Sri Aurobindo: Admit, — for it is true, — that this age of which materialism was the portentous offspring and in which it had ﬁgured ﬁrst as petulant rebel and aggressive thinker, then as a grave and strenuous preceptor of mankind, has been by no means a period of mere error, calamity and degeneration, but rather a most powerful creative epoch of humanity. Examine impartially its results. Not only has it immensely widened and ﬁlled in the knowledge of the race and accustomed it to a great patience of research, scrupulosity, accuracy, — if it has done that only in one large sphere of inquiry, it has still prepared for the extension of the same curiosity, intellectual rectitude, power for knowledge to other and higher ﬁelds, — not only has it with an unexampled force and richness of invention brought and put into our hands, for much evil, but also for much good, discoveries, instruments, practical powers, conquests, conveniences which, however we may declare their insufﬁciency for our highest interests, yet few of us would care to relinquish, but it has also, paradoxical as that might at ﬁrst seem, strengthened man’s idealism. On the whole, it has given him a kindlier hope and humanised his nature. Tolerance is greater, liberty has increased, charity is more a matter of course, peace, if not yet practicable, is growing at least imaginable.


Sri Aurobindo: Latterly the thought of the eighteenth century which promulgated secularism has been much scouted and belittled, that of the nineteenth which developed it, riddled with adverse criticism and overpassed. Still they worshipped no mean godheads. Reason, science, progress, freedom, humanity were their ideals, and which of these idols, if idols they are, would we like or ought we, if we are wise, to cast down into the mire or leave as poor unworshipped relics on the wayside? If there are other and yet greater godheads or if the visible forms adored were only clay or stone images or the rites void of the inmost knowledge, yet has their cult been for us a preliminary initiation and the long material sacriﬁce has prepared us for a greater religion.  Reason is not the supreme light, but yet is it always a necessary light-bringer and until it has been given its rights and allowed to judge and purify our ﬁrst infra-rational instincts, impulses, rash fervours, crude beliefs and blind prejudgments, we are not altogether ready for the full unveiling of a greater inner luminary.


Sri Aurobindo: Science is a right knowledge, in the end only of processes, but still the knowledge of processes too is part of a total wisdom and essential to a wide and a clear approach towards the deeper Truth behind. If it has laboured mainly in the physical ﬁeld, if it has limited itself and bordered or overshadowed its light with a certain cloud of wilful ignorance, still one had to begin this method somewhere and the physical ﬁeld is the ﬁrst, the nearest, the easiest for the kind and manner of inquiry undertaken. Ignorance of one side of Truth or the choice of a partial ignorance or ignoring for better concentration on another side is often a necessity of our imperfect mental nature.  It is unfortunate if ignorance becomes dogmatic and denies what it has refused to examine, but still no permanent harm need have been done if this willed self-limitation is compelled to disappear when the occasion of its utility is exhausted.


Sri Aurobindo: Now that we have founded rigorously our knowledge of the physical, we can go forward with a much ﬁrmer step to a more open, secure and luminous repossession of mental and psychic knowledge. Even spiritual truths are likely to gain from it, not a loftier or more penetrating, — that is with difﬁculty possible, — but an ampler light and fuller self-expression.  Progress is the very heart of the signiﬁcance of human life, for it means our evolution into greater and richer being; and these ages by insisting on it, by forcing us to recognise it as our aim and our necessity, by making impossible hereafter the attempt to subsist in the dullness or the gross beatitude of a stationary self-content, have done a priceless service to the earthlife and cleared the ways of heaven. Outward progress was the greater part of its aim and the inward is the more essential?


Sri Aurobindo: but the inward too is not complete if the outward is left out of account. Even if the insistence of our progress fall for a time too exclusively on growth in one ﬁeld, still all movement forward is helpful and must end by giving a greater force and a larger meaning to our need of growth in deeper and higher provinces of our being. Freedom is a godhead whose greatness only the narrowly limited mind, the State-worshipper or the crank of reaction can now deny. No doubt, again, the essential is an inner freedom; but if without the inner realisation the outer attempt at liberty may prove at last a vain thing, yet to pursue an inner liberty and perpetuate an outer slavery or to rejoice in an isolated release and leave mankind to its chains was also an anomaly that had to be exploded, a conﬁned and too selfcentred ideal. Humanity is not the highest godhead; God is more than humanity; but in humanity too we have to ﬁnd and to serve him.


Sri Aurobindo: The cult of humanity means an increasing kindliness, tolerance, charity, helpfulness, solidarity, universality, unity, fullness of individual and collective growth, and towards these things we are advancing much more rapidly than was possible in any previous age, if still with sadly stumbling footsteps and some ﬁerce relapses. The cult of our other human selves within the cult of the Divine comes closer to us as our large ideal. To have brought even one of these things a step nearer, to have helped to settle them with whatever imperfect expression and formula in our minds, to have accelerated our movement towards them are strong achievements, noble services.  Objection can at once be made that all these great things have no connection with materialism. The impulse towards them was of old standing and long active in the human mind; the very principle of the humanitarianism which has been one of the striking developments of modern sentiment, was ﬁrst brought out from our nature and made prominent by religion, compassion and the love of man ﬁrst intimately and powerfully enforced by Christianity and Buddhism; if they have now a little developed, it is the natural expanding from seeds that had long been sown.


Sri Aurobindo: Materialism was rather calculated to encourage opposite instincts; and the good it favoured it limited, made arid, mechanised. If all these nobler things have grown and are breaking the bounds set to them, it is because man is fortunately inconsistent and after a certain stage of our development cannot be really and wholly materialistic; he needs ideals, ethical expansion, a closer emotional fulﬁlment, and these needs he has tacked on to his development of materialistic opinion and corrected its natural results by them. But the ideals themselves were taken from an anterior opinion and culture.  This is the truth, but not the whole truth. The old religious cultures were often admirable in the ensemble and always in some of their parts, but if they had not been defective, they could neither have been so easily breached, nor would there have been the need of a secularist age to bring out the results the religions had sown.


