BY V. CHANDRASEKHARAM

Science would derive the universe from an initial, limited stock of energy through fortuitous evolution and assure it a quiet end by means of the law of increasing entropy. Blind chance is the builder of the worlds; for the random behaviour of quanta or the basic infinitesimal units of energy takes on in the mass the character, by statistical effect, of an order or system governed by uniform laws. Anyhow, the order of the world is the order of an invariable, though not a necessary, sequence. Modern science finds the notion of chance understandable and the notion of necessity mystical. But it would appear that the chance it contemplates is not one arising out of a pure and unmitigated chaos, but one leaping into play from a system of attractions and repulsions with which it endows its basic units. And even if such a chance may perhaps be admitted as being able to issue in some sort of necessity called statistical, both of them, the chance and the necessity, can only be the expression of some inherent imperative truth of world-energy. What that may be Science does not tell.

The older Science that believed in a world governed by necessity, boldly declared that, given perfect knowledge of any one moment in the world-sequence, it could know all other movements, backwards and forwards, of the entire sequence. With the exception of the sub-atomic realm which is now given over to indeterminacy, with some reservations of a purely theoretical import as regards future happening, that declaration even now stands. Only modern science would like to reduce necessity to chance; that would be more in accord with its hypothesis of a self-sufficient energy. And that all world-phenomena can be reduced to some physical energy is an article of faith, even for modern science; only some scientists would prefer to give the name ‘neutral staff’ to the basic energy.

But there are fatal difficulties in the way of this belief. First of all it is well to remember that science cannot give a complete account of the world for the simple reason that it limits its investigation to particular aspects of it. Science successfully studies the workings and results of some of nature’s energies. It discovers the regular sequence within the workings and the constituent factors of the results. This knowledge often gives us control over those workings and results, but does not provide us with their fundamental explanation. Going a little further into detail, we see that Physical Science studies the structure of phenomena and hopes thereby to understand their whole variety and range. This would appear to be an impossible hope, for, even of the phenomena it studies, it knows only the structure but not the nature. We see new and unpredictable qualities coming into being with new complexities of structure. If structure is wholly responsible for the qualities, that is, if it is their entire cause, we should be able to predict them; but it is not the case. That is why it appears unlikely that Chemistry could ever be reduced to Physics. But how about the emergence of creative Life and purposive Consciousness? There is no question of equivalence between life and the physico-chemical conditions that are the occasion of its manifestation, between the energy that it takes into itself and that into which it is transmuted by it. The upward tendency of life, which is so obvious in the ever more complex forms that it throws up, cannot be accounted for by Science, and can belong only to a creative energy striving for higher and higher expression. Life is an energy that is building up in a universe that is running down. Deathless in the germ-plasm, it is at least de jure immortal–an infinite. And as for consciousness, its nature becomes incomprehensible if we try to look at it as a product of living matter, and its activity, too, becomes quite un-understandable if we try to see it as wholly, determined by forces acting upon it from outside. It is light on the pathways of life’s creation, it is a thing of freedom striving to widen the close meshes of necessity in which it is held captive. It is not a functionless phosphorescence occurring in the track of molecular disturbance in brain matter, nor, worse, is it something which has the nuisance function of engendering vain illusions of free-will and purposiveness. It is a herald of the Spirit Creativeness. Purposive will and freedom cannot be born, it is evident, out of necessity or even mere indeterminacy. It is strange that Science, which has thrown shaft after shaft of penetrating light into the material term of Nature and revealed it as a fit dwelling for the gods, should end in darkening our understanding of Life and Spirit.

