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System of Vedic Psychology
THE successes of European science have cast the shadow of their authority and prestige over the speculations of European scholarship; for European thought is, in appearance, a serried army marching to world-conquest and we who undergo the yoke of its tyranny, we, who paralysed by that fascination and overborne by that domination, have almost lost the faculty of thinking for ourselves, receive without distinction all its camp followers or irregular volunteers as authorities to whom we must needs submit. We reflect in our second hand opinions the weak parts of European thought equally with the strong; we do not distinguish between those of its ideas which eternal Truth has ratified and those which have merely by their ingenuity and probability captivated for a short season the human imagination. The greater part of the discoveries of European science (its discoveries, not its intellectual generalisations) belong to the first category; the greater part of the conclusions of European scholarship to the second. The best European thought has itself no illusions on this score. One of the greatest of European scholars and foremost of European thinkers, Ernest Renan, after commencing his researches in Comparative Philology with the most golden and extravagant hopes, was compelled at the close of a life of earnest and serious labour to sum up the chief preoccupations of his days in a formula of mesaured disparagement, – "petty conjectural science". In other words, no science at all; for a science built upon conjectures is as much an impossibility and a contradiction in terms as a house built upon water. Renan’s own writings bear eloquent testimony to the truth of his final verdict; those which sum up his scholastic research, read much like a mass of learned crudity, even the best of them no longer authoritative or valid; those which express the substance or shade of his life’s thinking are of an imperishable beauty and value. The general sentiment of European Science Page-180 agrees with the experience of Renan and even shoots beyon,d it; in the vocabulary of German scientists, the word "philology", "philologist", bears a really disparaging and contemptuous significance and so great is the sense among serious thinkers of the bankruptcy of Comparative Philology that they deny even the possibility of an etymological Science. There is no doubt an element of exaggeration in some of these views; but it is here that Comparative Philology, Comparative Mythology, ethnology, anthropology and their kindred "sciences" are largely a mass of conjectures, – shifting intellectual quagmires in which we can find no sure treading. Only the airy wings of an ingenious imagination can bear us up on that shimmering surface and delude us with the idea that it is the soul which supports our movement and not the wings. There is a meagre but sound sub- stratum of truth which will disengage itself some day from the conjectural rubbish; but the present stage of these conjectural sciences is no better but so far worse than the state of European chemistry in the days of Paracelsus. But we in India are under the spell of European philology; we are taken in by its ingenuity, audacity and self-confidence, an ingenuity which is capable of giving a plausibility to the absurd and an appearance of body to the unsubstantial, an audacity which does not hesitate to erect the most imposing theories on a few legs of disconnected facts, a confidence which even the constant change of its own opinions cannot disconcert. Moreover, our natural disposition is to the intellectuality of the scholar (Pandit): verbal ingenuity, recondite explanations, far-fetched glosses have by far a weight with us which the discontinuity of our old scientific activities and disciplined experimental methods of reaching subjective truth has exaggerated and our excessive addiction to mere verbal meta- physics strongly confirmed. It is not surprising that educated India should have tacitly or expressly accepted even in subjects of such supreme importance to us as the real significance of the Vedas and Upanishads the half patronising and half contemptuous views of the European scholar. What are those views? They represent the Veda to us as a mass of naturalistic, ritualistic and astrological conceits, allegories and metaphors, crude and savage in the substance of its Page-181 thought but more artificial and ingenious in its particular ideas and fancies than the most artificial, allegorical or Alexandrine Poetry to be found in the World’s literature, – a strange incoherent and gaudy jumble unparalleled by the early literature of any other nation, – the result of a queer psychological meeting of an early savage with a modern astronomer and comparative mythologist. Is there or can there be a system of Vedicpsychology? To us who are dominated today by the prestige of European thought and scholarship, the Vedas are a document of primitive barbarism, the ancient Vedanta a mass of sublime but indisciplined speculations. We may admit the existence o.f many deep psycho- Ioical intuitions in the Upanishads; we do not easily allow to an age which we have been taught to regard as great but primitive and undeveloped the possibility of a profound and reasoned system in a subject in which Europe with all her modern scientific knowledge has been unable to develop a real science. I believe that this current view of those Vedic forefathers is entirely erroneous and arises from our application to them of a false system of psychological and intellectual values. Europe has formed certain views about the Veda and the Vedanta, and succeeded in imposing them on the Indian intellect. The ease with which this subjugation has been effected is not surprising; for the mere mass of labour of Vedic scholarship has been imposing, its ingenuity of philological speculation is well calculated to dazzle the uncritical mind and the audacity and self-confidence with which it constructs its theories conceals the conjectural uncertainty of their foundations. When a hundred world-famous scholars cry out, "This is so", it is hard indeed for the average mind, and even minds above the average but inexpert in these special subjects not to acquiesce. Nor has there been any corresponding labour of scholarship, diligence and sound enquiry which could confront the brilliant and hazardous generalisations of modern Sanskrit scholarship with the results of a more perfect system