which knew matter, and that matter was that which was known by mind. And yet to the careful scrutiny it was apparent that the fact of a very close and intimate tie, an unbreakable nexus, of mutual and complete interdependence between these opposites, mind and matter, had been made apparent, as it was not before apparent, to all who had not travelled along the paths of enquiry trodden by these two, either in their company, or in those of their elders and predecessors in the race of thinkers, or, it may be, by themselves and alone. The problem was therefore the richer for the labours of Berkeley and Hume, and had now a newer and deeper significance.
Kant took it up at this stage. What is the nature, what are the laws, of this unbreakable bond between mind and matter ? What are they ? How do they affect each other ? Within is without and without is within is all right enough : but this mutual absorption shows independence as well as interdependence. Two men may appear to be standing on each other's
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shoulders by twisting themselves double ; but even this can be only appearance ; each must have at least a secret fulcrum, a solid standing- ground. After many years' hard thinking he came to the conclusion that each man did have such a separate standing-ground. Behind mind was a thing-in-itself,1 and behind matter was a thing-in-itself ; and from these two noumena there irradiated and corruscated, spontaneously and by inherent nature, phenomena which entangled themselves with each other and produced what we know as mind and matter. But, Kant added, the phenomena that issued from the mental thing-in-itself were few in number and took the shape of laws and ' forms,' into which the phenomena that streamed from the material thing-in-itself as ' sensations ' — the ' matter ' of knowledge, as opposed to its ' form,' in technical language — fitted in exactly and helplessly, and so an organic whole of systematised knowledge was produced.
But this was worse and worse. The shop- keeper and the ploughman might be excused for staring aghast. We had two difficulties to deal with before, viz., mind and matter ;
1 Compare the tS(?Wfl> sva-lakshana, ' own-mark,' of the Bauddhas.
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now we have four, viz., two things-in-themselves and two (or rather an endless number) of things- in-other -than -themselves ! What are these things-in-themselves ? Some ran away with the idea that they were the unknowable ultimates of the universe ; and whenever that which it most concerns us to know, that which is most necessary for us to know, that which is a matter of life or of death for us to be intimate with or strangers to — whenever that comes up before us, then, these people declared, we must shut our eyes and turn away and say : " We cannot know you, the limits of human know- ledge have been already reached and circum- scribed." Others, impressed by the stately technical harness and trappings of the philosophy, but not caring to examine beneath those externals, took to themselves the belief that these things-in-themselves were knowable in some mystic state, unmindful that the very definition of " thing-in-itself " excluded any such possibility of cognition, that as soon as anything is cognised it ceases by that very fact to be a thing-in-itself, and that the thing-in-itself retires inwards, beneath and behind that which has been cognised, and which forthwith becomes an attribute and a phenomenon veiling the now deeper thing-in-itself. Thus many theories and
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schools arose on the basis of the labours of Kant and under the shadow of his 'critical philosophy,' as it was called. But the plain and patent objection to the conclusions of Kant was that instead of an explanation he had given us only an increase of confusion. As Stirling has pointed out in his annotations to Schwegler's History of Philosophy and his Text-book to Kant, and as Schelling also seems to have hinted,1 there was no superior law provided by Kant, as was most imperatively needed, to regulate and govern the fitting of sense-phenomena (the matter) into the so-called laws (the forms) of mind, the mind-phenomena. If there was something inherent in the sense- phenomena which guided them instinctively to close with the right laws, then that same instinct might well enable them to marshal themselves out into systematic knowledge with- out the help of any of these mental laws either. On the other hand, if the mind-phenomena had something in them which would enable them to select the right sense-phenomena for operation, then they might also very well have in themselves the power to create such phenomena without the aid of any material thing-in-itself. Kant himself seems to have