Sri Aurobindo: Their faults were those of a certain narrowness and exclusive vision. Concentrated, intense in their ideal and intensive in their effect, their expansive inﬂuence on the human mind was small. They isolated too much their action in the individual, limited too narrowly the working of their ideals in the social order, tolerated for instance and even utilised for the ends of church and creed an immense amount of cruelty and barbarism which were contrary to the spirit and truth from which they had started. What they discouraged in the soul of the individual, they yet maintained in the action and the frame of society, seemed hardly to conceive of a human order delivered from these blots.  The depth and fervour of their aspiration had for its shadow a want of intellectual clarity, an obscurity which confused their working and baulked the expansion of their spiritual elements.


Sri Aurobindo: They nourished too a core of asceticism and hardly cared to believe in the deﬁnite amelioration of the earth life, despised by them as a downfall or a dolorous descent or imperfection of the human spirit, or whatever earthly hope they admitted saw itself postponed to the millennial end of things. A belief in the vanity of human life or of existence itself suited better the preoccupation with an aim beyond earth. Perfection, ethical growth, liberation became individual ideals and ﬁgured too much as an isolated preparation of the soul for the beyond. The social effect of the religious temperament, however potentially considerable, was cramped by excessive other-worldliness and distrust in the intellect accentuated to obscurantism.  The secularist centuries weighed the balance down very much in the opposite direction.


Sri Aurobindo: They turned the mind of the race wholly earthwards and manwards, but by insisting on intellectual clarity, reason, justice, freedom, tolerance, humanity, by putting these forward and putting the progress of the race and its perfectibility as an immediate rule for the earthly life to be constantly pressed towards and not shunting off the social ideal to doomsday to be miraculously effected by some last divine intervention and judgment , they cleared the way for a collective advance. For they made these nobler possibilities of mankind more imperative to the practical intelligence. If they lost sight of heaven or missed the spiritual sense of the ideals they took over from earlier ages, yet by this rational and practical insistence on them they drove them home to the thinking mind. Even their too mechanical turn developed from a legitimate desire to ﬁnd some means for making the effective working of these ideals a condition of the very structure of society.


Sri Aurobindo: Materialism was only the extreme intellectual result of this earthward and human turn of the race mind. It was an intellectual machinery used by the Time-spirit to secure for a good space the ﬁrm ﬁxing of that exclusive turn of thought and endeavour, a strong rivet of opinion to hold the mind of man to it for as long as it might be needed. Man does need to develop ﬁrmly in all his earthly parts, to fortify and perfect his body, his life, his outward-going mind, to take full possession of the earth his dwelling-place, to know and utilise physical Nature, enrich his environment and satisfy by the aid of a generalised intelligence his evolving mental, vital and physical being. That is not all his need, but it is a great and initial part of it and of human perfection. Its full meaning appears afterwards; for only in the beginning and in the appearance an impulse of his life, in the end and really it will be seen to have been a need of his soul, a preparing of ﬁt instruments and the creating of a ﬁt environment for a diviner life.


Sri Aurobindo: He has been set here to serve God’s ways upon earth and fulﬁl the Godhead in man and he must not despise earth or reject the basis given for the ﬁrst powers and potentialities of the Godhead. When his thought and aim have persisted too far in that direction, he need not complain if he is swung back for a time towards the other extreme, to a negative or a positive, a covert or an open materialism. It is Nature’s violent way of setting right her own excess in him.  But the intellectual force of materialism comes from its response to a universal truth of existence. Our dominant opinions have always two forces behind them, a need of our nature and a truth of universal existence from which the need arises.


Sri Aurobindo: We have the material and vital need because life in Matter is our actual basis, the earthward turn of our minds because earth is and was intended to be the foundation here for the workings of the Spirit. When indeed we scan with a scrupulous intelligence the face that universal existence presents to us or study where we are one with it or what in it all seems most universal and permanent, the ﬁrst answer we get is not spiritual but material.  The seers of the Upanishads saw this with their penetrating vision and when they gave this expression of our ﬁrst apparently complete, eventually insufﬁcient view of Being, “Matter is the Brahman, from Matter all things are born, by Matter they exist, to Matter they return,” they ﬁxed the formula of universal truth of which all materialistic thought and physical science are a recognition, an investigation, a ﬁlling in of its signiﬁcant details, elucidations, justifying phenomena and revelatory processes, the large universal comment of Nature upon a single text.


Sri Aurobindo: Mark that it is the ﬁrst fact of experience from which we start and up to a certain point an undeniable universal truth of being. Matter surely is here our basis, the one thing that is and persists, while life, mind, soul and all else appear in it as a secondary phenomenon, seem somehow to arise out of it, subsist by feeding upon it, — therefore the word used in the Upanishads for Matter is, food, — and collapse from our view when it disappears. Apparently the existence of Matter is necessary to them, their existence does not appear to be one whit necessary to Matter. The Being does present himself at ﬁrst with this face, inexorably, as if claiming to be that and nothing else, insisting that his material base and its need shall ﬁrst be satisﬁed and, until that is done, grimly persistent with little or with no regard for our idealistic susceptibilities and caring nothing if he breaks through the delicate net of our moral, our aesthetic and our other ﬁner perceptions. They have the hope of their reign, but meanwhile this is the ﬁrst visage of universal existence and we have not to hide our face from it any more than could Arjuna from the terrible ﬁgure of the Divine on the battle-ﬁeld of Kurukshetra, or attempt to escape and evade it as Shiva, when there rose around him the many stupendous forms of the original Energy, ﬂed from the vision of it to this and that quarter, forgetful of his own godhead.


