Values of Life: From Darkness to Light

From Darkness to Light is one of the most pregnant metaphors in language. Places of learning are devoted to the dispelling of darkness and the spreading of light. It is their high function ceaselessly to increase our knowledge and make it more and more certain. Universities make the world more familiar everyday and therefore more friendly to man. We fear nature less and less. “Vidwan na bibheti kadachana” the enlightened man has no fear from any quarter. But he must be full enlightened. He must be master of human experience – religion, history, science. Imperfection in knowledge, error, superstition, from these he must be emancipated. Alchemy, astrology, magic, miracle-mongering must not tempt him from the royal road to knowledge. The human mind is subject to two opposite tendencies, which require to be rigidly controlled, if they are not to paralyse and wreck each other. The balance between them is at all times difficult to attain and often impracticable. They are the instincts to believe and question. Credulity and scepticism, faith and reason are perpetually opposed to each other, but fated to operate on the same brain. No man is wholly devoid of either faculty, though some have as strong dose of the one and some of the other. Their relative influence too varies from time to time in the same man, and not merely from time to time, but from department of knowledge to department of knowledge. I have known lawyers, accustomed to weigh the evidence of witnesses and documents in the most rigid of scales, but ready to swallow the most extravagant stories of seances, communications from the dead and spiritualistic phenomena. On the contrary, some people who subject these phenomena to exacting proofs fall easy victims to cheats, impostors and company promoters. The man is rare, one in a million, who strikes the just medium, both in human affairs and natural phenomena between caution on the one hand and receptivity on the other. To be reckoned among good-natured and lovable men, one must have a certain amount of trustfulness in dealings with others, a fixed disposition to believe good of others till they are proved unworthy and to give them further chances even after that limit. The right question to ask when your help or sympathy is sought in that sphere is ‘why not?’ To ask, ‘why should I?’ would be to betray undue harshness of judgment, if not heartlessness. In matters of scientific interest, on the contrary, where not generosity or charity is concerned, but truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, where, for instance, a so-called miracle or marvel is put forward for acceptance, it is right to insist on the evidence being produced, sifted and analysed without reference to the personalities concerned. If a trustworthy friend attests the phenomenon and is prepare to pledge his honour for its accuracy, it may incline you to make investigation, but cannot justify any relaxation in the standard of demonstration required to establish a natural phenomenon. ‘Why?’ represents the correct attitude of mind, not ‘Why not?’ that the phenomenon did in point of fact occur as it is alleged to have occurred must be proved. You must not undertake to prove that it could not have occurred as it is alleged to have occurred. And yet many highly educated persons yield their credence to miracles just because it is not possible there and then prove a negative.

The opposition between these attitudes of mind, viewed in a general way, may be described as the opposition between faith and reason, faith being the attitude belauded by religion and reason the attitude championed by science. That reason is not an unfailing guide, that it is in certain circumstances impotent to discover truth must be acknowledged. Many facts have yet to be explained by reason. Nevertheless, reason has faith in itself to this extent that, as science advances; such facts will receive satisfactory explanation from natural laws. No one who surveys the state of human knowledge from time to time, beginning from our primitive days, can hold that the triumphs of reason are over, or that in the centuries in front of us many phenomena which now perplex the scientist will not yield up their secret. Our vedic philosophers long ago laid down that faith begins where reason ends. It follows that the province of faith is subject to unceasing encroachment by science. Faith claims that it can remove mountains. If this means that in the sphere of human endeavour deeds at first regarded as impossible have actually been accomplished, it is a tribute to the power of hope and persistence which reason need not grudge. But when a certain Hindu prince of the last century caused Ganges water to be sprinkled all round his fort by pious Brahmins and trusted the infidel army to be stayed outside the hallowed line, or when in my own recent experience a holy ascetic fasted and kept vigil and intoned the Gayatri for weeks together in the confident hope that the Viceroy would not give his assent to the Child Marriage Restraint Bill, they gave proof of magnificent but unavailing faith. Faith of that type governed human conduct much more in the old days, but we shall see it contracting its operation rapidly in future.

Science and scientists are accused today of abusing their knowledge and the power of their knowledge. They seem likely to destroy the very civilisation that nurtured them. The wealthy classes, the trading classes, the manufacturing classes, the publishing classes, the governing classes all have bent their energies to the work of destruction. Why scientists should be singled out for execration has always puzzled me. Do not historians falsify contemporary records before our eyes? Do not literary men write flagrantly one sided books for propaganda purposes? Do not eloquent men stir up anti-social passions? Will the State allow the men of science alone the freedom to choose how and how far they will help its projects? What would the British House of Commons say if the laboratories in the Universities had been shut up and the services of inventors and ingenious craftsmen had been denied to war-work? If war is in-human and a crime against our kind, we are all alike to blame, for we all join in it, we all give our best to its successful prosecution. It is unreasonable to expect the votaries of science to cultivate an exalted morality of their own, cut off from the other professions which are tributaries to the welfare of society.

A word or two about the spirit of scientific and historical research and teaching. The essential condition is to shake off the bondage of prejudice and prepossession and to follow where the light leads. Violence may have to be done to pet theories, to social and communal traditions, to national pride, and to the practices and beliefs of consecrated churches and holy orders. On the altar of truth all these possessions, material and immaterial, must be sacrificed, if need be. It will cost us much anguish of the soul. But the cause is worth it and more. For as the years roll on and other generations come up, a new and better world order will arise, a higher polity will evolve, and what we sacrifice with grief to-day will be replaced by institutions and practices and beliefs more in consonance with truth and more serviceable to the requirements of that time.
–Reprinted from Triveni, June 1943