1 Ueberweg. History of Philosophy (English translation). II., 216. (Art. 'Schelling.')
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felt these difficulties in his later days, and to have begun to see that the mental thing-in- itself was nothing else than the pure Ego, and that this Ego was the law and the source of all laws. Perhaps he had also begun to see that the pure Ego was not only thing-in-itself to mind, but also, in some way or other, thing- in-itself to matter too. But it was not given to him to work out and attain those last results in that life of his ; and Fichte took up and onward the work left unfinished by Kant. Fichte clearly saw the necessity, in the interests of mental satisfaction, true internal liberty and respite from restless doubt, of deducing the whole mass and detail of the universe from a single principle with which the human Jiva could find the inviolable refuge of identity ; and he also saw therefore that this principle must be the Ego. Fichte is the western thinker who, of all known western thinkers, ancient as well as modern, appears to have come nearest the final truth, attained closest to the ultimate explanation of the universe. He divides with Schelling and Hegel, in current public judgment, the high honour of leading a large mass of humanity, in the west, away from the deadly pits of blind belief on the one hand and blind scepticism on the other, towards the lifeful and magnificent
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mountain heights of a reasoned knowledge of the boundlessness and unsurpassable dignity of the Jiva's life. Some are inclined to place Hegel's work higher than Fichte's, especially Stirling, who has spent a lifetime on the study of German thinkers, and whose opinion on any matter connected with them is therefore entitled to the highest respect. Yet it may be said that, though Hegel's work was fuller in detail and more encyclopaedic in its comprehension of the sciences than Fichte's, Fichte's enunciation of the basic principle of the world-process is more centre - reaching, more luminous — one would almost say wholly luminous, were it not for a last remaining unexplained difficulty — than Hegel's. And therefore it may also be said that Fichte has gone a step further than Hegel. The man's noble and transparent personal life deserved too that he should see more closely and clearly the nobility and transparence of the truth. Hegel's life was also free from blame, and yet it does not seem to have been so selfless as Fichte's, and therefore he probably saw the truth under a slightly thicker veil. It may be that if Fichte had lived longer he would have explained the last difficulty that remains behind at the end of his work ; he would then have applied a master-key to all the problems and the sciences that Hegel has dealt with, and
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opened up their hearts with a surer touch. It may also be that if Hegel had lived longer he might have completed his system, which also suffers from a single last want, by means of Fichte's single principle, and so have done the same work that might have been done by Fichte. In the combination of the two lies great promise of satisfaction. On the whole, then, because of the view that Fichte has gone further than Hegel, what has to be said here about Hegel will be said first and Fichte taken up after- wards.
But before taking up Hegel, a word should be given to Schelling, who has very much in common with Hegel. The two were contem- poraries and associates of each other and partly of Fichte's also, both being greatly influenced by Fichte. But Schelling failed to make such a lasting impression on European philosophy as did Hegel, because of a certain lack of con- sistency and of stringency and rigour of thought and genetic construction such as those which Hegel carried into effect. The net addition made by Schelling to the stock of western philosophy may be said to be a deeper and fuller view of the law of relativity, viz., the law that two opposites imply each other. The point which Hegel emphasised so much does not seem to have occurred to him, that such
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opposites further inhere in a third something, which is not exclusively and wholly either the one or the other, but somehow includes and contains both, and is itself the aggregate of the two. What Hamilton and Mansel of England derived from Schelling, and Herbert Spencer from them, is that as everything implies its opposite so the whole of the world, the whole mass of relatives, of opposites, being taken together as one term — which may be called the Relative — this whole would necessarily imply its opposite, the Absolute. Hamilton and Mansel vaguely called this Absolute, God ; Herbert Spencer called it the Unknowable. In one sense this conclusion is true; in another it is only a verbal quibble, so that critics have not been wanting to point out that the absolute and the relative make a new relation, a new pair of opposites which also requires an opposite in a higher absolute and so on endlessly.1
Hegel put a stop to this unfruitful and fatuous endlessness of higher and higher absolutes, which really explains nothing and is a contra- diction in terms, by showing that when all opposites had been once heaped together under
1 For various criticisms of Spencer's view on this subject, see Caird, Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, ch. i. ; and also Spencer's own Replies to Criticisms, published in his collected Essays.
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the Relative, no further opposite could be left outside of this mass in the shape of an absolute; that if such a train of reasoning was to be followed at all, the logical conclusion should be that the Absolute was immanent in the mass of the Relative ; that every thing contained its opposite within itself, and that the true Absolute would be complete when opposites had been resolved into each other, so that no further search for a higher absolute was left to make. Hegel's most important contribution to meta- physic accordingly seems to be a full develop- ment and application of the law that two opposites, two extremes, always find their recon- ciliation in a third something, a mean, which, as said before, is neither the one nor the other exclusively but both taken together. Applying this principle to the world-process in the mass, he first analyses it into two pure opposites, pure Being and pure Nothing, and then proceeds to state that the collapse of these two into each other is ' becoming,' is the world-process. The fact that 'becoming' is the conjunction of Being and Nothing, and that every particular combines and reconciles within itself two opposites ; and the consequent law that the reconciliation of two extremes should be always sought for in the mean, and that extremes should always be regarded as a violent and unnatural disruption
F
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of the mean — this fact and this law are pro- foundly significant and very helpful to bear in mind in all departments of life. But yet the mere statement of them, which is practically all that Hegel has done, leaves behind a sense of dissatisfaction. The why and the how are not explained ; and the why and the how necessarily come up when we begin with two and not with one. If we begin with one and can maintain it changeless, then none may ask why and how. Merely to say that every change implies a falling of Being into Nothing and of Nothing into Being is perfectly true ; but is true only as breaking down some old precon- ceived notions obstructive to further progress, true as a stimulus to further enquiry ; it is not quite immediately satisfactory in itself or helpful towards the solution of the final doubt. It was declared long before Hegel, and declared a thousand times, that the world of things is Being, ^, sat, as well as Non-Being, ^THWN, asat ; that it is both and that it is neither ; but the state- ment remains dark, unlighted. Where is the lamp to light it up and to make all clear at once ?
