The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

by René Guénon

  As the West has just been alluded to, one further remark is called for: however far afield the state of mind that has been specifically designated as ‘modern’ may have spread, especially in recent years, and however strong may be the hold it has taken and that it exercises ever more completely — at least externally — over the whole world, this state of mind remains nevertheless purely Western in origin: in the West it had its birth, and the West was for a long time its exclusive domain; in the East its influence will never be anything but a Westernization. However far that influence may extend in the course of events still to be unfolded, its extension can never be held to contradict what has been said about the difference between the spirit of the East and that of the West, and this difference is none other than that between the traditional spirit and the modern spirit; for it is all too clear that to the extent that a man ‘Westernizes’ himself, whatever may be his race or country, to that extent he ceases to be an Easterner spiritually and intellectually, that is to say from the one point of view that really holds any interest. This is not a simple question of geography, unless that word be understood in a sense other than its modern one, for there is also a symbolical geography; indeed, in this connection, there is a very significant correspondence between the domination of the West and the end of a cycle, for the West is the place where the sun sets, that is to say where it arrives at the end of its daily journey, and where, according to Chinese symbolism, ‘the ripe fruit falls to the foot of the tree’. As to the means whereby the West has come to establish that domination, of which the ‘modernization’ of a more or less considerable number of Easterners is only the latest and most vexing consequence, it has been made sufficiently clear in the author’s other works that these means are based on material strength alone, which amounts to saying that Western domination is itself no more than an expression of the ‘reign of quantity’.

  Thus, from whatever side one looks at things, one is always brought back to the same considerations and constantly sees them verified in all possible applications. There ought not to be anything surprising in this, for truth is necessarily coherent; but that certainly does not mean that truth is ‘systematic’, as profane philosophers and scholars all too readily imagine, confined as they are within narrowly limited conceptions to which alone the word ‘systems’ can properly be applied, and which merely reflect the insufficiency of individual minds left to their own devices; this is so even when the minds in question belong to those conventionally called ‘men of genius’, for all the most vaunted speculations of such people are certainly not equal in value to a knowledge of the smallest traditional truth. Enough has been said on that subject in another place, for it has previously been found necessary to denounce the errors of ‘individualism’, for that again is one of the characteristics of the modern spirit; here it may be added that the false unity of the individual, conceived as constituting in himself a complete whole, corresponds in the human order to the false unity of the so-called ‘atom’ in the cosmic order: both the one and the other are merely elements that are regarded as ‘simple’ from a purely quantitative point of view, and as such are supposed to be capable of a sort of indefinite repetition, which is strictly speaking an impossibility since it is essentially incompatible with the very nature of things; in fact, this indefinite repetition is nothing but the pure multiplicity toward which the present world is straining with all its might, without however being able ever to lose itself entirely therein, because pure multiplicity is situated beneath the level of manifested existence, and represents the extreme opposite of principial unity. The descending cyclic movement must therefore be considered as taking place between these two poles, starting from unity, or rather from the point closest to unity in the domain of manifestation, relatively to the state of existence envisaged, and gradually tending toward multiplicity, that is to say toward multiplicity considered analytically and without reference to any principle, for it goes without saying that in the principial order all multiplicity is synthetically comprehended in unity itself. It might appear that there is, in a sense, multiplicity at the two extreme points, in the same way as there is correlatively, as has just been pointed out, unity on the one side and ‘units’ on the other; but the notion of inverse analogy applies strictly here too, so that while the principial multiplicity is contained in metaphysical unity, arithmetical or quantitative ‘units’ are on the other hand contained in the other and inferior multiplicity. Incidentally, does not the mere possibility of speaking of ‘units’ in the plural show clearly enough how far removed the thing so spoken of is from true unity? The multiplicity of the lower order is by definition purely quantitative, it could be said to be quantity itself, deprived of all quality; on the other hand the multiplicity of the higher order, or that which can be called so analogically, is really a qualitative multiplicity, that is to say the integrality of the qualities or attributes that constitute the essence of beings and of things. So it can be said that the descent referred to tends away from pure quality toward pure quantity, both the one and the other being limits situated outside manifestation, the one above it and the other beneath. In relation to the special conditions of our world or of our state of existence, these limits are an expression of the two universal principles that have elsewhere been referred to as ‘essence’ and ‘substance’, and they are the two poles between which all manifestation is produced. This is a point that must be explained more fully before going any further, for it provides an indispensable key to the better understanding of the considerations to be developed later in this study.