We can neither shut our eyes to the most obvious facts of life and consciousness, nor black out our deepest and most persistent intuitions as regards the universe, even for the sake of scientific theory. Starting on a metaphysical enquiry into the truth and origin of things, we find ourselves forced to the conception of an Absolute–an Indeterminate that is the source of all fundamental determinates, an Infinite supporting all relative infinites. Mind cannot achieve this concept with any degree of satisfaction; it is fascinated by it and yet staggered by the many contradictions that arise from it. Some vital truth of the Absolute is caught by man’s intenser consciousness and intuition, but is invariably crushed under the destructive weight of a philosophical system which the intellect builds upon it. Kindly agnostics warn us that this seeking after the Absolute is an absolute futility, but consciousness tells us that it is there in us for utter and complete knowledge. The Absolute can be known in a knowledge beyond the mind’s knowledge. The contradictory deliverances of even intuitive knowledge need not dishearten us; for every contradiction, however obstinate and irresolvable, is an indication to consciousness, not for turning back but for a higher ascent wherefrom to achieve a more total perspective. At some level of consciousness it must be possible to resolve all contradictions and arrive at a unified all-knowledge. Sri Aurobindo tells us that it is in the global vision of the Super-mind–" of which intuition is only a sharp edge, or intense projected ray"–that we can escape from the oppositions of all partial views and come into possession of the Supreme Truth.

But it is not to be supposed that the Supermind is some tranced state that is numb to the difficulties of our reason and the paradoxes of our experience or that it is some wonder-realm where arbitrary miracle achieves harmony out of conflict. It is quite the contrary, for it is Supreme Reason. Its logic is the logic of the Infinite, of the relations of spiritual existense. It is this reason and this logic that resolve the oppositions between oneness and diversity, flux and identity, being and becoming, the infinite and the finite, the universal and the individual, that confront us everywhere and pursue us in different forms into every order of phenomena and into every level of experience. In the final illumination of the Supermind they find their perfect reconciliation and harmony.

But meanwhile it is not necessary that reason should abdicate or wait, helpless and ineffective. For example, it is able to understand and organise the infra-rational instinct in man; something similar it can do with intuition until it becomes perfectly sure of itself. For this purpose it has to become subtle and sensitive to a deeper range of reality. It has to revise its concepts and remould its categories, not arbitrarily or speculatively, but in living response to a compulsive deeper experience. If reason could not overleap its mechanistic limitations, it would not be able to explore realms of reality other than material, and silence would be the only way of dealing with the ineffable Absolute. But it is because reason could do this in some measure that it becomes possible to have a science of reality which is something more than a synthesis of the science of nature.

To the understanding of such a large and plastic reason Sri Aurobindo presents, in this second volume of "The Life Divine," a uniquely integral view of Reality which harmonises its conflicting aspects, a synthesis of opposed lines of spiritual experience which shows them meeting on the level of the Supermind, beyond mind and Overmind, and a comprehensive conception of the Absolute which resolves the difficulties and contradictions which the intellect finds in its effort to reach it. There have been at all times philosophies that tried to envisage the ultimate Reality as mechanical–the Reality being regarded as absolutely self- sufficient, though not necessarily infinite; there have been other systems that tried to identify the Absolute–regarded at least as the supreme though not as the only Reality with some principle, of life or consciousness as we know them such as desire or will idea or phantasy, dream or false imposition. But the Veda and the Upanishad–the founts of Spiritual knowledge for the ages–have regarded the Absolute as an Absolute of Existence, Consciousness and Delight and the Universe as its self-manifestation. The full meaning and implications of this conception have been already explained in the first volume of ‘The Life Divine.’ An original and unique exigesis of this Vedic doctrine of the world as a progressive self-expression of the one and the Omnipresent Divine Reality, an exigesis which helps as none other has done to bring down its truth from the level of vision or self-evidence to the intellect and enable it to see how it is that there arises this staggering opposition between the nature of the world and that of the Divine Reality, and also a further original development of this doctrine as regards the nature of man’s fulfillment–all this in true accord with the body of the spiritual experience that we find recorded in the Upanishads and the Vedic hymns–is what one is privileged to read in these volumes. Here we are far from the din of dialectical battles, we are lifted quite above mere controversy, though dialectical skill and logical acumen of the rarest order make themselves constantly felt. But behind the movement of ideas and arguments of the Master we sense a stream of seeing thought flowing into the Mind and filling it with a liquid brilliance which can image in itself the form and feature of spiritual truth. We have a traditional way of expressing our gratitude to the cleansing and life-giving streams of our land: it is to take as much water from them as our joined palms can hold and give it back to them as the only adequate offering. What is intended by the present study is something similar in spirit.

