IN the seventeenth century,
John Smith, one of the Cambridge Platonists, wrote: "The reason why,
notwithstanding all our acute reasons and subtile disputes, Truth prevails no
more in the world, is, we so often disjoyn Truth and true Goodness, which in
themselves can never be disunited." This criticism, made at a time when
scientific modes of thought were just beginning to be formulated, is still an
accurate and succinct commentary on modern theories of knowledge.
The idea that scientific knowledge needs to be conjoined with a sense of moral
obligation, -- or, to use words meaning the same thing but more in keeping with
the modern spirit, with a sense of "social responsibility" -- is now a
conception of wide-spread expression and increasing emphasis. The destruction
wrought by men with the powers of nature placed in their hands by science has
shown the supreme importance of this need. Thus we are faced with a problem to
which scientific men, as scientists, have given little thought. How is this
sense of social responsibility to be aroused?
For generations philosophers of science have held that ethical considerations
are a distracting intrusion in the sphere of "pure" research. Facts, they have
asserted, are one thing, and values (if, indeed, values exist at all) quite
another. Because Plato refused to separate knowledge from the moral scheme of
human life, he has been condemned as having interfered with the progress of
"exact science." But although today the acuteness of our moral or social
problems is increasingly evident to the scientific mind, Plato is far from being
vindicated. The knowledge of science is still thought to be knowledge, and that
it needs only to be joined with ethics. But that this would be no natural union
is not perceived; we have yet to learn that truly scientific ethics is more than
a mere emotional infusion of uninstructed "good will" to dilute the materialism
of our civilization.
The real problem has to do with the nature of the "facts" with which science
attempts to deal. No fact is simple and single, but stands in relation to all
other facts. In a sevenfold universe, there must be seven major relations for
every fact. Unless these are known, our understanding of the facts is partial,
and is therefore deceptive if believed to be complete. Let us reduce the problem
to simpler terms. If the world is regarded under three aspects of reality,
Spiritual, Psychical, Physical, then all things and beings stand in threefold
relation with all other things and beings.
Almost all the facts of science are "physical" facts -- descriptions, that is,
of the forms and the movements of matter. Physical science has formulated laws
which give an account of the dynamic play between the objects thus described.
With these laws as the basis of speculation, theories of cause and effect and of
the fundamental nature of things have been deduced -- theories forming the
rambling structure of metaphysical materialism, i.e., the doctrine that the
first principles of things are exhibited in the properties and attributes of
visible phenomena. The Psychical world, insofar as it is granted any real
existence, is described in refinements of the terms of physics; psychic
happenings are "epiphenomenal"; their self-existent reality is only seeming and
has no being apart from the physical world. The Spiritual world is terra
incognita to science.
What kind of knowledge, then, is scientific knowledge? Is it conceivable that a
true ethics can be joined with science, so long as the principles of science
remain a negation of the concepts of universal purpose and moral
interdependence? Is it not self-evident that a true understanding of the
physical world includes also the knowledge of Mind and Spirit, and the
interrelation of all three?
Both the scientist and the student of spiritual philosophy see the same facts,
but here ends the unity of their perceptions. The entire grammar of science --
its ways of describing phenomena -- is organized in terms of materialistic
assumption, so that even the bare account of the appearance of the physical
world little resembles the philosopher's description of the same phenomena. The
extremes of opposition between the two views are reached when facts are
discussed with reference to their meaning.
The science and ethics of Theosophy are not divided ways of thought; they are
two aspects of the same truth: Compassion is no attribute; it is the Law of
Laws. The Bhagavad-Gita and the Voice of the Silence are as scientific as they
are ethical. The world of knowledge and the world of right action are one, and
until this is seen and acted upon, there will be no Truth in the world of men.