The
Western idea of evolution is the statement of a process of formation,
not an explanation of our being. Limited to the physical and biological
data of Nature, it does not attempt except in a summary or a superficial
fashion to discover its own meaning, but is content to announce itself
as the general law of a quite mysterious and inexplicable energy. Evolution
becomes a problem in motion which is satisfied to work up with an automatic
regularity its own puzzle, but not to work it out, because, since it
is only a process, it has no understanding of it-self, and, since it
is a blind perpetual automatism of mechanical energy, it has neither
an origin nor an issue. It began perhaps or is always beginning; it
will stop perhaps in time or is always somewhere stopping and going
back to its beginnings, but there is no why, only a great turmoil and
fuss of a how to its beginning and its cessation; for there is in its
acts no fountain of spiritual intention, but only the force of an unresting
material necessity. The ancient idea of evolution was the fruit of a
philosophical intuition, the modern is an effort of scientific observation.
Each as enounced misses something, but the ancient got at the spirit
of the movement where the modern is content with a form and the most
external machinery. The Sankhya thinker gave us the psychological elements
of the total evolutionary process, analysed mind and sense and the subtle
basis of matter and divined some of the secrets of the executive energy,
but had no eye for the detail of the physical labour of Nature. He saw
in it too not only the covering active evident Force, but the concealed
sustaining spiritual entity, though by an excess of the analytic intellect,
obsessed with its love of trenchant scissions and symmetrical oppositions,
he set between meeting Soul and Force an original and eternal gulf or
line of separation. The modern scientist strives to make a complete
scheme and institution of the physical method which he has detected
in its minute workings, but is blind to the miracles each step involves
or content to lose the sense of it in the satisfied observation of a
vast ordered phenomenon. But always the marvel of the thing remains,
one with the inexplicable wonder of all existence, - even as it is said
in the ancient Scripture,
"One
looks on it and sees a miracle, another speaks of it as a miracle,
as a miracle another hears of it, but what it is, for all the hearing,
none knoweth."
We
know that evolution there is, but not what evolution is; that remains
still one of the initial mysteries of Nature.
For
evolution, as is the habit with human rasons's accounts and solutions
of the deep and unfathomable way of the Spirit in things, raises more
questions than it solves; it does not do away with, the problem of creation
for all its appearances of solid orderly fact, any more than the religious
affirmation of an external omnipotent Creator could do it or the Illusionist's
mystic Maya, aghatana- ghatana-patïyasï, very skilful
in bringing about the impossible, some strange existent non-existent
Power with an idea in That which is beyond and without ideas, self-empowered
to create an existent non-existent world, existent because it very evidently
is, non-existent because it is a patched up consistency of dreamful
unreal transiences. The problem is only prolonged, put farther back,
given a subtle and orderly, but all the more challengingly complex appearance.
But, even when our questioning is confined to the one issue of evolution
alone, the difficulty still arises of the essential significance of
the bare outward facts observed, what is meant by evolution, what is
it that evolves, from what and by what force of necessity? The scientist
is content to affirm an original matter or substance, atomic, electric,
etheric or whatever it may finally turn out to be, which by the very
nature of its own inherent energy or of an energy in it and on it, -
the two things are not the same, and the distinction, though it may
seem immaterial in the beginning of the process, is of a considerable
ultimate consequence, - produces owing to some unexplained law,constant
system of results or other unalterable principle a number of different
basic forms and powers of matter or different sensible and effective
movements of energy: these come into being, it seems, when the minute
original particles of matter meet together in variously disposed quantities,
measures and combinations, and all the rest is a varying, developing,
mounting movement of organised energy and its evolutionary consequences,
parinãma, which depend on this crude constituting basis.
All that is or may be a correct statement of phenomenal fact, - but
we must not forget that the fundamental theory of science has been going
of late through a considerable commotion of a upsetting and a rapid
rearrangement, - but it carries us no step farther towards the principal,
the all-important thing that we want to know. The way in which man sees
and experiences the universe, imposes on his reason the necessity of
a one original eternal substance of which all things are the forms and
a one eternal original energy of which all movement of action and consequences
is the variation. But the whole question is, what is the reality of
this substance and what is the essential nature of this energy?
-Sri
Aurobindo