Sri Aurobindo: We must look existence in the face in whatever aspect it confronts us and be strong to ﬁnd within as well as behind it the Divine.  Materialistic science had the courage to look at this universal truth with level eyes, to accept it calmly as a starting-point and to inquire whether it was not after all the whole formula of universal being. Physical science must necessarily to its own ﬁrst view be materialistic, because so long as it deals with the physical, it has for its own truth’s sake to be physical both in its standpoint and method; it must interpret the material universe ﬁrst in the language and tokens of the material Brahman, because these are its primary and its general terms and all others come second, subsequently, are a special syllabary. To follow a selfindulgent course from the beginning would lead at once towards fancies and falsities. Initially, science is justiﬁed in resenting any call on it to indulge in another kind of imagination and intuition.


Sri Aurobindo: Anything that draws it out of the circle of the phenomena of objects, as they are represented to the senses and their instrumental prolongations, and away from the dealings of the reason with them by a rigorous testing of experience and experimentation, must distract it from its task and is inadmissible. It cannot allow the bringing in of the human view of things; it has to interpret man in the terms of the cosmos, not the cosmos in the terms of man. The too facile conclusion of the idealist that since things only exist as known to consciousness, they can exist only by consciousness and must be creations of the mind, has no meaning for it; it ﬁrst has to inquire what consciousness is, whether it is not a result rather than a cause of Matter, coming into being, as it seems to do, only in the frame of a material inconscient universe and apparently able to exist only on the condition that that has been previously established. Starting from Matter, science has to be at least hypothetically materialistic.  When the action of the material principle, the ﬁrst to organise itself, has been to some extent well understood, then can this science go on to consider what claim to be quite other terms of our being, — life and mind.


Sri Aurobindo: But ﬁrst it is forced to ask itself whether both mind and life are not, as they seem to be, special consequences of the material evolution, themselves powers and movements of Matter. After and if this explanation has failed to cover and to elucidate the facts, it can be more freely investigated whether they are not quite other principles of being. Many philosophical questions arise, as, whether they have entered into Matter and whence or were always in it, and if so, whether they are for ever less and subordinate in action or are in their essential power greater, whether they are contained in it only or really contain it, whether they are subsequent and dependent on its previous appearance or only that in their apparent organisation here but in real being and power anterior to it and Matter itself dependent on the essential pre-existence of life and mind. A greater question comes, whether mind itself is the last term or there is something beyond, whether soul is only an apparent result and phenomenon of the interaction of mind, life and body or we have here an independent term of our being and of all being, greater, anterior, ultimate, all matter containing and contained in a secret spiritual consciousness, spirit the ﬁrst, last and eternal, the Alpha and the Omega, the OM. For experiential philosophy either Matter, Mind, Life or Spirit may be the Being, but none of these higher principles can be made securely the basis of our thought against all intellectual questioning until the materialistic hypothesis has ﬁrst been given a chance and tested.


Sri Aurobindo: That may in the end turn out to have been the use of the materialistic investigation of the universe and its inquiry the greatest possible service to the ﬁnality of the spiritual explanation of existence. In any case materialistic science and philosophy have been after all a great and austere attempt to know dispassionately and to see impersonally. They have denied much that is being reafﬁrmed, but the denial was the condition of a severer effort of knowledge and it may be said of them, as the Upanishad says of Bhrigu the son of Varuna, . “He having practised austerity discovered that Matter was the Brahman.”  The gates of escape by which a knowledge starting from materialism can get away from its own self-immuring limitations, can here only be casually indicated.


Sri Aurobindo: I may take another occasion to show how the possibility must become in eventual fact a necessity. Physical science has before its eye two eternal factors of existence, Matter and Energy, and no others at all are needed in the account of its operations. Mind dealing with the facts and relations of Matter and Energy as they are arranged to the senses in experience and continuative experiment and are analysed by the reason, would be a sufﬁcient deﬁnition of physical science. Its ﬁrst regard is on Matter as the one principle of being and on Energy only as a phenomenon of Matter; but in the end one questions whether it is not the other way round, all things the action of Energy and Matter only the ﬁeld, body and instrument of her workings. The ﬁrst view is quantitative and purely mechanical, the second lets in a qualitative and a more spiritual element.


Sri Aurobindo: We do not at once leap out of the materialistic circle, but we see an opening in it which may widen into an outlet when, stirred by this suggestion, we look at life and mind not merely as phenomenon in Matter but as energies and see that they are quite other energies than the material with their own peculiar qualities, powers and workings. If indeed all action of life and mind could be reduced, as it was once hoped, to none but material, quantitative and mechanical, to mathematical, physiological and chemical terms, the opening would cease to be an outlet; it would be choked. That attempt has failed and there is no sign of its ever being successful.  Only a limited range of the phenomena of life and mind could be satisﬁed by a purely bio-physical, psycho-physical or biopsychical explanation, and even if more could be dealt with by these data, still they would only have been accounted for on one side of their mystery, the lower end. Life and Mind, like the Vedic Agni, have their two extremities hidden in a secrecy, and we should by this way only have hold of the tail-end: the head would still be mystic and secret.


Sri Aurobindo: To know more we must have studied not only the actual or possible action of body and matter on mind and life, but explored all the possible action of mind too on life and body; that opens undreamed vistas. And there is always the vast ﬁeld of the action of mind in itself and on itself, which needs for its elucidation another, a mental, a psychic science.  Having examined and explained Matter by physical methods and in the language of the material Brahman, — it is not really explained, but let that pass, — having failed to carry that way of knowledge into other ﬁelds beyond a narrow limit, we must then at least consent to scrutinise life and mind by methods appropriate to them and explain their facts in the language and tokens of the vital and mental Brahman. We may discover then where and how these tongues of the one existence render the same truth and throw light on each other’s phrases, and discover too perhaps another, high, brilliant and revealing speech which may shine out as the deﬁnitive all-explaining word. That can only be if we pursue these other sciences too in the same spirit as the physical, with a scrutiny, not only of their obvious and ﬁrst actual phenomena, but of all the countless untested potentialities of mental and psychic energy, and with a free unlimited experimentation.