If our concept of the Absolute is to have any significance at all, we must conceive it not only as the sanction and support but also as the essence and the source of all determinations. Surely the Absolute is indeterminable; but the true sense of this and other kindred negative statements about the Absolute is not negation but affirmation. The Absolute is free from limitation by its own determinations and free to release from within itself infinite self-determinations. Indeterminability is in the sense a necessary condition of free infinite self-determination. The one implies the other and there is no opposition between them. They are two aspects, one essential, the other dynamic and creative, of the Absolute. If indeterminability and free infinite self-determination were not both of them complementary elements in our conception of the Absolute, the Absolute would be reduced to the position of an indeterminate void or of a fixed determinate, or it would become a mere sum-total of fixed possibilities of determination inherent within it. The opposition between an indeterminable Absolute and a universe of determinations is merely conceptual; the universe need not therefore be an illusory projection of the Absolute or a mysterious super-imposition upon it.

Again, the statement of the Absolute’s illimitable freedom, freedom from form and name, quality and feature, and so on, is not meant to limit by negation the Absolute to an essential condition without form and feature. It is a positive statement of the Infinite’s capacity of infinite self-expression. It denies that any sum of its self-expressions could ever sum up the Infinite. Similarly there is no real opposition between essential, infinite oneness and infinite multiplicity of manifestation. It may be said, on the other hand, that the fullest power and truth of the unity of the one is expressed in its utmost differentiation of itself. The same conciliation occurs as regards the opposition between being and becoming, that is, between unchangeable Identity and incessant flux; for what characterises Being is not the self-identity of eternal blankness or of one fixed formation, but the unchangeableness that persists unimpaired through endless formation of Being. We see, therefore, that the fundamental negative statements about the Absolute are not really opposed to their corresponding positives; they deny only the limitations that may be there implied in the latter. And if our thought tries to reach at the Absolute with the help of an all-excluding negation, we should not forget that it is compelled at the same time to conceive of it as the Supreme Positive of all positives. However, the great elucidation of these conceptual perplexities can come only when the nodus of the Absolute and the Relative is seized in experience.

To a knowledge by Identity to which man’s inner being has access, the Absolute is revealed as an Infinite of self-existence, self-awareness and self-delight of Being. These three primal aspects of the Reality are an inseparable trinity. However, on the level of Mind and Overmind, each of them may be entered into to the exclusion and even obliteration of the rest, while lower down they are felt as divorced from each other. Each of these primal aspects of infinite Existence, Consciousness and Delight has its fundamental spiritual determinates, fundamental because they are the necessary postulates for all its self-manifestation. The fundamental determinates of the Divine Delight of Being are Love, Joy and Beauty; of infinite consciousness-force of Being, Knowledge and Will–expressing themselves as the Power of conceptive creation or Maya, as the self-effectuating executive Force or Nature or Prakriti, and again as the Conscious Power of the Divine Being or Shakti which works, through both the modes of Conceptive Creation and dynamic execution. And the aspect of Infinite Existence reveals itself as Self or Atman, as Conscious Being or Spirit or Purusha, and as God or the Divine Being or Ishwara. Now it should not be thought that these determinates are exclusive of each other. The distinctions made here do not imply a division in the Spiritual Reality: for in it there could be no division, as in matter, but only self-variation, self-limitation and self-absorption; and even in matter, it is well to remember, there is division but not isolation. A status of Being, for example, is a self-variation of Infinite Being in which that status prevails while other statuses are withheld from actively manifesting themselves within it. It is the same with a mode of Consciousness-Force.