Then this speaking in the third person, Being and Nothing, instead of in the first and second person, Self and Not-Self, (' I ' and ' you,')1 rein-
1 Shankara. Shdrtraka-BMshya, the very first paragraph.
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vests the whole problem with the old strangeness, which we were at so much pains to transform into the home-feeling that goes with the words Self and Not-Self. Being means Self to us ; and Nothing is nothing else than Not-Self (in the sense of a denial of the Self), if it is any- thing at all. To talk of Being and Nothing after Fichte has talked of Ego and Non-Ego is to take a regressive rather than a progressive step. Indeed, this may be said, in a sense, to be the greatest defect of Hegel's system. To speak in terms of ' pure universal notions,' of Being and Nothing, &c, instead of Self and Not-Self and their derivatives, to imply that ' spirit ' (in the sense of Self) is subsequent to ' pure immaterial thought,' is to walk on the head and hands instead of the feet. There may be a little progress made even in that way. But the tumbles are frequent, and the whole process is invested with an immense and most unnatural strain. Of course, it is clear that if we would deal with psychology and metaphysic we must introspect, we must look inwards, more or less, we must turn our eyes in a direction opposite to that in which we usually employ them in ordinary life. But Hegel insists that while we should so turn our head and eyes, we must keep our chests in the old position ! This involves a twisting-round of the neck which is
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well-nigh impossible. Hence Hegel's preter- natural difficulty.
Moreover while pure Being and pure Nothing might well be allowed to combine into pure becoming, whence comes this endless multi- plicity of particular becomings, or rather 'becomes,' i.e., of special things that have become? Hegel does not seem to have ex- plained this ; although it seems necessary and even quite easy to do so from the standpoint of a true definition of the Absolute. A single word explains it. Has Hegel said that word ? It does not appear that he has. If he has, then there is nothing more to be said against him on this score. Yet the story goes that Krug once asked Hegel to deduce his particular writing quill from the general principle that Being and Nothing make becoming, and that Hegel could reply with a smile only. Stirling talks of Krug's ' ridiculous expectation ' ; it seems to others that Krug's request was perfectly fair and legitimate. The arbitrariness of Krug's particular quill does require to be explained away.
Again, Hegel's fundamental proposition, the very base ancf foundation of his system — vtz.t that Being and Nothing are the same and yet opposite, and that their mutual mergence makes becoming, which indeed is the true Absolute — is
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full of dissatisfaction. It may be true, nay, it is true, in a certain sense, that Being and Nothing are the same and yet opposed ; but it is not Hegel who tells us what that certain sense is. It may be true, nay, it is true, in a certain sense, that becoming is the Absolute ; but it is not Hegel who tells us what that sense is. On the contrary, the general impression is that Hegel began with a violent petitio principii when he assumed that Being and Nothing though opposite are the same, and so took for granted the very reconciliation of opposites which it was his business to prove. After assuming that the two most opposed of all opposites are identical with each other, it is truly easy to reconcile all other opposites that may come up for treatment later.
