by René Guénon
In order to reach the stage that has been described, man must have lost the use of the faculties which in normal times allowed him to pass beyond the bounds of the sensible world, the loss being due to the existence of ‘materialization’ or ‘solidification’, naturally as effective in him as in the rest of the cosmic manifestation of which he is a part, and producing considerable modifications in his ‘psycho-physiological’ constitution. For even if the sensible world is in a very real sense surrounded by barriers that can be said to be thicker than they were in its earlier states, it is nonetheless true that there can never anywhere be an absolute separation between different orders of existence; any such separation would have the effect of cutting off from reality itself the domain thus isolated, so that in any such event the existence of that domain, that of the sensible world in this instance, would instantly vanish. It might however legitimately be asked how so complete and so general an atrophy of certain faculties has actually come about. In order that it might take place, man had first of all to be induced to turn all his attention exclusively to sensible things; the work of deviation had necessarily to begin in this way, that work which could be said to consist in the ‘manufacturing’ of the present world, and it clearly could not ‘succeed’ in its turn except precisely at this phase of the cycle, and by using, in ‘diabolical’ mode, the existing conditions of the environment itself. So much for this matter, which need not be further insisted on for the moment; nevertheless, the solemn silliness of certain declamations dear to scientific (or rather ‘scientistic’) ‘popularizers’ can scarcely be too much admired, when they are pleased to assert on all occasions that modern science ceaselessly pushes back the boundaries of the known world, which is in fact the exact opposite of the truth: never have those boundaries been so close as they are in the conceptions admitted by this profane self-styled science, never have either the world or man been so shrunken, to the point of their being reduced to mere corporeal entities, deprived, by hypothesis, of the smallest possibility of communication with any other order of reality!
There is also yet another aspect of the question, both reciprocal and complementary to the aspect considered hitherto: man is not restricted at any stage to the passive role of a mere spectator, who must confine himself to forming an idea more or less true, or more or less false, of what is happening around him; on the contrary, he is himself one of the factors that intervene actively in the modification of the world he lives in; and it must be added that he is even a particularly important factor, by reason of the characteristically ‘central’ position he occupies in that world. The mention of this human intervention does not imply that the artificial modifications to which industry subjects the terrestrial environment are alone in view, and in any case they are too obvious to be worth spending time on: they are certainly something to be taken into account, but they are not everything, and the matter now particularly to be considered in relation to the point of view of the present discussion is something quite different, and is not willed by man, at least expressly or consciously, though it nonetheless actually covers a much wider field than do any artificial modifications. The truth is that the materialistic conception, once it has been formed and spread abroad in one way or another, can only serve to further reinforce the very ‘solidification’ of the world that in the first place made it possible; and all the consequences directly or indirectly derived from that conception, including the current notion of ‘ordinary life’, tend only toward this same end, for the general reactions of the cosmic environment do actually change according to the attitude adopted by man toward it. It can be said with truth that certain aspects of reality conceal themselves from anyone who looks upon reality from a profane and materialistic point of view, and they become inaccessible to his observation: this is not a more or less ‘picturesque’ manner of speaking, as some people might be tempted to think, but is the simple and direct statement of a fact, just as it is a fact that animals flee spontaneously and instinctively from the presence of anyone who evinces a hostile attitude toward them. That is why there are some things that can never be grasped by men of learning who are materialists or positivists, and this naturally further confirms their belief in the validity of their conceptions by seeming to afford a sort of negative proof of them, whereas it is really neither more nor less than a direct effect of the conceptions themselves. It is of course by no means the case that the things that elude the materialists have in any sense ceased to exist since the time of, or because of, the birth of materialism and positivism, but they do actually ‘cut themselves off from the domain that is within the reach of profane learning, refraining from penetrating into it in any way that could allow their action or even their existence to be suspected, very much as, in another order not unrelated to the order under consideration, the repository of traditional knowledge veils itself and shuts itself in ever more strictly before the invasion of the modern spirit. This is in a sense the ‘counterpart’ of the limitation of the faculties of the human being to those that are by their nature related to the corporeal modality alone: because of that limitation man becomes, as has been explained, incapable of getting out of the sensible world; because of what has just been called its ‘counterpart’ he loses in addition all chance of becoming aware of a manifest intervention of supra-sensible elements in the sensible world itself. So for him that world has become to the greatest possible extent completely ‘closed’, for it has become ever more ‘solid’ as it has become more isolated from every other order of reality, even from those orders that are nearest to it and simply constitute separate modalities of one and the same individual domain. From the inside of such a world it may appear that ‘ordinary life’ has only to roll on henceforward without trouble or unforeseen accidents, just like the movements of a well regulated ‘mechanism’; is not modern man, having ‘mechanized’ the world around him doing his very best to ‘mechanize’ himself, in all the forms of activity that still remain open to his narrowly limited nature?
