The
first foundation in this emergence, the creation of forms of Matter,
first of inconscient and inanimate, then of living and thinking Matter,
the appearance of more and more organised bodies adapted to express
a greater power of consciousness, has been studied from the physical
side, the side of form building, by Science; but very little light has
been shed on the inner side, the side of consciousness, and what little
has been observed is rather of its physical basis and instrumentation
than of the progressive operations of Consciousness in its own nature.
In the evolution, as it has been observed so far, although a continuity
is there,—for Life takes up Matter and Mind takes up submental
Life, the Mind of intelligence takes up the mind of life and sensation,—the
leap from one grade of consciousness in the series to another grade
seems to our eyes immense, the crossing of the gulf whether by bridge
or by leap impossible; we fail to discover any concrete and satisfactory
evidence of its accomplishment in the past or of the manner in which
it was accomplished. Even in the outward evolution, even in the development
of physical forms where the data are clearly in evidence, there are
missing links that remain always missing; but in the evolution of consciousness
the passage is still more difficult to account for, for it seems more
like a transformation than a passage. It may be, however, that, by our
incapacity to penetrate the subconscious, to sound the submental or
to understand sufficiently a lower mentality different from ours, we
are unable to observe the minute gradations, not only in each degree
of the series, but on the borders between grade and grade: the scientist
who does observe minutely the physical data, has been driven to believe
in the continuity of evolution in spite of the gaps and missing links;
if we could observe similarly the inner evolution, we could, no doubt,
discover the possibility and the mode of these formidable transitions.
But still there is a real, a radical difference between grade and grade,
so much so that the passage from one to another seems a new creation,
a miracle of metamorphosis rather than a natural predictable development
or quiet passing from one state of being to another with its well-marked
steps arranged in an easy sequence.
These
gulfs appear deeper, but less wide, as we rise higher in the scale of
Nature. If there are rudiments of life-reaction in the metal, as has
been recently contended, it may be identical with life-reaction in the
plant in its essence, but what might be called the vital-physical difference
is so considerable that one seems to us inanimate, the other, though
not apparently conscious, might be called a living creature. Between
the highest plant life and lowest animal the gulf is visibly deeper,
for it is the difference between mind and the entire absence of any
apparent or even rudimentary movement of mind: in the one this stuff
of mental consciousness is unawakened though there is a life of vital
reactions, a suppressed or subconscious or perhaps only submental sense-vibration
which seems to be intensely active; in the other, though the life is
at first less automatic and secure in the subconscious way of living
and in its own new way of overt consciousness imperfectly determined,
still mind is awakened,—there is a conscious life, a profound transition
has been made. But the community of the phenomenon of life between plant
and animal, however different their organisation, narrows the gulf,
even though it does not fill in its profundity. Between the highest
animal and the lowest man there is a still deeper though narrower gulf
to be crossed, the gulf between sense-mind and the intellect: for however
we may insist on the primitive nature of the savage, we cannot alter
the fact that the most primitive human being has above and beyond the
sense-mind, emotional vitality and primary practical intelligence which
we share with the animals, a human intellect and is capable,—in
whatever limits,—of reflection, ideas, conscious invention, religious
and ethical thought and feeling, everything fundamental of which man
as a race is capable; he has the same kind of intelligence, it differs
only in its past instruction and formative training and the degree of
its developed capacity, intensity and activity. Still, in spite of these
dividing furrows, we can no longer suppose that God or some Demiurge
has manufactured each genus and species ready-made in body and in consciousness
and left the matter there, having looked upon his work and seen that
it was good. It has become evident that a secretly conscious or an inconscient
Energy of creation has effected the transition by swift or slow degrees,
by whatever means, devices, biological, physical or psychological machinery,—perhaps,
having made it, did not care to preserve as distinct forms what were
only stepping-stones and had no longer any function nor served any purpose
in evolutionary Nature. But this explanation of the gaps is little more
than a hypothesis which as yet we cannot sufficiently substantiate.
It is probable at any rate that the reason for these radical differences
is to be found in the working of the inner Force and not in the outer
process of the evolutionary transition; if we look at it more deeply
from that inner side, the difficulty of understanding ceases and these
transitions become intelligible and indeed inevitable by the very nature
of the evolutionary process and its principle.
For
if we look, not at the scientific or physical aspects, but at the psychological
side of the question and inquire in what precisely the difference lies,
we shall see that it consists in the rise of consciousness to another
principle of being. The metal is fixed in the inconscient and inanimate
principle of matter; even if we can suppose that it has some reactions
suggestive of life in it or at least of rudimentary vibrations that
in the plant developed into life, still it is not at all characteristically
a form of life; it is characteristically a form of matter. The plant
is fixed in a subconscient action of the principle of life,—not
that it is not subject to matter or devoid of reactions that find their
full meaning only in mind, for it seems to have submental reactions
that in us are the foundation of pleasure and pain or of attraction
and repulsion; but still it is a form of life, not of mere matter, nor
is it, so far as we know, at all a mind-conscious being. Man and the
animal are both mentally conscious beings: but the animal is fixed in
vital mind and mind-sense and cannot exceed its limitations, while man
has received into his sense-mind the light of another principle, the
intellect, which is really at once a reflection and a degradation of
the Supermind, a ray of gnosis seized by the sense-mentality and transformed
by it into something other than its source: for it is agnostic like
the sense-mind in which and for which it works, not gnostic; it seeks
to lay hold on knowledge, because it does not possess it, it does not
like Supermind hold knowledge in itself as its natural prerogative.
In other words, in each of these forms of existence the universal being
has fixed its action of consciousness in a different principle or, as
between man and animal, in the modification of a lower by a higher though
still not a highest-grade principle. It is this stride from one principle
of being to another quite different principle of being that creates
the transitions, the furrows, the sharp lines of distance, and makes,
not all the difference, but still a radical characteristic difference
between being and being in their nature.
-
Sri Aurobindo