The One Existent appears as the Cosmic Self with regard to the universe, but as the Supreme Self he is transcendent of the universe and at the same time individual-universal in every existence. Transcendence and impersonality are the characteristic features in the individual’s experience of identity with the Self. But Conscious Being or Spirit or Purusha is seen as intimately connected with Nature, for He is the Self as originator and enjoyer of the forms and works of Consciousness-Force or Nature, and assumes various graded poises of His Being appropriate to each of her varying gradations. He is identical with the Self, in that He is individual and cosmic and transcendent: but He is characteristically the Impersonal-Personal Spirit in all existence: impersonal because it is undifferentiated by personal formation, and personal because it is that which presides over every individualisation of existence. But the true regard of Spirit to Nature is that of mastery over its own executive force, and this aspect of mastery comes out in its fullest power in the Divine Being or God or Ishwara. For He is the Infinite Being in its transcendental and cosmic consciousness and force, Creator and Ruler of the universe, Friend and Refuge of all creatures, the All-Person who is the source of personality. And of Him cosmic Joy and beauty and Love are the most intimate revelation. Thus seen, this is the most comprehensive aspect of the Reality. For He is the Absolute or the Supreme Brahman, He is the Supreme Self, and He is also the Supreme Purusha. The Divine Being is that Supreme aspect of the Realty which is master and enjoyer of its own self-existence, ruling from above and guiding from within its own self-manifestation. The Divine Being thus regarded is not the personal God or Gods of popular religions who are limited representations of certain divine qualities and powers. Neither is He to be identified with Saguna Brahman–the Reality manifesting itself in infinite quality and action–for the Nirguna or the Reality not manifesting in quality and immobile is also an aspect of His Existence.

But as in the effort of Pure Reason to reach the Absolute, so also in the striving by direct experience to get to the Infinite Being, man is faced by the perplexity of conflicting deliverances. Here too the cause is similar. It lies in pitting one partial experience against another and in trying to found the whole scheme of things on that partial basis. But it may be asked how at all authentic spiritual experience could be partial. The answer to this is to be sought in the nature of Spirit’s self-manifestation, which is a process of involution and evolution. If we look into this process a little closely, we shall be able to understand the origin of the movement of Ignorance, in which Mind is a critical stage, and then it would be easy to see how it is that, like mental reason, spiritual experience too can be partial.

We must accept free self-variation as a power of Spirit, for it is a necessary postulate for its self-manifestation in the universe. And self-variation would involve the consequence that the One Being could be aware of itself simultaneously in different real statuses of consciousness. There would be no impairment, however, of the knowledge of infinite oneness. Another power again, a power of free self-limitation, we should be able to accord to the Infinite, for it is a necessary pre-condition of its self-determinations. As a consequence of this power, we can imagine infinite Consciousness moving into a special determination of itself to preside over and base a world or a world-principle such as Mind, Life or Matter; and taking one more step, we can imagine it moving into a still further specialisation of the World Being in that special determination and assuming the status of the individual self or spirit. And so far too, Consciousness would be limiting its action with full knowledge of all itself. As a result of another power inherent in Spirit and indispensable for creation, the power of self-absorption, we have the luminous trance of the Infinite, where infinite consciousness is swallowed up in pure Being that is merely self-aware–the state of Super-concience, and its opposite pole of dark trance which appears as an infinite non-being–the state of Inconscience. And by a partial action of the same movement as of this two-fold infinite Self-absorption. we can imagine Infinite Being becoming aware separately of one aspect or status of itself, and consciousness limiting itself to one field of being and to a particular movement of itself. Integral consciousness would now be abolished, though always recoverable. Here would be the source of the downward movement of Ignorance. And these powers of Spirit–of self-variation, self-limitation and absorption–provide the key to the mystery of the process of spirit’s self-manifestation, that is, of Creation.

Now it would be easy to see how consciousness may, in its descent or ascent,–descent from the–integral to the limited and ascent from the limited to the integral–identify itself with one status or movement of itself to the exclusion of the rest. A fundamental double status like that of Nirguna and Saguna, each based upon a truth of the absolute, becomes possible in the infinite consciousness. And man’s limited conciousness rising to or reflecting one or the other may be inclined to claim that a Pure Being actionless and immobile, or an Infinite Person upholding and directing the works of the world, is the Supreme Reality. It thus happens that an opposition is set up between these statuses. We can form some figure of such differing and conflicting statuses in infinite Being from the normal experience of our limited consciousness, for instance, from the duality arising in us between our consciousness, for that is involved in the automation of some habit, and the rest of it that is relatively free. That their duality can be much more than a figure of speech is brought home to us when the conflict between them becomes formidable; yet the truth is that they are not two different things but a dual status belonging to a single consciousness, and that in both of them, there is the same consciousness, in one tied up and in the other relatively free. Thus comes about the danger of the truth of one authentic experience being set in opposition to other truth of a different but equally authentic experience. Only a profound intuitive sense that all aspects of the World-Reality, however conflicting and contradictory in appearance, must find their complete reconciliation in the Supreme Truth can guard us from this danger.