Then, what is meant by saying or implying that becoming is the Absolute? If the word becoming is taken to mean the totality of the world-process from the beginning to the end of beginningless and endless time, then of course an absolute may be meant, but such an absolute remains absolutely unilluminative and useless. Hegel says (as summarised by Schwegler) : " the absolute is, firstly, pure immaterial thought ;~. secondly, heterisation of pure thought, disrup- tion of thought into the infinite atomism of time and space — nature ; thirdly, it returns out
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of this its self-externalisation and self-alienation back into its own self, it resolves the heterisation of nature, and only in this way becomes at last actual, self-cognisant thought, spirit" Perhaps, then, he means not the totality of the world- process, but a growing, maturing, absolute. But the absoluteness of an evolving changing thing or thought is a very doubtful thing and thought. Indeed there should be no distinction of thing and thought in the Absolute ; and this it is one of the very hardest and subtlest tasks of metaphysic to explain away. The general impression left by Hegel is that the Absolute is an idea which finds its gradual expression and manifestation and realisation in the things, the becomings, of the world-process ; and that consequently there is a difference of nature between the idea and the things. But if there is any such difference, then the things fall out- side of the idea and have to be explained, and the whole task begins again. But even apart from this difficulty, which constitutes a separate doubt by itself, is the main difficulty of a changing absolute. The elementary Veda- texts, which helped as temporary guides at an earlier stage of the journey, and which said that the Self multiplied itself into many, had to be abandoned (for the time being at least) for want of sufficient reason and justification for the
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changing moods of a Supreme. We have been pining all along for changelessness, for rest and peace amidst this fearful turmoil. Hegel gives us an endlessness of change. He says the Absolute realises itself through nature in and into the individual ; otherwise, the already supreme and perfect God developes into and finds himself in perfected man. A doctrine unsatisfactory enough in the mouth of any one and much more so in the mouth of Hegel — who knows nothing, or at least indicates nothing of the knowledge, of the vast evolution and involution of worlds upon worlds, material elements and Jivas, of the incessant descent of spirit into matter and its reascent into itself. What does Hegel say as to where and when the Absolute began its evolution and when it will complete and end it? Has he anywhere entered into the question whether this actual self-cognisant spirit, this perfected individual, this perfected man who has achieved that combination of reason with desire or will which makes the true freedom, the true internal liberty, moksha — whether such an individual is completed in and arises at a definite point of time, or is only an infinitely receding possibility of the endless future? There were millions of in- dividualised human Jivas upon earth in the
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time of Hegel. Had the Absolute finished evolution in them or any of them, and if not, as it clearly had not, then why not? Such are the legitimate questions that may in all fairness be put to Hegel. He does not seem to have answered them. And yet each and everyone of them should and can be answered from the standpoint of a complete metaphysic. It is not probable that Hegel in this birth, and in the life and surroundings of the period he lived and worked in, viz., the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nine- teenth century of the Christian era, knew all the even general details about the kosmic evolution of combined spirit and matter, which have since then become accessible to the human race. He ridicules the doctrine of rebirth,1 showing thereby that he did not realise the full significance and extensive ap- plication of some of the metaphysical laws which he himself, or Fichte and Schelling before him, stated. Yet these details, as ascer- tained by the masters of yoga and embodied to a certain extent in the extant Puranas and other Samskrit and Prakrit writings, are alone capable of providing a basis for a true and
1 Hegel. History of Philosophy. English Translation. I. Art. " Pythagoras."
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comprehensive metaphysic ; for they, in the very act of pointing out the way to the final goal, explain how they themselves are in- separately connected with and derived from that goal. And if Hegel was not acquainted with such details, it is no wonder that his meta- physic remains incomplete. It is, indeed, a wonder, on the contrary, that it is so full as it is. It may, on the other hand, be that it was given to a man who saw so much and so deeply to see more also, and that he did not say all he knew for special internal or external reasons. This is the view that Stirling takes, in pointing out Hegel's shortcomings, especially in his work entitled, What is Thought? Stirling probably had not in mind, when stating such a view, anything about information derivable by means of a higher develop- ment of human faculties through yoga. What most concerns us here to know is that such a lifelong student of Hegel as Stirling declares, with all the weight and authority of such study, that there is a radical defect in the system, and that a key is wanted which perhaps Hegel might have given if he had lived longer, that is to say assuming that he himself had it.
We see thus that, while Schelling and Hegel made a very close approach to the final expla-
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nation, they do not seem to have quite grasped it. Let us now examine what appears to have been in some respects an even closer approach than theirs.