Sri Aurobindo: We shall ﬁnd out that their ranges of the unknown are immense. We shall perceive that until the possibilities of mind and spirit are better explored and their truths better known, we cannot yet pronounce the last all-ensphering formula of universal existence. Very early in this process the materialistic circle will be seen opening up on all its sides until it rapidly breaks up and disappears. Adhering still to the essential rigorous method of science, though not to its purely physical instrumentation, scrutinising, experimenting, holding nothing for established which cannot be scrupulously and universally veriﬁed, we shall still arrive at supraphysical certitudes. There are other means, there are greater approaches, but this line of access too can lead to the one universal truth.


Sri Aurobindo: Three things will remain from the labour of the secularist centuries; truth of the physical world and its importance, the scientiﬁc method of knowledge, — which is to induce Nature and Being to reveal their own way of being and proceeding, not hastening to put upon them our own impositions of idea and imagination,, — and last, though very far from least, the truth and importance of the earth life and the human endeavour, its evolutionary meaning. They will remain, but will turn to another sense and disclose greater issues. Surer of our hope and our labour, we shall see them all transformed into light of a vaster and more intimate world-knowledge and self-knowledge.  THE GOAL  When we have passed beyond knowings, then we shall have Knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: Reason was the helper; Reason is the bar.  When we have passed beyond willings, then we shall have Power.  Effort was the helper; Effort is the bar.  When we have passed beyond enjoyings, then we shall have Bliss. Desire was the helper; Desire is the bar.


Sri Aurobindo: When we have passed beyond individualising, then we shall be real Persons. Ego was the helper; Ego is the bar.  When we have passed beyond humanity, then we shall be the Man. The Animal was the helper; the Animal is the bar.


Sri Aurobindo: Transform reason into ordered intuition; let all thyself be light.   This is thy goal.  Transform effort into an easy and sovereign overﬂowing of the soul-strength; let all thyself be conscious force. This is thy goal.


Sri Aurobindo: Transform enjoying into an even and objectless ecstasy; let all thyself be bliss. This is thy goal.  Transform the divided individual into the world-personality; let all thyself be the divine. This is thy goal.  Transform the Animal into the Driver of the herds; let all thyself be Krishna.


Sri Aurobindo: This is thy goal.     What I cannot do now is the sign of what I shall do hereafter.  The sense of impossibility is the beginning of all possibilities. Because this temporal universe was a paradox and an impossibility, therefore the Eternal created it out of His being.  Impossibility is only a sum of greater unrealised possibles.


Sri Aurobindo: It veils an advanced stage and a yet unaccomplished journey.  If thou wouldst have humanity advance, buffet all preconceived ideas. Thought thus smitten awakes and becomes creative. Otherwise it rests in a mechanical repetition and mistakes that for its right activity.  To rotate on its own axis is not the one movement for the human soul.


Sri Aurobindo: There is also its wheeling round the Sun of an inexhaustible illumination.   Be conscious ﬁrst of thyself within, then think and act. All living thought is a world in preparation; all real act is a thought manifested. The material world exists because an Idea began to play in divine self-consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: Thought is not essential to existence nor its cause, but it is an instrument for becoming; I become what I see in myself. All that thought suggests to me, I can do; all that thought reveals in me, I can become. This should be man’s unshakable faith in himself, because God dwells in him.  Not to go on for ever repeating what man has already done is our work, but to arrive at new realisations and undreamedof masteries. Time and soul and world are given us for our ﬁeld, vision and hope and creative imagination stand for our prompters, will and thought and labour are our all-effective instruments.


Sri Aurobindo: What is there new that we have yet to accomplish? Love, for as yet we have only accomplished hatred and self-pleasing; Knowledge, for as yet we have only accomplished error and perception and conceiving; Bliss, for as yet we have only accomplished pleasure and pain and indifference; Power, for as yet we have only accomplished weakness and effort and a defeated victory;  Life, for as yet we have only accomplished birth and growth and dying; Unity, for as yet we have only accomplished war and association.  In a word, godhead; to remake ourselves in the divine image.  THE DELIGHT OF BEING


Sri Aurobindo: If Brahman were only an impersonal abstraction eternally contradicting the apparent fact of our concrete existence, cessation would be the right end of the matter; but love and delight and self-awareness have also to be reckoned.  The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying certain equations of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.  We may speak of the Supreme as if He were a mathematician working out a cosmic sum in numbers or a thinker resolving by experiment a problem in relations of principles and the balance of forces: but also we should speak of Him as if He were a lover, a musician of universal and particular harmonies, a child, a poet.  The side of thought is not enough


Sri Aurobindo: ; the side of delight too must be entirely grasped: Ideas, Forces, Existences, Principles are hollow moulds unless they are ﬁlled with the breath of God’s delight.  These things are images, but all is an image. Abstractions give us the pure conception of God’s truths; images give us their living reality.  If Idea embracing Force begot the worlds, Delight of Being begot the Idea. Because the Inﬁnite conceived an innumerable delight in itself, therefore worlds and universes came into existence.


Sri Aurobindo: Consciousness of being and Delight of being are the ﬁrst parents.  Also, they are the last transcendences. Unconsciousness is only an intermediate swoon of the conscious or its obscure sleep; pain and self-extinction are only delight of being running away from itself in order to ﬁnd itself elsewhere or otherwise.  Delight of being is not limited in Time; it is without end or beginning. God comes out from one form of things only to enter into another.


Sri Aurobindo: What is God after all? An eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden.  MAN, THE PURUSHA  God cannot cease from leaning down towards Nature, nor man from aspiring towards the Godhead. It is the eternal relation of the ﬁnite to the inﬁnite.


Sri Aurobindo: When they seem to turn from each other, it is to recoil for a more intimate meeting.  In man nature of the world becomes again self-conscious so that it may take the great leap towards its Enjoyer. This is the Enjoyer whom unknowingly it possesses, whom life and sensation possessing deny and denying seek. Nature of the world knows not God only because it knows not itself; when it knows itself, it shall know unalloyed delight of being.


