XIV - INTUITION
ALL that our sense-experience tells us, is form and
movement. Forms exist, but with an existence that is not
put rather always mixed, combined, aggregated, relative. When we go within
ourselves, we may get rid of precise form, but
we cannot get rid of movement, of change.
Motion of matter in Space, motion of change in Time seem to be the condition
of existence. We may say indeed, if we like, that this
is existence and that the idea of existence in itself corresponds
to no discoverable reality. At the most in phenomenon of
self-awareness or behind it, we get sometimes a glimpse of something
immovable and immutable, something that we vaguely perceive or imagine that we
are beyond all life and deatth, beyond all change and formation and action.
Here is the one door in us that sometimes swings open upon the splendour
of a truth beyond and, before it shuts again, allows a ray to touch us,-a
luminous intimation which, if we have the strength and firmness, we may
hold to in our faith and make a starting-point for another play of
consciousness than that of the sense-mind, for the play of Intuition.
For if we examine carefully, we shall find that Intuition is our first teacher.
Intuition always stands veiled behind our mental operations. Intuition brings
to man those brilliant messages from the Unknown which are the beginnings of his
higher knowledge. Reason only comes in afterwardst to see what profit it can have
of the shining harvest. Intuition gives us that idea of something behind and
beyond all that
we know and seem to be which pursues man always in
conttradiction of his lower reason and all his normal experience and impels
him to formulate that formless perception in the more positive ideas of God,
Immortality, Heaven and the rest by which we strive to express it to the
mind.
For Intuition is as strong as Nature herself from whose very
soul it has sprung and cares nothing for the
contradictions of reason or the denials of experience. It knows what is because
it is, because itself it is of that and has come from
that, and will not yield it to the judgment of what merely
becomes and appears. What the Intuition tells us of, is not so much Existence
as the Existent, for it proceeds from that one point of light in us which gives
it its advantage, that sometimes opened door in our own self-awareness. Ancient
Vedanta seized this message of Intuition and formulated it in the three great
declarations of the Upanishads, 'I am He', 'Thou art That, O Swetaketu' ,
'All this is the Brahman ; this Self is the Brahman'.
But Intuition by the very
nature of its action in man, working as it does from behind the veil, active
principally in his more unenlightened, less articulate parts, served in front
of the veil, in the narrow light which is our waking consciousness, only by
instruments that are unable fully to assimilate its messages,-Intuition is
unable to give us the truth in that ordered and articulated form which our
nature demands. Before it could effect any such completeness of direct
knowledge in us, it would have to organise itself in our surface being and take
,possession there of the leading part. But in our surface being it is not the
Intuition, it is the Reason which is organised and helps us to order our
perceptions, thoughts and actions. Therefore the age of intuitive knowledge,
represented by the early Vedantic thinking of the Upanishads; had to give
place to the age of the rational knowledge; inspired Scripture made room , for
metaphysical philosophy, even as afterwards metaphysical philosophy had to give
place to experimental Science. Intuitive thought which is a messenger from
the superconscient and therefore our highest faculty, was supplanted by the
pure reason which is only a sort of deputy and belongs to the middle heights of
our being; pure reason in its turn was supplanted for a time by the mixed
action of the reason which lives on our plains and lower elevations and does
not in its view exceed the horizon of the experience that the physical mind and
senses or such aids as we can invent for them can bring to us. And this
process which seems to be a descent, is really a circle of progress. For in
each case the lower faculty is compeqed to take up as much as it can assimilate
of what the higher had already given and to attempt to re-establish it by its
own methods. By the attempt it is itself enlarged in its' scope and arrives
eventually at a more supple and a more ample self-accommodation to the higher
faculties.
Without this succession and attempt to
separat assimilation we should be obliged to remain under the exclusive
domination of a part of our nature while the rest remained either depressed and
unduly subjected or separate in its field and therefore poor in its development.
With this succession and separate attempt the balance is righted; a more
complete harmony of our parts of knowledge is prepared.
We see this succession in the Upanishads and
the subsequent Indian philosophies. The sages of the Veda and Vedanta
relied entirely upon intuition and spiritual experience. It is
by an error that scholars sometimes speak of the
great debates or discussions in the Upanishads. Wherever there is the
appearance of a controversy, it is not by discussion, by dialectics or the
use of logical reasoning that it proceeds, but by a comparison of intuitions and
experiences in which the less luminous ,gives place to the more luminous,
the narrower, faultier or less essential to the more comprehensive, more
perfect, more essential. The question asked by one thinker
of another is 'what dost thou know?', not 'what
does thou think?' nor 'to what conclusions has thy reasoning arrived?'
Nowhere in the Upanishads do we find any trace of logical reasoning urged in
support of the truths of Vedanta. Intuition, the sages seem to have held, must
be corrected by .! more perfect intuition; logical reasoning cannot be its
judge.
And yet die human reason demands its own method of
satisfaction. Therefore when die age of
rationalistic speculation began, Indian philosophers, respectful of the
heritage of the past, adopted a double attitude towards the Truth they
sought. They recognised in the Sruti, the earlier results of Intuition or, as
they preferred to call it, of inspired Revelation, an authority superior to
Reason. But at the same time they started from Reason and tested the results
it gave them holding only those conclusions to be valid which were supported
by the supreme authority. In this way they avoided
to a certain extent the besetting sin of metaphysics,
the tendency to battle in die clouds because it deals with words as if they
were imperative facts instead of symbols which have always to be carefully
scrutinised and brought back constantly to the sense of that which they
represent. Their speculations tended at first to keep near at the
centre to the highest and profoundest experience and proceeded with the united
consent of the two great authorities, Reason and Intuition. Nevertheless, the
natural trend of Reason to assert
its own supremacy triumphed in effect over the theory
of its subordination. Hence the rise of conflicting schools each of which
founded itself in theory on the Veda and used its texts as a weapon against the
others. For Intuition sees things in the whole, in the large and details only
as sides of the indivisibl,e whole; its tendency is towards synthesis and the
unity of knowledge. Reason, on the contrary, proceeds by analysis and division
and assembles its facts to form a whole; but in the assemblage so formed there
are opposites, anomalies, logical incompatibilities, and the natural tendency
of Reason is to affirm some and to negate others which conflict with its chosen
conclusions so that it may form a flawlessly logical system. The unity 6f the
first intuitional knowledge was thus broken up and the ingenuity of the
logician was always able to discover devices, methods of interpretation,
standards of varying value by which inconvenient texts of the Scripture could
be practically annulled and entire freedom acquired for their metaphysical
speculation.
Nevertheless, the main conceptions of the earlier Vedanta
remained in parts in the various philosophical systems and efforts were made
from time to time to recombine them into some image of the old catholicity and
unity of intuitional thought. And behind the thought of all, variously
presented, survived as the fundamental conception, Purusha, Atman
or Sad Brahman, the pure Existent of the Upanishads,
often rationalised into an idea of psychological state, but still carrying
something of its old burden of inexpressible reality. What may be the relation
of the movement of becoming which is what we call the world to this absolute
Unity and how the ego, whether generated by the movement or cause
of the movement, can return to that true Self,
Divinity or Reality declared by the Vedanta, these were the questions
speculative and practical which have always occupied the thought of
India.l
1 The
Life Divine, 'The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge', Book I, Chapter V,
pp. 101-7.