Fichte, as said before, realised and stated that the Ego was the only true universal, perfectly unconditioned in matter as well as in form (in the technical language of German thinkers), about the certainty of which there was not possible any doubt. And from this universal, he endeavoured to deduce the whole of the world -process. His deduction is usually summed up in three steps : Ego = Ego ; Non-Ego is not = Ego ; Ego in part=Non-Ego, and Non- Ego in part = Ego. There is first the thesis, the position of identity: 'I' is 'I'; secondly, there is the antithesis, the op-position of contradiction : 'I 'is not 'Not- 1'; lastly, there is the synthesis, the corn-position of a reconciliation of the opposites by mutual limitation, mutual yielding, a com- promise in which the ' I ' becomes, i.e., takes on the characteristics of, the 'Not-I,' and the 'Not-I' of the ' I.' And this is entirely and irrefutably in accordance with the facts of the world- process as they are there under our very eyes. No known western thinker has improved upon this summary of the essential nature of the world-process ; and it is difficult to understand how Stirling has failed to give due meed to
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this great work. In his annotation to Schwegler he says with regard to Fichte : " What is said about the universal Ego ... is not satisfactory. Let us generalise as much as we please, we still know no Ego but the empirical Ego and can refer to none other."1 Now, with the respect one has for Stirling's metaphysical acumen, one can only say that this statement of his is very difficult to understand. For it is exactly equiva- lent to the entire denial of the possibility of an 'abstract,' simply because we can never definitely cognise anything but a concrete with our physical senses. As said before, in dealing with the process by which the nature of the universal Self is established, the mere fact of a diversity, of the many, of concretes and particulars, necessarily requires for its existence, for its being brought into relief, the support and background of a continuity, a unity, an abstract and universal. The two, abstract and concrete, universal and particular, are just as inseparable as back and front. But looking for a highest universal and a lowest particular we find that the extremes meet. The highest universal, pure Being, TOTTTrRra, satta-samanya, is also the most irreducible point. The universal Ego is also the individual ego (the so-called empirical ego) ; the
1 Stirling's Schwegler. P. 428.
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universal Being and the anu, atom, of the Vaishe- shika system of philosophy, correspond to the Pratyag-atma and the atom which, enshrining a self, is the Jiv-atma. Between these two limits, which are not two but one, the all- comprehending substratum of all the world- process, there fall and flow all other pseudo- universals and pseudo-particulars ; pseudo, because each falls as a particular under a higher universal (or general) and at the same time covers some lower particulars (specials). The universal Ego is thus the only true, abso- lutely certain and final universal. " Hegel, in opposition to Fichte, . . . held that it is ... not the Ego that is the prius of all reality, but, on the contrary, something universal, a universal which comprehends within it every individual."1 This is where the deviation from the straight path began. It began with Hegel. And the results were : (i) that dissatisfaction with Hegel which Stirling confesses to again and again ; and (2) a tacit reversion, by Stirling himself, to that impregnable position of Fichte (as shown throughout Stirling's last work, What is Thought? in which he endeavours to make out that the double subject-object, ' I-me,' is the true Absolute). For if "we know no ego
^ Ibid. P. 315.
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but the empirical ego," how much more do we know no being but empirical and particular beings, no nothing but empirical and particular non-commencements or destructions. Ego and Non-Ego we understand ; they are directly and primarily in our constitution ; nay, they are the whole of our constitution, essence and accidence, core and crust, inside and outside, the very whole of it. But Being and Nothing we understand only through Ego and Non-Ego ; otherwise they are en- tirely strange and unfamiliar. Being is nothing else than position, positing, affirmation by consciousness, by the ' I ' ; Non- Being is nothing else than opposition, centra-position, denial by that same '!.' Stirling practically admits as much in What is Thought? Fichte's approach, then, is the closer and not Hegel's, and Stirling's opinion that "the historical value of the method of Fichte will shrink, in the end, to its influence on Hegel " l is annulled by his own latest research and finding. The probability indeed, on the contrary, is that Hegel's work will come to take its proper place in the appreciation of true students as only an attempt at a filling and completion of the outlines traced out by the earnest,
1 Ibid. P. 427.
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intense, noble and therefore truth-seeing spirit of Fichte.1
By sheer force of intense gaze after the truth Fichte has reached, even amidst the storm and stress of a life cast in times when empires were rising and falling around him, conclusions which were generally reached in India only with the help of a yoga-vision developed by long practice amidst the contemplative calm of forest-solitudes and mountain-heights.2 Page
1 Dr. J. H. Stirling, in a very kind letter, writes as below, on this point : " Dr. Hutchinson Stirling would beg to remark only that he is not sure that Mr. Bhagavan Das has quite correctly followed the distinction between Fichte's and Hegel's use of the Ego in deduction of the categories — the distinction at least that is proper to Stirling's interpretation of both : Stirling holding, namely, that Fichte, while without provision for an external world as an external world, has only an external motive or movement in his Dialectic, and is withal in his deduction itself incomplete ; whereas Hegel, with provision for externality, is inside of his principle, and in his deduction infinitely deeper, fuller, and at least completer." I give this extract from Dr. Stirling's letter with the view that it may help readers to check and correct any errors made in this chapter, in the comparative appreciation of Hegel and Fichte.
Professor J. E. McTaggart, of Trinity College, Cambridge, also writes : "... I still maintain that Hegel has got nearer the truth than Fichte."