Sri Aurobindo: Possession in oneness and not loss in oneness is the secret. God and Man, World and Beyond-world become one when they know each other. Their division is the cause of ignorance as ignorance is the cause of suffering.  Man seeks at ﬁrst blindly and does not even know that he is seeking his divine self; for he starts from the obscurity of material Nature and even when he begins to see, he is long blinded by the light that is increasing in him. God too answers obscurely to his search; He seeks and enjoys man’s blindness like the hands of a little child that grope after its mother.


Sri Aurobindo: God and Nature are like a boy and girl at play and in love. They hide and run from each other when glimpsed so that they may be sought after and chased and captured.  Man is God hiding himself from Nature so that he may possess her by struggle, insistence, violence and surprise. God is universal and transcendent Man hiding himself from his own individuality in the human being.  The animal is Man disguised in a hairy skin and upon four legs; the worm is Man writhing and crawling towards the evolution of his Manhood.


Sri Aurobindo: Even crude forms of Matter are Man in his inchoate body. All things are Man, the Purusha.  For what do we mean by Man? An uncreated and indestructible soul that has housed itself in a mind and body made of its own elements.


Sri Aurobindo: THE END  The meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the divine into the human and a self-immergence of man in the Divinity.  But that immergence is not in the nature of an annihilation.  Extinction is not the fulﬁlment of all this search and passion, suffering and rapture. The game would never have been begun if that were to be its ending.


Sri Aurobindo: Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God.  What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might ﬁnd itself innumerably.  And what is the middle?


Sri Aurobindo: Division that strives towards a multiple unity, ignorance that labours towards a ﬂood of varied light, pain that travails towards the touch of an unimaginable ecstasy. For all these things are dark ﬁgures and perverse vibrations.  And what is the end of the whole matter? As if honey could taste itself and all its drops together and all its drops could taste each other and each the whole honeycomb as itself, so should the end be with God and the soul of man and the universe.  Love is the keynote, Joy is the music, Power is the strain, Knowledge is the performer, the inﬁnite All is the composer and audience.


Sri Aurobindo: We know only the preliminary discords which are as ﬁerce as the harmony shall be great; but we shall arrive surely at the fugue of the divine Beatitudes.  THE CHAIN   The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains; this is the ﬁrst paradox and inextricable knot of our nature.  Man is in love with the bonds of birth; therefore he is caught in the companion bonds of death.


Sri Aurobindo: In these chains he aspires after freedom of his being and mastery of his self-fulﬁlment.  Man is in love with power; therefore he is subjected to weakness.  For the world is a sea of waves of force that meet and continually ﬂing themselves on each other; he who would ride on the crest of one wave, must faint under the shock of hundreds.  Man is in love with pleasure; therefore he must undergo the yoke of grief and pain. For unmixed delight is only for the free and passionless soul; but that which pursues after pleasure in man is a suffering and straining energy.


Sri Aurobindo: Man hungers after calm, but he thirsts also for the experiences of a restless mind and a troubled heart. Enjoyment is to his mind a fever, calm an inertia and a monotony.  Man is in love with the limitations of his physical being, yet he would have also the freedom of his inﬁnite mind and his immortal soul.  And in these contrasts something in him ﬁnds a curious attraction; they constitute for his mental being the artistry of life. It is not only the nectar but the poison also that attracts his taste and his curiosity.


Sri Aurobindo:     In all these things there is a meaning and for all these contradictions there is a release. Nature has a method in every madness of her combinings and for her most inextricable knots there is a solution.  Death is the question Nature puts continually to Life and her reminder to it that it has not yet found itself. If there were no siege of death, the creature would be bound for ever in the form of an imperfect living.


Sri Aurobindo: Pursued by death he awakes to the idea of perfect life and seeks out its means and its possibility.  Weakness puts the same test and question to the strengths and energies and greatnesses in which we glory. Power is the play of life, shows its degree, ﬁnds the value of its expression; weakness is the play of death pursuing life in its movement and stressing the limit of its acquired energy.  Pain and grief are Nature’s reminder to the soul that the pleasure it enjoys is only a feeble hint of the real delight of existence. In each pain and torture of our being is the secret of a ﬂame of rapture compared with which our greatest pleasures are only as dim ﬂickerings.


Sri Aurobindo: It is this secret which forms the attraction for the soul of the great ordeals, sufferings and ﬁerce experiences of life which the nervous mind in us shuns and abhors.  The restlessness and early exhaustion of our active being and its instruments are Nature’s sign that calm is our true foundation and excitement a disease of the soul; the sterility and monotony of mere calm is her hint that play of the activities on that ﬁrm foundation is what she requires of us. God plays for ever and is not troubled.  The limitations of the body are a mould; soul and mind have to pour themselves into them, break them and constantly remould them in wider limits till the formula of agreement is found between this ﬁnite and their own inﬁnity.  Freedom is the law of being in its illimitable unity, secret master of all Nature: servitude is the law of love in the being voluntarily giving itself to serve the play of its other selves in the multiplicity.


Sri Aurobindo: It is when freedom works in chains and servitude becomes a law of Force, not of Love, that the true nature of things is distorted and a falsehood governs the soul’s dealings with existence.  Nature starts with this distortion and plays with all the combinations to which it can lead before she will allow it to be righted.  Afterwards she gathers up all the essence of these combinations into a new and rich harmony of love and freedom.  Freedom comes by a unity without limits; for that is our real being. We may gain the essence of this unity in ourselves; we may realise the play of it in oneness with all others.


Sri Aurobindo: The double experience is the complete intention of the soul in Nature.  Having realised inﬁnite unity in ourselves, then to give ourselves to the world is utter freedom and absolute empire.  Inﬁnite, we are free from death; for life then becomes a play of our immortal existence. We are free from weakness; for we are the whole sea enjoying the myriad shock of its waves. We are free from grief and pain; for we learn how to harmonise our being with all that touches it and to ﬁnd in all things action and reaction of the delight of existence.


