object:04.08 - An Evolutionary Problem
book class:Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
subject class:Integral Yoga
class:chapter
Matter Aspires Values Higher and Lower
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The March of CivilisationAn Evolutionary Problem
An Evolutionary Problem
The London Times Literary Supplement (July 27, 1946), in the course of a critical estimate of Bernard Shaw, writes:
"Mr. Shaw pats Lamarck on the back and accepts his theory that 'living organisms change because they want to'.
If you have no eyes and want to see and keep trying to see, you will finally get eyes. If, like a mole or a subterranean fish, you have eyes and don't want to see, you will lose your eyes. If you like eating the tender tops of trees enough to make you concentrate all your energies on the stretching of your neck, you will eventually get a long neck like the giraffe.
But the metaphysics here are surely false. If a species has no eyes, has never possessed eyes, is unconscious of sight, or of the fact that there are sights to be seen, is unaware of any necessity for sight, how can that species desire sight or will itself into the possession of eyes? We can only will what we need."
I am afraid the metaphysics here found fault with is not surely false, it is the critics appreciation that is at fault. The metaphysics is perhaps somewhat too physical in its imagery and terminology, that is to say, graphic in the Shavian manner, but the matter seems to us quite all right. What the critic fails to understand is that it is not the conscious idea in the mind that brings about its concrete realisation. What is there at the outset in the evolutionary urge is a life-force, blind, no doubt in the usual sense, but driving towards greater expression and articulation, towards a more and more conscious and clear perception of ends and means. Thus, for example,the root shoots out of the earth into the open air, throws up the stem and the stem grows upward and branches out into tendrils and leaves: all that process means an ardent yearning, a wanting, to rush and plunge into the light and air above: The root or the seed underground does not see the light or air, how then does it move towards that? In fact, it is not necessary to have seen eyes, known what eyes are in order to grow the vision and the organ. We will what we need: yes, but what we need is not always or wholly covered by the conscious minds conception of it. The needs lie deep down and most of them are unconscious; and at a time, at a stage when conscious mind has not yet evolved, it is a secret sense of the life-force, an instinctive orientation to what is useful and needful that infallibly guides the living organism.
Evolution is purposive: not because it has had always a mentally conscious aim before it, for the mind is a later production, but because the purpose is latent within as an involved force and is gradually unrolled and worked out. It is not as indeterminate and unpredictable as Bergson would have it; it has a veiled determination, a disposition implanted in the very movement by the stress of an apparent unconsciousness seeking conscious formulation. We might also say, reverting to our analogy, that the seed sprouts towards light and air, because it had absorbed light and air in its original formation out of the flower blooming in the open space: the impress of that contact is taken into the very grain of its substance, in its chromosomes and genesit remains there as an indelible memory (although not of the human cerebral variety). It is no wonder therefore that an inner urge towards light gradually leads towards the formation of the instrument for sight. The organism may have no notion of the external eye, but the external eye is only a projection of an inner eye that lies imbedded in the sensory continuum. Behind the physical eye there is a subtle eye, the eye of the eye, as the Upanishad calls it, the secret gaze of an involved consciousness in the apparently unconscious.
The whole articulation of the external organism is, as we know, contained in a secret disposition of elements within the cellnot in the way, as was once supposed, viz., that a whole full-grown tree lies in a miniature form within the seed andgrowth simply means a gradual enlargement of that formbut that there is a pattern of ultimate particlesvital quantaa rhythm and vibration of life energy, that is the origin, the formal and efficient cause, of the material form. Deeper still, behind the blind instinctive urge of life, the unconsciousness that is the inertia of matter, there is a consciousness, a vision, a supernal self-conscious energy that inspires, guides, fashions the whole evolutionary scheme in the large as well as in all details.
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Matter Aspires Values Higher and Lower
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