2 Fichte's lecture on The Dignity of Man (pp. 331 — 336 of the Science of Knowledge, translated by A. Kroeger) is full of statements, which might be read as meaning, on Fichte's part, a belief in the evolution of the Jiv-atmi of the kind described in vedantic and theosophical literature, in direct contrast to Hegel's statements.
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after page of his work reads like translations from Vedanta works. Schwegler, apparently unmindful of their value and even disagreeing with them, sums up the conclusions of Fichte in words which simply reproduce the conclusions of the Advaita- Vedanta as now current in India. Fichte's statement, quoted above, as to the transference of their characteristics to each other by the Ego and the Non-Ego, is the lan- guage of Shafikara at the very commencement of his commentary, the SJidriraka-Bhdshya, on the Brahma- Stitra. His distinction between the absolute Ego and the individual or empirical ego is the distinction between the higher Atma and the Jiva. The words ' higher Atma ' are used here because one of the last defects and difficulties of the current Advaita- Vedanta turns exactly, as it does in Fichte, on the confusion between Pratyag-atma and Param-atma, the universal Ego and the true Absolute. Again, Fichte's view is thus stated by Schwegler : " The business of the theoretical part was to conciliate Ego and Non-Ego. To this end middle term after middle term was intercalated without success. Then came reason with the absolute decision: 'Inasmuch as the Non-Ego is incapable of union with the Ego, Non-Ego there shall be none.'" This is to all appearance exactly the Vedanta method, whereby predicate after pre-
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dicate is superimposed upon the Supreme, and predicate after predicate refuted and struck away as inappropriate, till the naked Ego remains as the unlimited which is the negation of all that is not-unlimited, and the searcher exclaims, " I am Brahman," 1 and " the Many is not at all,"2 as the two most famous Veda- texts, great sentences (in the Samskrit phrase, maha-vakyas) or logia, the foundation of the Advaita-Vedahta, describe it. The opposition between the (undistinguished) Brahman or Atm& or Ego, on the one hand, and the Non- Ego, on the other, is stated correctly by the vedantis thus : (The Atma is) that of which akasha (ether), air, fire, water and earth are the vivartas, opposites, perversions.3 The relation between them is indicated by Mad- husudana Sarasvati in a manner which comes home to the reader even more closely than Fichte's : " Brahman dreams all this universe, and its waking is the reduction of it all to illusion."4
Thus we see that some of the most important conclusions of the current Advaita-Ved£nta
1 Brihad-Aranyaka. I. iv. 10.
2 Ibid. IV. iv. 19.
3 Bh&mati. P. I.
* SaUkshepa-Sh&rtraka- Ttka. Hi. 240.
THE SELF AND THE NOT-SELF. 73
have been independently reached by this truly great German thinker. And in seeing this, we have ourselves taken a step further than we had done when we left the Vishishtadvaita system as the second result of the last endeavour to solve the supreme question of questions. We have seen that the current Advaita-Vedanta is an advance upon the Vishishtadvaita. We have also seen that Fichte and Hegel are supplementary to each other. For, while Fichte's dialectic is the more internal, starting with the Ego, and therefore the truer and less artificial, it follows out the world-process up to the end of two stages only, as it were, those of origination and preservation, z'.e., the present existing order of things, a commingling of the Ego and the Non-Ego ; whereas Hegel's dialectic — though external, starting with Being, return- ing however to thought afterwards, and therefore the more artificial — in a way completes the circuit of the world-process to the last stage, that of destruction, dissolution, or return to the original condition. (The words ' in a way ' have been used for want of the certainty that the full significance of this cyclic law and triple succession of origin, preservation and dissolution of the kosmic systems which make up the world-process, G
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and which law is reiterated over and over again in all Samskrit literature, was present to the minds of Fichte and Hegel). We feel now that Hegel, Fichte and current Advaita-Vedanta have come quite close to the very heart of the secret ; we feel that it cannot now be very far off; we are not only face to face with the lock that closes the whole treasure-house of explanations of all possible mysteries and secrets and con- fusions, but also hold in our hands the key which we feel is the only key to the lock ; and not only do we hold the key, but in our struggles with the key and the lock we have, in the good company of the Indian vedantis and the German idealists, broken through panes of the door-leaves and almost moved the door away from its hinges, and obtained many a glimpse and even plain view of many of those treasures and secrets. Yet the key will not quite turn in the lock. Some rust-stain somewhere, some defect of construction, prevents this.
The defect, some features of which have been already pointed out in treating of Hegel, is that we cannot deny altogether this Non-Ego. We cannot quite convince ourselves that it is pure Non-being, 'fcwin^if , atyantasat It seems both existent and non-existent, *l^nrx, sadasat.