Sri Aurobindo: We are free from limitation; for the body becomes a plaything of the inﬁnite mind and learns to obey the will of the immortal soul. We are free from the fever of the nervous mind and the heart, yet are not bound to immobility.  Immortality, unity and freedom are in ourselves and await there our discovery; but for the joy of love God in us will still remain the Many.  Some think it presumption to believe in a special Providence or to look upon oneself as an instrument in the hands of God, but I ﬁnd that every man has a special Providence and I see that God uses the mattock of the labourer and babbles in the mouth of a little child.  Providence is not only that which saves me from the shipwreck in which everybody else has foundered.


Sri Aurobindo: Providence is also that which while all others are saved snatches away my last plank of safety and drowns me in the solitary ocean.  The delight of victory is sometimes less than the attraction of struggle and suffering; nevertheless the laurel and not the cross should be the aim of the conquering human soul.  Souls that do not aspire are God’s failures; but Nature is pleased and loves to multiply them because they assure her of stability and prolong her empire.  Those who are poor, ignorant, ill-born or ill-bred are not the common herd; the common herd are all who are satisﬁed with pettiness and an average humanity.  Help men, but do not pauperise them of their energy; lead and instruct men, but see that their initiative and originality remain intact; take others into thyself, but give them in return the full godhead of their nature.


Sri Aurobindo: He who can do this is the leader and the guru.  God has made the world a ﬁeld of battle and ﬁlled it with the trampling of combatants and the cries of a great wrestle and struggle. Would you ﬁlch His peace without paying the price He has ﬁxed for it?  Distrust a perfect-seeming success, but when having succeeded thou ﬁndest still much to do, rejoice and go forward; for the labour is long before the real perfection.


Sri Aurobindo: There is no more benumbing error than to mistake a stage for the goal or to linger too long in a resting-place.


Sri Aurobindo: Wherever thou seest a great end, be sure of a great beginning.  Where a monstrous and painful destruction appals thy mind, console it with the certainty of a large and great creation. God is there not only in the still small voice, but in the ﬁre and in the whirlwind.  The greater the destruction, the freer the chances of creation; but the destruction is often long, slow and oppressive, the creation tardy in its coming or interrupted in its triumph.


Sri Aurobindo: The night returns again and again and the day lingers or seems even to have been a false dawning. Despair not therefore, but watch and work. Those who hope violently, despair swiftly: neither hope nor fear, but be sure of God’s purpose and thy will to accomplish.  The hand of the divine Artist works often as if it were unsure of its genius and its material. It seems to touch and test and leave, to pick up and throw away and pick up again, to labour and fail and botch and repiece together.


Sri Aurobindo: Surprises and disappointments are the order of his work before all things are ready. What was selected, is cast away into the abyss of reprobation; what was rejected, becomes the corner-stone of a mighty ediﬁce. But behind all this is the sure eye of a knowledge which surpasses our reason and the slow smile of an inﬁnite ability.  God has all time before him and does not need to be always in a hurry. He is sure of his aim and success and cares not if he break his work a hundred times to bring it nearer perfection.


Sri Aurobindo: Patience is our ﬁrst great necessary lesson, but not the dull slowness to move of the timid, the sceptical, the weary, the slothful, the unambitious or the weakling; a patience full of a calm and gathering strength which watches and prepares itself for the hour of swift great strokes, few but enough to change destiny.  Wherefore God hammers so ﬁercely at his world, tramples and kneads it like dough, casts it so often into the blood-bath and the red hell-heat of the furnace? Because humanity in the mass is still a hard, crude and vile ore which will not otherwise be smelted and shaped: as is his material, so is his method. Let it help to transmute itself into nobler and purer metal, his ways with it will be gentler and sweeter, much loftier and fairer its uses.  Wherefore he selected or made such a material, when he had all inﬁnite possibility to choose from?


Sri Aurobindo: Because of his divine Idea which saw before it not only beauty and sweetness and purity, but also force and will and greatness. Despise not force, nor hate it for the ugliness of some of its faces, nor think that love only is God. All perfect perfection must have something in it of the stuff of the hero and even of the Titan. But the greatest force is born out of the greatest difﬁculty.


Sri Aurobindo:


Sri Aurobindo: All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualised; but his nature mental and vital and physical is rebellious to the higher law. He loves his imperfections.  The Spirit is the truth of our being; mind and life and body in their imperfection are its masks, but in their perfection should be its moulds. To be spiritual only is not enough; that prepares a number of souls for heaven, but leaves the earth very much where it was. Neither is a compromise the way of salvation.


Sri Aurobindo: The world knows three kinds of revolution. The material has strong results, the moral and intellectual are inﬁnitely larger in their scope and richer in their fruits, but the spiritual are the great sowings.  If the triple change could coincide in a perfect correspondence, a faultless work would be done; but the mind and body of mankind cannot hold perfectly a strong spiritual inrush: most is spilt, much of the rest is corrupted. Many intellectual and physical upturnings of our soil are needed to work out a little result from a large spiritual sowing.  Each religion has helped mankind.


Sri Aurobindo: Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentler, purer, Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest and profoundest spiritual possibilities. A great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and cult egoism stand in the way.  All religions have saved a number of souls, but none yet has been able to spiritualise mankind. For that there is needed not cult and creed, but a sustained and all-comprehending effort at spiritual self-evolution.  The changes we see in the world today are intellectual, moral, physical in their ideal and intention: the spiritual revolution waits for its hour and throws up meanwhile its waves here and there.


Sri Aurobindo: Until it comes the sense of the others cannot be understood and till then all interpretation of present happening and forecast of man’s future are vain things. For its nature, power, event are that which will determine the next cycle of our humanity.  HE PHILOSOPHY and thought of the Greeks is perhaps the most intellectually stimulating, the most fruitful of clarities the world has yet had. Indian philosophy was intuitive in its beginnings, stimulative rather to the deeper vision of things, — nothing more exalted and profound, more revelatory of the depths and the heights, more powerful to open unending vistas has ever been conceived than the divine and inspired Word, the of Veda and Vedanta. When that philosophy became intellectual, precise, founded on the human reason, it became also rigidly logical, enamoured of ﬁxity and system, desirous of a sort of geometry of thought.