Nevertheless, the ‘solidification’ of the world, to whatever length it may actually be carried, can never be complete, and there are limits beyond which it cannot go, since, as explained earlier, arrival at its extreme end-point would be incompatible with any real existence, even of the lowest degree; and moreover, the further ‘solidification’ goes the more precarious it becomes, for the lowest reality is also the least stable; the ever-growing rapidity of the changes taking place in the world today provides all too eloquent a testimony to the truth of this. It cannot but be that ‘fissures’ should develop in this imagined ‘closed system’, which has moreover, owing to its ‘mechanical’ character, something ‘artificial’ about it (this word of course being used in a sense much broader than in its usual application to industrial products alone) that is not such as to inspire confidence in its duration; and there are already at this moment numerous signs indicating most clearly that its unstable equilibrium is on the point of being interrupted. So true is this that what has been said about the materialism and mechanism of the modern period could almost in a certain sense be relegated to the past even now; this of course does not mean that their practical consequences may not continue to develop for a certain time to come, nor that their influence on the general mentality will not persist for a more or less considerable period, if only as a consequence of ‘popularization’ in its various forms, including education in schools at all levels, where there are always plenty of ‘survivals’ of that sort hanging on (this point will be expanded shortly); but it is nonetheless true that at the present moment the very notion of ‘matter’, so painfully worked out through so many different theories, seems to be in course of fading away; nevertheless, there is perhaps no reason to be unduly pleased at the occurrence, because, as will become clearer later on, it can only properly be taken to represent yet one more step toward final dissolution.
18
Scientific Mythology and Popularization
Reference has already been made to ‘survivals’ le
ft behind in the common mentality by theories no longer believed in by the scientists, whereby those theories are enabled to continue as before to exercise their influence over the general outlook of mankind, and it will be useful to give some further attention to the subject, for it is one that can contribute toward the explanation of certain aspects of the present period. In this connection it should first be recalled that when profane science leaves the domain of a mere observation of facts, and tries to get something out of the indefinite accumulation of separate details that is its sole immediate result, it retains as one of its chief characteristics the more or less laborious construction of purely hypothetical theories. These theories can necessarily never be more than hypothetical, since their starting-point is wholly empirical, for facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations and so never have been and never will be able to guarantee the truth of any theory, and as was said earlier, their greater or lesser multiplicity has no bearing on the question; and besides, such hypotheses are really not inspired by the results of experience to nearly the same extent as by certain preconceived ideas and by some of the predominant tendencies of the modern mentality. The ever-growing rapidity with which such hypotheses are abandoned in these days and replaced by others is well known, and these continual changes are enough to make all too obvious the lack of solidity of the hypotheses and the impossibility of recognizing in them any value so far as real knowledge is concerned; they are also assuming more and more, in the eyes of their authors themselves, a conventional character, and so a quality of unreality, and this again may be noted as a symptom of the approach toward final dissolution. Indeed the scientists, and particularly the physicists, can hardly be completely deceived by constructions of this sort, the fragility of which they know all too well, today more so than ever. Not only are they quickly ‘worn-out’, but from their beginnings the very people who build them up only believe in them to a certain doubtless rather limited extent, and in a more or less ‘provisional’ way; very often they even seem to regard them less as real attempts at explanation than as mere ‘representations’ and as ‘manners of speaking’. This indeed is really all they are, and we have seen that Leibnitz had already shown that Cartesian mechanism could be nothing but a ‘representation’ of outward appearances, denuded of all genuinely explanatory value. Under such conditions the least that can be said is that the whole business is rather pointless, and a conception of science that can lead to a labour of that kind is certainly a strange one; but the danger of these illusory theories lies in the influence they are liable to exercise on the ‘public at large’ by virtue of the fact that they call themselves ‘scientific’, for the public takes them quite seriously and blindly accepts them as ‘dogmas’, and that not merely for as long as they last (that time often being not long enough for them to have even come fully to the knowledge of the public) but more especially when the scientists have already abandoned them, and for a long time afterward as well. This happens because they persist, as was pointed out earlier, in elementary teaching and in works of ‘popularization’, in which they are always presented in a ‘simplified’ and resolutely assertive form, and not by any means as mere hypotheses, though that is all they ever were for those who elaborated them. The use of the word ‘dogma’ a moment ago was deliberate, for it is a question of something that, in accordance with the anti-traditional modern spirit, must oppose and be substituted for religious dogmas; an example like that of the ‘evolutionary’ theories, among others, can leave no doubt on that score; and it is even more significant that most of the ‘popularizers’ have the habit of sprinkling their writings with more or less violent declamations against all traditional ideas, which shows only too clearly the part they are charged with playing, albeit unconsciously in many cases, in the intellectual subversion of our times.
