Book Description

An excerpt from the PREFACE: The problem of energy has generally been left to the scientist. It is taken for granted that energy is a fact of our experience, and that philosophy has little to say about matters of fact that have their certitude established by universal belief of mankind. From the savage to the savant, it is held as an undisputed fact that there is power in nature, power in us, and power in any conceivable form of ulterior reality. Men may differ as to the nature of this power, but nobody questions the fact itself. The aboriginal reduced nature to a congeries of wills and propitiated them. The later scientists and positivists, in their attempt to free nature from all anthropomorphic ideas, purged it of all forces and wills. But this so-called emancipation of scientific thought, though useful for the immediate purposes of science, left nature a huge and inexplicable illusion, leading most of these thinkers naturally to agnosticism; for, change is a patent fact of experience; how can it be explained without some power behind it? And yet the nature of this power defies thought. Humanity, as represented by the history of Western culture and civilization, has thus wavered between blind faith and agnosticism. After centuries of progress, its final attitude has been to relegate this problem to the scientist, who indeed speaks profusely about force and energy, but always finds it convenient to restrict these terms to certain conceptions of his own, formulated to suit his limited diagnosis of natural phenomena. Modern and contemporary philosophy has little to say definitely about it. In short, the final result of Western thinking has been to leave the problem where it was, in the mist of oboriginal ignorance, relieved only, by a learned agnosticism that is not unoften painfully conscious of its strangely grotesque constructions of nature. It will perhaps be thought ridiculous in some quarters, for a professed student of Advaitism to attempt the solution of such a concrete problem; for that philosophy is known to deny all facts of experience, and to revel merely in high-sounding but empty words about an Absolute that is to all appearances a meaningless fiction. Can such a philosophy solve one of the most concrete of our problems, when some of the best intellects among men, with a most intimate touch with reality and actual facts, have failed? The doubt is plausible,— at least sincere. But all I can say at present in answer to it is to refer to the following pages and the solution contained therein.