  1

  Quality and Quantity

  Quality and quantity are fairly generally regarded as complementary terms, although the profound reason for their complementarism is often far from being understood, this reason lying in the ‘polar’ correspondence referred to toward the end of the introduction to this book. This, the first of all cosmic dualities, is a starting-point, for it is situated at the very principle of existence or of universal manifestation, and without it no manifestation would be possible in any mode whatsoever: it is the duality of Purusha and Prakriti according to the Hindu doctrine, or to use another terminology, that of ‘essence’ and ‘substance’. Its two terms must be envisaged as universal principles, and as being the two poles of all manifestation; but, at another level, or rather at a number of different levels (for there are many levels, corresponding to the more or less particularized domains that can be envisaged in the interior of universal manifestation), these two terms can also be used analogically and in a relative sense to designate that which corresponds to the two principles, or most directly represents them with reference to a particular more or less limited mode of manifestation. Thus it is that essence and substance can be spoken of in relation either to a world, that is to say to a state of existence determined by certain special conditions, or in relation to a being considered as a separate entity, or even to each of the states of that being, that is to say, to its manifestation in each of the degrees of existence; in this last case, there is naturally a correspondence between what essence and substance represent in the microcosm and what they represent, considered from a macrocosmic point of view, in the world in which the manifestation of the being is situated; in other words, they are then only particularizations of the relative principles that are the determinations of universal essence and substance in relation to the conditions of the world in question.

  Understood in this relative sense, and especially with reference to particular beings, essence and substance are in effect the same as the ‘form’ and ‘matter’ of the scholastic philosophers; but it is better to avoid the use of these latter terms because, doubtless owing to an imperfection of the Latin language in this connection, they only convey rather inaccurately the ideas they ought to express,[1] and also because they have lately become even more equivocal by reason of the quite different meaning commonly assigned to them in current speech. However that may be, to say that every manifested being is a composite of
‘form’ and ‘matter’ amounts to saying that its existence necessarily proceeds simultaneously from both essence and substance, and consequently that there is in each being something corresponding both to the one and to the other of these two principles, in such a way that the being is as it were a resultant of their union, or to speak more exactly, a resultant of the action exercised by the active principle, Essence, on the passive principle, Substance; and if consideration is confined to the special case of individual beings, the ‘form’ and the ‘matter’ that constitute those beings are respectively identical with what the Hindu tradition designates as nāma and rūpa. While on the subject of concordances between different terminologies, thus perhaps incidentally enabling some people to translate the explanations given into a language to which they are more accustomed, it may be added that the Aristotelian designations ‘act’ and ‘potency’ also correspond to essence and substance. Aristotle’s terms are susceptible of a more extended application than are the terms ‘form’ and ‘matter’, but to say that there is in every being a mixture of act and potency comes back to the same thing in the end, for act is that in him by which he participates in essence, and potency is that in him by which he participates in substance; pure act and pure potency could not exist anywhere in manifestation, since they are true equivalents of universal essence and substance.

  Provided that this is clearly understood, it is possible to speak of the Essence and of the Substance of our world, that is, of the world that is the domain of the individual human being, and it can be said that in conformity with the particular conditions that define this world as such, these two principles appear in it under the aspects of quality and of quantity respectively. This may appear evident at first sight so far as quality is concerned, since essence is the principial synthesis of all the attributes that belong to a being and make that being what it is, and since attributes and qualities are really synonymous: and it may be observed that quality, considered as the content of Essence, if such an expression be allowable, is not exclusively confined to our world, but is susceptible of a transposition that universalizes its significance. There is nothing remarkable in this, since Essence represents the superior principle; but in any such universalization quality ceases to be the correlative of quantity, for quantity, unlike quality, is strictly linked up with the special conditions of our world; furthermore, from a theological point of view, is not quality in some way brought into relation with God himself when his attributes are spoken of, whereas it would be manifestly inconceivable to pretend to assign to him any sort of corresponding quantitative determination.[2] To this the objection might perhaps be raised that Aristotle ranks quality as well as quantity among his ‘categories’, which are only special modes of the being and not coextensive with it; he does so however without effecting the transposition previously mentioned, indeed he has no need to effect it, for the enumeration of his ‘categories’ relates only to our world and to its conditions, in such a way that quality cannot be and is not really meant to be understood otherwise than in a sense that is more immediate for us in our state as individuals, the sense in which, as explained earlier, it appears as a correlative of quantity.