Thus it comes about that there has grown up in the scientistic ‘mentality’ — which is, for the largely utilitarian reasons already indicated, more or less the mentality of a great majority of our contemporaries — a real ‘mythology’: most certainly not in the original and transcendent meaning applicable to the traditional ‘myths’, but merely in the ‘pejorative’ meaning that the word has acquired in current speech. Endless examples could be cited: one of the most striking and most ‘immediate’, so to speak, being the ‘imagery’ of atoms and the many particles of various kinds into which they have lately become dissociated in the most recent physical theories (the result of this of course being that they are no longer in any sense atoms, which literally means ‘indivisibles’, though they go on being called by that name in the face of all logic). ‘Imagery’ is the right word, because it is no more than imagery in the minds of the physicists; but the ‘public at large’ believes firmly that real ‘entities’ are in question, such as could be seen and touched by anyone whose senses were sufficiently developed or who had at his disposal sufficiently powerful instruments of observation; is not that a ‘mythology’ of a most ingenuous kind? This does not prevent the same public from pouring scorn on the conceptions of the ancients at every opportunity, though of course they do not understand a single word about them; even admitting that there may have been ‘popular’ deformations at all times (‘popular’ being another word that people are very fond of using wrongly and ineptly, doubtless because of the growing importance accorded to the ‘masses’), it is permissible to doubt whether those deformations have ever been so grossly materialistic and at the same time so widely diffused as they are at present, thanks to the tendencies inherent in the mentality of today and at the same time to the much vaunted spread of a ‘compulsory education’ at once profane and rudimentary!
Too much time must not be spent on this subject, for it would lend itself to an almost indefinite development, since it leads too far afield from the main point at issue; it would for instance be easy to show that, by reason of the ‘survival’ of hypotheses, elements that really belong to different theories get superimposed and intermingled in such a way in popular notions that they sometimes form the most incongruous combinations; and in any case the contemporary mentality is made up in such a way that it readily accepts the strangest contradictions. But it will be more profitable to stress again a particular aspect of this subject, though admittedly this will involve some anticipation of considerations that will find their place later on, for it concerns things more properly belonging to a phase other than that which has been in view up till now, though these phases cannot be kept quite separate, for that would give much too ‘schematic’ an impression of our period. At the same time a glimpse can be given of the way in which the tendencies toward ‘solidification’ and toward dissolution, while they are apparently opposed in some respects, are nevertheless associated from the very fact that they act simultaneously in such a way as to come to an inevitable end in the final catastrophe. The aspect of affairs to which attention will now be directed is the quite particularly extravagant character assumed by the notions in question when they are carried over into a domain other than that to which they were originally intended to be applied; from such misapplications are derived most of the phantasmagoria of what has been called ‘neo-spiritualism’ in its various forms, and it is just such borrowings from conceptions belonging essentially to the sensible order which explain the sort of ‘materialization’ of the supra-sensible that is one of its most common characteristics.[51] Without seeking for the moment to determine more precisely the nature and quality of the supra-sensible, insofar as it is actually involved in this matter, it will be useful to observe how far the very people who still admit it and think that they are aware of its action are in reality permeated by materialistic influence: for even if they do not deny all extra-corporeal reality, like the majority of their contemporaries, it is only because they have formed for themselves an idea of it that enables them in some way to assimilate it to the likeness of sensible things, and to do that is certainly scarcely better than to deny it. There is no reason to be surprised at this, considering the e
xtent to which all the occultist, Theosophist, and other schools of that sort are fond of searching assiduously for points of approach to modern scientific theories, from which indeed they draw their inspiration more directly than they are prepared to admit, and the result is what might logically be expected under such conditions. It may even be observed that, in accordance with the continuous changes in scientific theories, the resemblance between the conceptions of a particular school and a particular scientific theory may make it possible to ‘date’ the school, in default of any more precise information about its history and its origins.