THE SELF AND THE NOT-SELF. 75
Whence this appearance of existence in it ? The last unexplained crux of the current Advaita- Vedanta is the connection between Brahman, the Absolute, and Maya, the illusion of the world-process. As with Fichte's Non- Ego, so with the vedanti's Maya, there remains behind an appearance of artificiality, of a deus ex machind, a lack of organic connection — a lack of the working of the whole world- process into and out of it, in the arrange- ment between it, on the one hand, and the Ego, or Brahman, on the other. Why should Brahman dream ? A hundred different ways of enunciation and illustration are tried by the ordinary vedanti. None is satis- factory. And therefore the current Advaita does not reach to the final stage of a true Advaita. When pressed, it, like Fichte, falls back upon the position that May& (Non-Ego, with Fichte) is wholly Non-being, instead of both existent and non-existent, and this we cannot quite bring home to ourselves. Besides this difficulty there is the process of change : the ' I ' opposes to itself the ' Not- 1 ' and reverts again to an original condition. Why ? Our Absolute must be above change. Again, there seems to be an artificiality and arbitrariness about the ' Not- 1 ' in another way. Why any one particular ' Not-I ' ? Fichte's deduction of
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the world-process is effected in a syllogism of three steps, three propositions, and even then it does not quite complete the process but leaves it half-finished. It ought to be complete in one proposition, one single act of conscious- ness, otherwise the difficulty of change in the Absolute remains unsolved.
There are expressions and indications that to the mind of Fichte and other German thinkers, as to the mind of the vedanti, there is present the distinction between eternity or rather timelessness, WRSffirhTiTT, kalatitata, on the one hand, and time, 1RT&, kala, on the other. In this distinction lies the clue to much of the secret, and yet it does not seem to have been utilised. It is not properly utilised in the extant books on Advaita- Vedanta, although the fact of Brahman being beyond space and time is reiterated incessantly. Nor does it seem to have been put to much distinct and effective use by Fichte or any other western thinker, though it has been recognised by even such a non-metaphysical but extremely acute reasoner as J. S. Mill, in his Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, as the distinction between the true and the false infinite. One hesitates to say positively that Fichte has left this last work unperformed ; but from the accounts and
THE SELF AND THE NOT-SELF. 77
translations of his writings available in English, this seems to be the case. And yet the secret is there all the time among the ideas expressed in his writings, as much as in the better works of current Advaita-Vedanta. Just the one rust-stain has to be removed from the key, and it will turn and finally unclose the lock and lay open before us what we want.
We want, as said before, that which combines within itself change as well as changelessness. An infinity of change even though it be a change of progress — a progress that has no self-contained and consistent meaning, that is without a definite final goal towards which it is a progress ; an increasing progress which, there is reason to believe, may also be alter- nating with an ever-increasing regress ; a progress in a convolved spiral which, if it turns upwards to ever greater glories of higher and subtler life, may also, by necessary correspon- dence, in accordance with the law of balance, of compensation, of action and reaction, pass downwards too through ever-increasing miseries of lower and grosser densities of matter — such ceaseless, aimless, process, or progress even, means not satisfaction, brings not happiness, but rather a desolate weariness. Fichte has said (to quote again the words of Schwegler) :
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" It is our duty at once, and an impossibility to reach the infinite ; nevertheless just this striving united to this impossibility is the stamp of our eternity."1 Schelling has said the same thing.2 And to the principle of this meta- physical deduction corresponds the actual fact ascertained by yoga and occult science and stated in the Puranas and other theosophical and yoga literature, that there is an endless evolution of the Jiva through body after body and world after world. But this fact is not the whole of truth ; it does not stand by itself. If it did, then such a mere infinity of change/ without a constant and permanent basis of changelessness and peace, would only add the horrors of Sisyphus to the agonies of Tantalus. No soul, however patiently it now accepts — as many do — the doctrine of an endless progress will long feel peace in it by itself. The longing, yearning, all-resistless and unquenchable craving for changelessness and peace and rest will come upon it sooner or later.