There is, for instance, the opposition that is made between Personality and Impersonality, and it is often facilely assumed that the Impersonal view of the Reality is the higher and final truth. We are impressed by the universal and impersonal character of the inconscient energy of Nature creating a world of countless forms, all modifications of itself. And we try to imagine the relation between the undifferentiated Spirit and the personal individuals as something similar to that between the inconscient energy of Nature and its modifications. We argue that a modification is name and form merely, and that the basic energy alone is the truth. But obviously this is a partial view, for the truth also of its modifications enters into the truth of basic energy. Diamond and coal are both of them carbon; but we know more fully of the nature of carbon when we have known that it can appear in the form of coal or diamond. Form is not figment. It is significant, evidently of some essential truth, and is rooted in it. It is wrong therefore, even in the case of inconscient existence, to think that universality is the truth and individuality a transient and baseless phenomenon. But we take over this wrong outlook into conscient existence, think that personality is something belonging only to its manifestations, and conclude that conscient existence at its source and origin must be impersonal. But the truth of personality is rooted in conscient existence itself. The chief reason, however, for accepting the impersonal view of the Reality as the ultimate truth would seem to be the over-whelming nature of the experience of the impersonal Self. However convincing and far-reaching this experience, and however necessary too, for the spirit’s transcendence of Nature, it must be held to be a partial experience. The experience of the Reality as personal has been held to be equally convincing and far-reaching. There is no opposition, however, between these two aspects of the Reality, the personal and impersonal, for what we mean by Person is conscious Being, and what appears impersonal may be said to be a power of the Person or Conscious Being. An Infinite Self-existence is the highest Reality; but of this basis and ground, as the Gita puts it (14, 27) in other words, the truth and significance may be said to be the Supreme Being, transcendent and eternal–an Infinite Person, so to say, because it is his being which is the source, essence and truth of all personality.

Such is the integral view of the Reality, a Reality manifold of aspect, status and movement, and whose oneness is absolute and nowise or nowhere suffers the least impairment, that Sri Aurobindo presents to us. This view has been implicit in the Upanishads and the Gita, but it has been missed ever afterwards, or it has never been brought out with such clarity and convincingness. It should be now easy, we presume, to realise what great help Sri Aurobindo brings to the understanding of the Upanishadic view of creation. The Upanishad speaks of creation by the Reality through ‘seeing’–the expression it often uses is ‘It (the Reality) saw and it became’ or ‘It saw and it loosed forth from itself’–and through meditation and Tapas or intense self-concentration and self-absorption. There is no tinge here of illusion or false imposition or ignorance. Neither is it anything like the potter making his pots. It is a creation by infinite Consciousness which realises whatever it sees within itself. And naturally arising out of this view of the Reality, and of creation as self-manifestation, is Sri Aurobindo’s view of the aim of man’s life and the nature of his fulfillment. Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy is above all else the philosophy of a divine life, and this aspect of it may be said to be his greatest and in a way his special contribution. But in order to know if the integral aim of a divine life on earth which Sri Aurobindo has presented to humanity is at all Possible, it would be necessary to form a clear idea of the truth of man’s individuality; for if man’s individuality were such that only in its abolition lay its fulfillment, there could be no basis for a really divine life in the fullest sense of the word and it is only by courtesy that a life of striving devoted to the annihilation of individuality could be called the divine life.