Sri Aurobindo: The ancient Greek mind had instead a kind of ﬂuid precision, a ﬂexibly inquiring logic; acuteness and the wide-open eye of the intellect were its leading characteristics and by this power in it it determined the whole character and ﬁeld of subsequent European thinking.  Nor is any Greek thinker more directly stimulating than the aphoristic philosopher Heraclitus; and yet he keeps and adds to this more modern intellectual stimulativeness something of the antique psychic and intuitive vision and word of the older Mystics. The trend to rationalism is there, but not yet that ﬂuid clarity of the reasoning mind which was the creation of the Sophists.  Professor R. D. Ranade has recently published a small treatise on the philosophy of Heraclitus. From the paging of the treatise it seems to be an excerpt, but from what there is nothing to tell.


Sri Aurobindo: It is perhaps too much to hope that it is from a series of essays on philosophers or a history of philosophy by this perfect writer and scholar. At any rate such a work from such a hand would be a priceless gain. For Professor Ranade possesses in a superlative degree the rare gift of easy and yet adequate exposition; but he has more than this, for he can give a fascinating interest to subjects like philology and philosophy which to the ordinary reader seem harsh, dry, difﬁcult and repellent. He joins to a luminous clarity, lucidity and charm of expression an equal luminousness and just clarity of presentation and that perfect manner in both native to the Greek and French language and mind, but rare in the English tongue. In these seventeen pages he has presented the thought of the old enigmatic Ephesian with a clearness and sufﬁciency which leaves us charmed, enlightened and satisﬁed.


Sri Aurobindo: On one or two difﬁcult points I am inclined to differ with the conclusions he adopts. He rejects positively Pﬂeiderer’s view of Heraclitus as a mystic, which is certainly exaggerated and, as stated, a misconception; but it seems to me that there is behind that misconception a certain truth. Heraclitus’ abuse of the mysteries of his time is not very conclusive in this respect; for what he reviles is those aspects of obscure magic, physical ecstasy, sensual excitement which the Mysteries had put on in some at least of their ﬁnal developments as the process of degeneration increased which made a century later even the Eleusinian a butt for the dangerous mockeries of Alcibiades and his companions. His complaint is that the secret rites which the populace held in ignorant and superstitious reverence “unholily mysticise what are held among men as mysteries.” He rebels against the darkness of the Dionysian ecstasy in the approach to the secrets of Nature; but there is a luminous Apollonian as well as an obscure and sometimes dangerous Dionysian mysticism, a Dakshina as well as a Vama Marga of the mystic Tantra.


Sri Aurobindo: And though no partaker in or supporter of any kind of rites or mummery, Heraclitus still strikes one as at least an intellectual child of the Mystics and of mysticism, although perhaps a rebel son in the house of his mother. He has something of the mystic style, something of the intuitive Apollonian inlook into the secrets of existence.  Certainly, as Mr. Ranade says, mere aphorism is not mysticism; aphorism and epigram are often enough, perhaps usually a condensed or a pregnant effort of the intellect. But Heraclitus’ style, as Mr. Ranade himself describes it, is not only aphoristic and epigrammatic but cryptic, and this cryptic character is not merely the self-willed obscurity of an intellectual thinker affecting an excessive condensation of his thought or a too closelypacked burden of suggestiveness. It is enigmatic in the style of the mystics, enigmatic in the manner of their thought which sought to express the riddle of existence in the very language of the riddle.


Sri Aurobindo: What for instance is the “ever-living Fire” in which he ﬁnds the primary and imperishable substance of the universe and identiﬁes it in succession with Zeus and with eternity? or what should we understand by “the thunderbolt which steers all things”? To interpret this ﬁre as merely a material force of heat and ﬂame or simply a metaphor for being which is eternal becoming is, it seems to me, to miss the character of Heraclitus’ utterances. It includes both these ideas and everything that connects them. But then we get back at once to the Vedic language and turn of thought; we are reminded of the Vedic Fire which is hymned as the upbuilder of the worlds, the secret Immortal in men and things, the periphery of the gods, Agni who “becomes” all around the other immortals, himself becomes and contains all the gods; we are reminded of the Vedic thunderbolt, that electric Fire, of the Sun who is the true Light, the Eye, the wonderful weapon of the divine pathﬁnders Mitra and Varuna.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the same cryptic form of language, the same brief and abundant method of thought even; though the conceptions are not identical, there is a clear kinship.  The mystical language has always this disadvantage that it readily becomes obscure, meaningless or even misleading to those who have not the secret and to posterity a riddle.  Mr. Ranade tells us that it is impossible to make out what Heraclitus meant when he said, “The gods are mortals, men immortals.” But is it quite impossible if we do not cut off this thinker from the earlier thought of the mystics? The Vedic Rishi also invokes the Dawn, “O goddess and human”; the gods in the Veda are constantly addressed as “men”, the same words are traditionally applied to indicate men and immortals.


Sri Aurobindo: The immanence of the immortal principle in man, the descent of the gods into the workings of mortality was almost the fundamental idea of the mystics. Heraclitus, likewise, seems to recognise the inextricable unity of the eternal and the transitory, that which is for ever and yet seems to exist only in this strife and change which is a continual dying. The gods manifest themselves as things that continually change and perish; man is in principle an eternal being. Heraclitus does not really deal in barren antitheses; his method is a statement of antinomies and an adumbrating of their reconciliation in the very terms of opposition. Thus when he says that the name of the bow  is life, but its work is death, obviously he intends no mere barren play upon words; he speaks of that principle of war, father of all and king of all, which makes cosmic existence an apparent process of life, but an actual process of death.