  It is of interest to note on the other hand that the ‘form’ of the scholastics is what Aristotle calls εἶδος, and that this latter word is also used to mean ‘species’, which is properly speaking a nature or an essence common to an indefinite multitude of individuals. Specific nature is of a purely qualitative order, for it is truly ‘innumerable’ in the strict sense of the word, that is to say it is independent of quantity, being indivisible and entire in every individual belonging to the species, so that it is quite unaffected by the number of those individuals, ‘plus’ or ‘minus’ not being applicable to it. Moreover, εἶδος, is etymologically the ‘idea’, not only in the modern psychological sense, but also in an ontological sense nearer than is ordinarily supposed to the sense in which Plato uses it, for whatever may be the real differences in this connection between the conceptions of Plato and of Aristotle, as so often happens they have been greatly exaggerated by disciples and commentators. The Platonic ideas are also essences; Plato gives expression chiefly to the transcendent aspect and Aristotle to the immanent aspect, but this does not imply incompatibility; independently of any conclusions to which the ‘systematic’ spirit may lead, it is only a matter of a difference of level; in any case, they are always considering ‘archetypes’ or the essential principles of things, such principles representing what may be called the qualitative side of manifestation. Furthermore, the Platonic ideas, under another name and by direct filiation, are the same thing as the Pythagorean numbers; and this shows clearly that although the Pythagorean numbers are, as already indicated, called numbers analogically, they are in no way numbers in the ordinary quantitative sense of the word; they are on the contrary purely qualitative, corresponding inversely on the side of essence to what the quantitative numbers are on the side of substance.[3]

  On the other hand, when Saint Thomas Aquinas says that numerus stat ex parte materiae he is speaking of quantitative number, thereby affirming decisively that quantity has an immediate connection with the substantial side of manifestation. The word ‘substantial’ is used here because materia in the scholastic sense is not by any means the same as ‘matter’ as understood by modern physicists, but is properly ‘substance’, whether that word be taken in its relative meaning, as when it is put into correlation with forma and referred to particular beings, or whether it be taken, when materia prima is in question, as the passive principle of universal manifestation, that is, as pure potentiality, and so as the equivalent of Prakriti in the Hindu doctrine. However, as soon as ‘matter’ is in question, in whatever sense the word be taken, everything becomes particularly obscure and confused, and doubtless not without reason;[4] and therefore, while it has been possible to give an adequate account of the relation of quality to essence without developing a long argument, it will be necessary to go more deeply into the relation between quantity and substance in order to present a clear picture of the various aspects assumed by the Western conception of ‘matter’ even before the advent of the modern deviation in which this word was destined to play so great a part: and it is all the more necessary to do so because this question is in a sense at the very root of the principal subject of this study.

  2

  Materia Signata Quantitate

  The scholastics gave the name materia, generally speaking, to what Aristotle had called ὕλη; but this materia, as has already been said, must in no way be identified with the ‘matter’ of the moderns, for the idea of ‘matter’, complex and even in some ways contradictory as it is, seems to have been as strange to the ancient Westerners as it still is to Easterners. Even admitting that materia can become ‘matter’ in certain special cases, or rather to be more accurate, that the more recent conception can be made to fit into the earlier one, materia nevertheless includes many other things at the same time, and it is these other things that must be carefully distinguished from ‘matter’; but for the purpose of naming them as a group by some comprehensive term like ὕλη or materia, we have no better word at our disposal in Western languages than the word ‘substance’. In any case, ὕλη, as a universal principle, is pure potency in which nothing is distinguished or ‘actualized’, and it constitutes the passive ‘support’ of all manifestation; it is therefore, taken in this sense, precisely Prakriti or universal substance, and everything that has been said elsewhere about Prakriti applies equally to ὕλη thus understood.[5] Substance, understood in a relative sense as being that which represents analogically the substantial principle and plays its part in relation to a more or less narrowly restricted order of existence, furnishes the term ὕλη with a secondary meaning, particularly when this term is correlated with εἶδος, to designate the two sides, essential and substantial, of particular existences.

  The scholastics, following Aristotle, distinguish these two meanings by speaking of mate
ria prima and materia secunda, so that it can be said that their materia prima is universal substance and their materia secunda is substance in the relative sense; but, since terms become susceptible of multiple applications at different levels as soon as the relative is considered, what is materia at a certain level can become forma at another, and inversely, according to the more or less particularized hierarchy of the degrees of manifested existence under consideration. In no case is a materia secunda pure potency, although it may constitute the potential side of a world or of a being; universal substance alone is pure potency, and it is situated not only beneath our world (substantia, from sub stare, is literally ‘that which stands beneath’, a meaning also attached to the ideas of ‘support’ and ‘substratum’), but also beneath the whole of all the worlds and all the states comprised in universal manifestation. In addition, for the very reason that it is potentiality, absolutely ‘undistinguished’ and undifferentiated universal substance is the only principle that can properly be said to be ‘unintelligible’, not merely because we are not capable of knowing it, but because there is actually nothing in it to be known; as for relative substances, insofar as they participate in the potentiality of universal substance, so far do they also participate in its ‘unintelligibility’. Therefore the explanation of things must not be sought on the substantial side, but on the contrary it must be sought on the essential side; translated into terms of spatial symbolism, this is equivalent to saying that every explanation must proceed from above downward and not from below upward; and this observation has a special relevance at this point, for it immediately gives the reason why modern science actually lacks all explanatory value.