The essential fact about individuality is that it is a centre in consciousness (this is spatial language but it is inevitable) for experience, for all-vision and self-vision. It is more than a particular individualisation of the world principles of matter, life and mind. It is the Divine Nature, by which is upheld the world-nature, that has become the individual; it is an eternal portion of the Divine Being (Gita 7, 5; 15, 7), not subject to the phenomenal incidents of modification, and beyond mortality and Time (Gita, Chapter 2). The true individual or person or Self is a Power of being of infinite self-existence, a self-limitation in it with full knowledge of all itself and untouched by the separative ignorance. It is of one essence with the transcendent Reality. Going beyond the separative ego a formation of world-nature, we reach the true individual that is our Self, (Mudaka 1, 3, 1...3) and thus come into possession of the joy of union and identity with the transcendent and cosmic Divine and with the other selves, that is, we come into possession of the joy of a perfect self-manifestation, unclouded by ignorance, which is a movement of world-nature, of the Divine. It is on the supramental level of Being, or in Vijnana, that we reach our true spiritual Self, and it is from here that can be brought down the Light and the Power that can entirely transform, so as to accord with the divine Will and Idea, the lower nature and its workings in the mind, in the life and even in the body. Then would be the Divine Life a perfect self-expression of the Divine, even in the lower nature as in the higher Divine Nature. This, according to Sri Aurobindo, is the divine consummation of the evolutionary urge in the material universe, of the great human enterprise on this planet. This is no escape from nature; it is mastery over it and through that mastery its transformation. It is a divine fulfillment, possible even here–not beyond; possible even now–not in timeless eternity.

But the logical mind has its difficulties again in comprehending this integral aim of a divine consummation of the soul or Spirit expressing itself through a divine life and divine works in Nature. If the liberated individual becomes one with the Supreme Reality, who is it that is left to enjoy the divine union or live the divine life? But if a divine life based on a divine union is insisted upon as man’s fulfillment, it may be perhaps accepted as a stage in it, but not as his final fulfillment; for in the latter, there could not be even a shadow of difference between the Transcendent and the individual, and, for a continuing relation of union with the Divine, some sort of difference would seem to be necessary. In the highest liberation individuality must cease. Individuality must be phenomenal or even illusory, for there could not be a multiplicity of real individuals in the One Reality.

To answer these objections with countering logic would be futile, for we have here to understand the basic relations of infinite Self-existence. The appeal should lie to experience; the concepts of identity, difference, identity in difference, and so on, fail to express adequately the relation of the Individual to the Eternal. The physical notions of part and whole of continent and contained, do not apply at all to the indivisible Spiritual Reality. Again such poetical analogies as that of the streams losing themselves in the sea and becoming one with it, or of the sun and his reflection becoming one with the removal of the reflecting medium, and so on, though they succeed in bringing home to the mind and the heart some element of the truth, fail to touch the others, and, pressed too far, end in distorting it. The Upanishads describe the condition of the liberated Individual as one of mergence in the universal, and of utter ineffable identity with the Absolute; also as one wherein he sees all beings within himself and himself within all beings, for all beings become his very self; and as one wherein he sees all beings and himself in God, and God in himself and all beings. Obviously here is no annihilation of the Individual Self, and the relation between the Self and other Selves and between the Self and God, is not one of mere psychological contact. It is a relation of mutual inclusion and clearly separativeness is not the basis on which spiritual individuality stands. And in that case, all the logical difficulties, which have been indicated above, of a mind that reasons from its own experience of separative existence, must get convicted as fallacies. The only way to understand all deeper spiritual experiences is to see that the transcendent and the universal and the individual are the three terms of existence, each of them including, either overtly or behind the veil, the two others. The liberated individual consciously possesses his unity with the transcendent and the universal, which is veiled by ignorance in the ordinary individual. It is such a liberated Individual who, with the mastery born of his liberation, transforms the mental, vital and physical nature which is the basis of his existence here and lives a divine life. But one objection might still be made; it might be said that so long as we can speak of these three terms of existence, the transcendent, the universal and the individual, we are in the realm of manifested Reality, and that in the ineffable Absolute they cease to exist. But the position taken by Sri Aurobindo is that their truth must, however ineffably other than what the highest Spiritual experience knows, be pre-existent even in the Absolute.