and a more penetrating vision. The only attempt in that direction, the attempt of Swami Dayananda, – has not been of a kind to generate confidence in the dispassionate judgment of Posterity which must be the final arbiter of these disputes; for not only was Page-182 that great Pandit and vigorous disputant unequipped with the wide linguistic and philological scholarship necessary for his work, but his method was rapid, impatient, polemical, subservient to certain fixed religious ideas rather than executed in the calm, disinterested freedom of the careful and impartial thinker and scholar. Judgment has focussed on the Veda and Vedanta by default in favour of the scholastic criticism of Europe which has alone been represented in the court of modern opinion. Nevertheless a time must come when the Indian mind will shake off the darkness that has fallen upon it, cease to think or hold opinions at second and third hand and reassert its right to judge and enquire in a perfect freedom into the meaning of its own Scriptures. When that day comes we shall, I think, discover that the imposing fabric of Vedic theory is based upon nothing more sound or true than a foundation of loosely massed conjectures. We shall question many established philological myths, – the legend, for instance, of an Aryan invasion of India from the north, the artificial and inimical [?] distinction of Aryan and Dravidian which an erroneous philology has driven like a wedge into the unity of the homogenous Indo-Afghan race; the strange dogma of a "henotheistic" Vedic naturalism; the ingenious and brilliant extravagances of the modern sun and star myth weavers, and more… the hasty and attractive generalisation which, after a brief period of unquestioning acceptance by the easily-persuaded intellect of mankind, is bound to depart into the limbo of forgotten theories. We attach an undue importance and value to the ephemeral conclusions of European philology, because it is systematic in its errors and claims to be a science. We forget or do not know that the claims of philology to a scientific value and authority are scouted by European scientists, the very word, philology, is a by-word of scorn or pseudo-scientific cant. Beyond one or two generalisations of the mutations followed by words in their progress through the various Aryan languages and a certain number of grammatical rectifications and rearrangements, resulting jn a more or less arbitrary view of linguistic…,, modern philology has discovered no really binding law or rule for its own guidance. It has fixed one or two sure sign-posts; – the rest is speculation and conjecture. We are not, therefore, Page-183 bound to worship at the shrine of Comparative Science and Comparative Mythology and offer up on these dubious [?] altars the Veda and Vedanta. The question of Vedic lore [?] and the meaning of Veda still lies open. If Sayana’s interpretation of Vedic texts is largely conjectural and likely often to be mistaken and unsound, the European interpretation can make claim to no better certainty. The more lively ingenuity and imposing orderliness of the European method of conjecture may be admitted; but ingenuity and orderliness though good help to an enquiry are in themselves no guarantee of truth and a conjecture does not cease to be a conjecture because it is laboriously justified or brilliantly supported. It is on the basis of a purely conjectural translation of the Vedas that Europe presents us with these brilliant pictures of Vedic religion, Vedic society, Vedic civilisation which we so eagerly accept and unquestioningly reproduce. For we take them as the form of an unquestionable truth, in reality they are no more than brilliantly coloured hypotheses, - works of imagination, not drawings from the life.
When the ancient thinkers of India set themselves to study the soul of man in
themselves and others, they, unlike any other nation or school of early thought,
proceeded at once Their object was to study and arrange and utilise the forms,
forces and working movements of consciousness, just as the modern physical
sciences study, arrange and utilise the forms, forces and working movements of
objective Matter. The material with which they had to deal was more subtle,
flexible and variable than the most impalpable forces of what the physical
sciences have become aware; its motions were more elusive, its processes harder
to fix but once grasped and ascertained, the movements of consciousness were
found by Vedic psychologists to be in their process and activity as regular,
manageable and utilisable as the movements of physical forces. The power of the
soul can be as perfectly handled and as safely, methodically and puissantly
directed to practical life-purposes of say, power and light as the modern power
of Page-184 there is no difference of essential law in the physical and the psychical but only a difference and undoubtedly a great difference of energy, instrumentation and exact process. For, the Supreme Existence which expresses itself equally in soul and matter moves on one fundamental principle on all its seven-fold levels and even one set of medial processes; but it varies their minute arrangement and organic functioning to suit the material which it is using and the objective which it has set before Itself in Its divine movement. Exact observation and untrammelled yet scrupulous experiment are the method of every true science. Not mere observation by itself, – for observation without experiment, without analysis and new combination leads to a limited and erroneous knowledge; often it generates an empirical classification which does not in the least deserve the name of science. The old European system of psychology was just such a pseudo-scientific system. Its observations were superficial, its terms and classification arbitrary, its aim and spirit abstract, empty and scholastic. In modern times a different system and method are being founded; but the vices of the old system persist. The observations made have been incoherent, partial or morbid and abnormal; the generalisations are far too wide for their meagre substratum of observed data; the abstract, and scholastic use of psychological terms and the old metaphysical ideas of psychological processes still bandage the eyes of the infant knowledge, mar its truth and hamper its progress. These old errors are strangely entwined with a new fallacy which threatens to vitiate the whole enquiry, – the fallacy of the materialistic prepossession. (Incomplete) Page-185 |