Besides this emotional difficulty, this surfeit of unrest, which is now upon us, there is the intellectual difficulty, the impossibility of under- standing the very fact of change. The instinct
1 Schwegler's History of Philosophy. P. 270. 'J.H.Stirling. What is Thought ? Pp. 397-398.
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of the intellect cries out as the very first words of all logic, as the primary laws of all thought, that A is A and that it is not not- A, that Being is Being only and never Nothing. " The non-existent cannot be, and the existent cannot not be."1 And yet every mortal moment of our lives, all around and above and below us, these much-vaunted laws of logic are being violated incessantly. Every infinitesimal instant, something, some existent thing, is becoming non-existent, and some non-existent thing is coming into being, is becoming existent. We may say that it is only the form that behaves like this. But what is the good of saying so ? All that the world really means to us, sounds and sights, tastes, touches, and scents, all is included in the ' form ' that changes. Even weight, it is being attempted to prove by mathematical computations, will change, with change of position, from planet to planet. And finally, those mathematical laws them- selves, on which such computations are based, can no longer boast permanence. They too are being changed by mathematicians, and it is endeavoured to be shown that parallel lines can meet and two things occupy the same space. That we have an indestructible faith
1 Bhagavad-Gttd. ii. 16.
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that matter is indestructible is, to tell the truth, not due to any limited facts we know, for limited data can never justify limitless infer- ences, but is only the unavoidable assignment by us, by the 'I,' of a conjugal share in our own indefeasible eternity, to our undivorceable partner in life, the ' Not- 1,' matter. Such being the case, it does not help us in any way to say that only the form changes. The form is practically everything ; and even if it were not so, even then it is something, it is an existent something at one moment. And what is existent once, should be existent ever. How, why, does it pass into non-existence ? We do not understand change. We do not understand the world-process. If you would have us understand it, you must show that this world- process is not a process at all, but a rock-like fixity. Then only shall we be able to bring it into accord with the primary laws of thought. Such is the difficulty of the exaggerated and yet legitimate demand of the reason, on the one hand.
On the other hand stands the difficulty of what may be called the demand of the senses. A doctrine of mere changelessness is incomplete ; a mere assertion of it perfectly unconvincing. It explains nothing and is not a fact. It is, as just said, denied by every wink of our eyes, by
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every breath of our lungs, by every beat of our hearts. We want that which will combine and harmonise both change and changelessness. We want to reduce each into terms of the other.
Many have been the efforts to shut up the world-process into something which can be held in a single hand, which shall be but one single act of consciousness. Fichte could not do it in less than three successive, unsimultaneous and therefore change-involving steps, and then too but incompletely. The great mystic school of Rosicrucians has endeavoured to do so in one thought and sentence, " I am that I am " ; but this propounds mere changelessness and makes no provision for change. The Veda-texts belonging to the penultimate stage have exclaimed separately, as said before : " I am Brahman " and then : " the Many is not at all " ; but these too are insufficient for our purpose ; they too establish changelessness alone and explain not change.
What we seek shall be obtained by com- pressing the three steps of Fichte into one ; by combining the two separate scripture-utterances into a unity — a small change perhaps, at first sight, but almost as radical and important in result as an alteration of the mere order of letters composing a word, an alteration which
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makes a completely new word with an entirely new meaning.
NOTE. — It may be mentioned here that the Western philosophers especially selected in the text to serve as landmarks on the path of enquiry have been so selected because their special way of thought, arising out of modern conditions, is the freshest and most suited to the modern student and best fitted for the purpose in hand. Other- wise, indeed, the same subjects of enquiry have been and are being investigated by hundreds of the finest intellects of the human race from the most ancient times up to the present day, and different aspects of the same truths and propositions and solutions may be found in the works of the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, and the Neo-Platonists especially, of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, of the mystics, Scheffler, Eckhart, Albrecht, and Boehme, of Bruno and Bacon, and, again, Schopenhauer and Spencer, and many others. Each philosopher worthy of the name, and to whom the name has been given by public recognition, has undoubtedly left the world's stock of philosophical knowledge richer by at least some definite piece of work, a fuller and deeper view of some law, or a new application and use of it, or a new aspect of a question, or fact, or law. Indeed, as may appear later on, the most erroneous-seeming opinion ever held by any thinker will appear, from an all-embracing standpoint, and in a certain sense, to be a not inaccurate description of one aspect of a world-fact, one half of a truth. But some of the latest German thinkers seem to have suc- ceeded better than any of their precursors in Europe in the attempt to systematise and unify. And even amongst these, from such accounts and translations of his writings into English as are available, Fichte appears to be an almost indispensable help to the students of true Vedanta and the higher metaphysic — the higher metaphysic which would enclose so-called occult and superphysical science
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within its principles as well as physical science ; which claims to be a science because it offers to be tested in the same way as every particular science is tested, viz., by endeavouring to show that its hypotheses agree with present facts, and also enable prediction to be made correctly, of results in the future ; which, indeed, claims to be the very science of sciences by providing a great system, a great hypothesis, which, while special sciences systematise and unify limited groups of facts, would systematise and unify all possible world-facts, past, present, and to come.