Now it is unnecessary to stress that the great aim of a supra-mental transformation of human nature is in many ways a new and original envisagement of life’s possibility. It is a new aspiration. It is the crowning spire of a great shrine of Spiritual knowledge that Sri Aurobindo has brought into being, through his vision, for a new humanity. The Gita, adumbrating as it does the philosophy of the Divine Man, has made some advances in the direction of an integral aim such as is implied in the Vedic aspiration of Swarajya and Samrajya or Self-dominion and All-dominion, which the succeeding ages unfortunately allowed to lapse. But even the Gita, influenced probably by the pessimistic trend of Buddhistic thought, often formulates to the seeker his aim as escape from birth and death, As an element in the divine fulfillment and as meaning complete mastery over Nature and its gravitational force towards earth-existence, this aim may be unexceptionable; but stressed in its negative aspect and envisaged as the whole content of man’s fulfillment and destiny, it has its dangers. The adequate statement of the full aim of man’s evolution is not of little practical importance, and is not merely a question of high theory, as might be supposed; a narrow aim goes down cramping the course of human life and endeavour along its entire length, often resulting in a disastrous constriction. We are grateful, therefore, to Sri Aurobindo for having placed before man the goal of his destiny in its largest scope, however vast and tremendous and even unrealisable it may appear to our mind of ignorance.

We have tried to give an idea of the thought and vision of Sri Aurobindo as regards the fundamental problems of existence, that is, of the central theme of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy. It is not possible here to go into its further development and elucidation, which the present volumes of ‘The Life Divine’ take up, in relation to the downward movement of consciousness into the separative Ignorance, and then with regard to the upward movement from the Ignorance to the integral consciousness. The future will record as one of the main achievements of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy that it has stemmed finally the currents of world-negation and world-refusal that one of the greatest personalities of all time, Buddha, had let loose in the stream of Indian philosophic thought. Some chapters in these volumes are devoted to a complete and thorough-going refutation–the last word on the matter–of the elusive doctrine of illusionism, which has been not unjustly characterised as Buddhism in disguise, and which has been driven deep into the heart of India by Sankara–an intense flaming spirit solely intent, in the midst of the Buddhistic debacle, upon making India hark back to the Upanishadic message of the immortal Spirit. The problem of world-evil–it is this which throws up the philosophies of world-negation–Sri Aurobindo faces squarely. As long as the world is not divinely justified, the divine is imperfectly known. But the various efforts of the intellect to solve this insistent problem may bring to the mind a more or less precarious conviction, the heart in its moments of grace may echo the mystic’s cry of rapture that this world with all its evil is a world of glory and delight; but the knowledge that would annul the problem for us, it would seem, could be securely possessed only far beyond the boundaries of the mind. Even those that have crossed them seem unable to transmit the knowledge through the word. Or is it that they have spoken but we are unable to understand? Perhaps it is as well that it should be so, and this too may be a part of the scheme of things. For what else, if not the lure of this knowledge, could give us such driving power to transcend ourselves? For transcending, we could transform evil, along with its ground, the dark earth-nature in us and around us. That is the aim of the integral perfection which Sri Aurobindo holds before us. No other philosophy or religion, positivist or spiritual, gives to life on the earth such high significance as Sri Aurobindo gives. He affirms that our outer nature too has a claim to deliverance, and that it can be divinely transformed. Human life is not merely a preparation for the soul’s perfection elsewhere. Human life itself can and should become the manifestation of that perfection. Sri Aurobindo has presented in these volumes an organic body of thought and knowledge, concerning man and the universe, which has the character of a perfectly natural and inevitable synthesis of all that is valuable in the various main lines of intellectual seeking and vision, of aspiration and discipline, for upward effort and aim, of the ancient and the modern world, of the west and the East. This is not a synthesis of the kind we know, in Spencer, for instance; this seems to grow out of vision, which is by nature synthetic and total. Resurgent India has in ‘The Life Divine’ a world view worthy of its glorious past, and formative of a more glorious future.

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