Vedic Moral Reasoning In Context Of The Jurisprudential Realist – A Look At Theistic Free-will

By Author: Premkumar Nadarajan.
Total Articles: 26
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Growing experience of the unity of Nature, of the interdependence of all
the various forces and departments of Nature, have made such a view of it
impossible to civilized and educated man. Primitive man was quite right
in arguing that, where he saw motion, there must be consciousness like
his own. But we have been led by Science to believe that whatever is the
cause of any one phenomenon (at least in inanimate nature), must be the
cause of all. The interconnexion, the regularity, the order observable
in phenomena are too great to be the result of chance or of the
undesigned concurrence of a number of independent Vedic agents: and
probably one may go on further to submit that this one cause must be the
ultimate cause even of those events which are directly and immediately
caused by our own wills. I would humbly submit that at least for the events of physical nature there must
be one Cause. And if the only sort of cause we know is a conscious and
rational being, then we have another most powerful reason for believing
that the ultimate reality, ...
... from which all other reality is derived, is
Mind--a single conscious Mind which we may now further describe as not
only Thought or Intelligence but also Will.

Let me add this additional consideration in support of the conclusion
that the world is not merely thought by God but is also willed by God.
When we talk about thought without will, we are talking about something
that we know absolutely nothing about. In all the consciousness that we
know of, in every moment of our own immediate waking experience, we find
thought, feeling, willing. Even in the consciousness of animals there
appears to be something analogous to these three sides or aspects of
consciousness: but at all events in developed human consciousness we know
of no such thing as thinking without willing. All thought involves
attention, and to attend is to will. If, therefore, on the grounds
suggested by the Vedic Idealists, we have been
led to think that the ultimate Reality is Mind or Spirit, we should
naturally conclude by analogy that it must be Will as well as Thought
and--I may add, though it hardly belongs to the present argument to
insist upon that--Feeling. On the other hand if, with men like
Vedic Natural law proponents we are conducted by the
appearances of design in Nature to the idea that Nature is striving after
something, that the ultimate Reality is Will, we must supplement that
line of argument by inferring from the analogy of our own Consciousness
that Will without Reason is an unintelligible and meaningless
abstraction; an impossible abstraction;
unconscious Will is as unintelligible a contradiction as an
unconscious Reason.
God is not Will without Reason or
Reason without Will, but both Reason and Will.

And here I must try to meet an inevitable objection. I do not say that
these three activities of the human intellect stand in God side by side
with the same distinctness and (if I may say so) irreducibility that they
do in us. What feeling is for a Being who has no material organism, we
can form no distinct conception. Our thought with its clumsy processes
of inference from the known to the unknown must be very unlike what
thought is in a Being to whom nothing is unknown. All our thought too
involves generalization, and in universal concepts
much that was present in the living experience of actual
perception is necessarily left out. Thought is but a sort of
reproduction--and a very imperfect reproduction--of actual, living,
sensible experience. We cannot suppose, then, that in God there is the
same distinction between actual present experience and the universal
concepts employed in thinking which there is in us. And so, again,
willing must be a very different thing in a being who wills or creates
the objects of his own thought from what it is in beings who can only
achieve their ends by distinguishing in the sharpest possible manner
between the indefinite multiplicity of things which they know but do not
cause and the tiny fragment of the Universe which by means of this
knowledge they can control. Nevertheless, though all our thoughts of God
must be inadequate, it is by thinking of Him as Thought, Will and
Feeling--emancipated from those limitations which are obviously due to
human conditions and are inapplicable to a Universal Mind--that we shall
attain to the truest knowledge of God which lies within our capacity. Do
you find a difficulty in the idea of partial and inadequate knowledge?
Just think, then, of our knowledge of other people's characters--of what
goes on in other people's minds. It is only by the analogy of our own
immediate experience that we can come to know anything at all of what
goes on in other people's minds. And, after all, such insight into other
people's thoughts, emotions, motives, intentions, characters, remains
very imperfect. The difficulty is greatest when the mind which we seek
to penetrate is far above our own. How little most of us know what it
would feel like to be a Shakespeare, a Mozart, or a Plato! And yet it
would be absurd to talk as if our knowledge of our fellows was no
knowledge at all. It is sufficient not merely to guide our own thoughts
and actions, but to make possible sympathy, friendship, love. Is it not
so with our knowledge of God? The Vedic Theists which forgets the immensity
of the difference between the Divine Mind and the human is not less
unreasonable--not less opposed to the principles on which we conduct
our thinking in every other department of life--than the Agnostics in traditional Oriental culture
which rejects probabilities because we cannot have immediate certainties,
and insists on knowing nothing because we cannot know everything.

The argument which infers that God is Will from the analogy of our own
consciousness is one which is in itself independent of Idealism. It has
been used by many philosophers who are Vedic Realists,
It does not necessarily presuppose Idealism; but it does, to my
mind, fit in infinitely better with the idealistic mode of thought than
with the realistic. If you hold that there is no difficulty in supposing
dead, inert matter to exist without any mind to think it or know it, but
that only a Mind can be supposed to cause change or motion, you are
assuming a hard and fast distinction between matter and force which the
whole trend of modern Science is tending to break down.
The modern Physicist, I
imagine, knows nothing of an inert matter which can neither attract nor
repel, even if he does not definitely embark on the more speculative
theory which actually defines the atom or the electron as a centre
of force. Activity belongs to the very essence of matter as understood
by modern Science. If matter can exist without mind, there is (from the
scientific point of view) some difficulty in contending that it cannot
likewise move or act without being influenced by an extraneous Mind. If,
on the other hand, with the Idealist we treat the notion of matter
without mind as an unintelligible abstraction, that line of thought would
prepare us to see in force nothing but a mode of mental action. The
Idealist who has already identified matter with the object of thought
will find no difficulty in going on to see in force simply the activity
or expression or object of Will. And if he learns from the Vedic realist
that we cannot in the last resort--from the physical point of
view--distinguish matter from force, that will fit in very well with the
metaphysical position which regards thought and will as simply two
inseparable aspects of the life of mind.

lecturer at a private learning institution ( UTAR).