Sri Aurobindo: The Upanishads seized hold of the same truth when they declared life to be the dominion of King Death, described it as the opposite of immortality and even related that all life and existence here were ﬁrst created by Death for his food.  Unless we bear in mind this pregnant and symbolic character of Heraclitus’ language we are likely to sterilise his thought by giving it a too literal sense. Heraclitus praises the “dry soul” as the wisest and best, but, he says, it is a pleasure and satisfaction to souls to become moist. This inclination of the soul to its natural delight in a sort of wine-drenched laxity must be discouraged; for Dionysus the wine-god and Hades, the Lord of Death, the Lord of the dark underworld, are one and the same deity. Professor Ranade takes this eulogy of the dry soul as praise of the dry light of reason; he ﬁnds in it a proof that Heraclitus was a rationalist and not a mystic: yet strangely enough he takes the parallel and opposite expressions about the moist soul and Dionysus in a quite different and material sense, as an ethical disapprobation of wine-drinking.


Sri Aurobindo: Surely, it cannot be so; Heraclitus cannot mean by the dry soul the reason of a sober man and by a moist soul the non-reason or bewildered reason of the drunkard; nor when he says that Hades and Dionysus are the same, is he simply discouraging the drinking of wine as fatal to the health! Evidently he employs here, as always, a ﬁgurative and symbolic language because he has to convey a deeper thought for which he ﬁnds ordinary language too poor and superﬁcial.  Heraclitus is using the old language of the Mysteries, though in his own new way and for his own individual purpose, when he speaks of Hades and Dionysus and the everliving Fire or of the Furies, the succourers of Justice who will ﬁnd out the Sun if he oversteps his measure. We miss his sense, if we see in these names of the gods only the poorer superﬁcial meanings of the popular mythological religion. When Heraclitus speaks of the dry or the moist soul, it is of the soul and not the intellect that he is thinking, and not.


Sri Aurobindo: corresponds roughly to the or of Indian psychology, to; the dry soul of the Greek thinker to the puriﬁed heart-consciousness, , of the Indian psychologists, which in their experience was the ﬁrst basis for a puriﬁed intellect,.  The moist soul is that which allows itself to be perturbed by the impure wine of sense ecstasy, emotional excitement, an obscure impulse and inspiration whose source is from a dark underworld. Dionysus is the god of this wine-born ecstasy, the god of the Bacchic mysteries, — of the “walkers in the night, mages, bacchanals, mystics”: therefore Heraclitus says that Dionysus and Hades are one. In an opposite sense the ecstatic devotee of the Bhakti path in India reproaches the exclusive seeker by the way of thought-discernment with his “dry knowledge”, using Heraclitus’ epithet, but with a pejorative and not a laudatory signiﬁcance.  To ignore the inﬂuence of the mystic thought and its methods of self-expression on the intellectual thinking of the Greeks from Pythagoras to Plato is to falsify the historical procession of the human mind.


Sri Aurobindo: It was enveloped at ﬁrst in the symbolic, intuitive, esoteric style and discipline of the Mystics, — Vedic and Vedantic seers, Orphic secret teachers, Egyptian priests. From that veil it emerged along the path of a metaphysical philosophy still related to the Mystics by the source of its fundamental ideas, its ﬁrst aphoristic and cryptic style, its attempt to seize directly upon truth by intellectual vision rather than arrive at it by careful ratiocination, but nevertheless intellectual in its method and aim.  This is the ﬁrst period of the Darshanas in India, in Greece of the early intellectual thinkers. Afterwards came the full tide of philosophic rationalism, Buddha or the Buddhists and the logical philosophers in India, in Greece the Sophists and Socrates with all their splendid progeny; with them the intellectual method did not indeed begin, but came to its own and grew to its fullness. Heraclitus belongs to the transition, not to the noontide of the reason; he is even its most characteristic representative.


Sri Aurobindo: Hence his cryptic style, hence his brief and burdened thought and the difﬁculty we feel when we try to clarify and entirely rationalise his signiﬁcances. The ignoring of the Mystics, our pristine fathers,, is the great defect of the modern account of our thought-evolution.  HAT PRECISELY is the key-note of Heraclitus’ thinking, where has he found his starting-point, or what are the grand lines of his philosophy? For if his thought is not developed in the severe systematic method of later thinkers, if it does not come down to us in large streams of subtle reasoning and opulent imagery like Plato’s but in detached aphoristic sentences aimed like arrows at truth, still they are not really scattered philosophical reﬂections. There is an inter-relation, an inter-dependence; they all start logically from his fundamental view of existence itself and go back to it for their constant justiﬁcation.


Sri Aurobindo: As in Indian, so in Greek philosophy the ﬁrst question for thought was the problem of the One and the Many. We see everywhere a multiplicity of things and beings; is it real or only phenomenal or practical,,? Has individual man, for instance, — the question which concerns us most nearly, — an essential and immortal existence of his own or is he simply a phenomenal and transient result in the evolution or play of some one original principle, Matter, Mind, Spirit, which is the only real reality of existence? Does unity exist at all and, if so, is it a unity of sum or of primordial principle, a result or an origin, a oneness of totality or a oneness of nature or a oneness of essence, — the various standpoints of Pluralism, of Sankhya, of Vedanta? Or if both the One and the Many are real, what are the relations between these two eternal principles of being, or are they reconciled in an Absolute beyond them?


Sri Aurobindo: These are no barren questions of logic, no battle of cloudy metaphysical abstractions, as the practical and sensational man would have us contemptuously believe; for on our answer to them depends our conception of God, of existence, of the world and of human life and destiny.  Heraclitus, differing in this, as Mr. Ranade reminds us, from Anaximander who like our Mayavadins denied true reality to the Many and from Empedocles who thought the All to be alternately one and many, believed unity and multiplicity to be both of them real and coexistent. Existence is then eternally one and eternally many, — even as Ramanuja and Madhwa have concluded, though in a very different spirit and from a quite different standpoint. Heraclitus’ view arose from his strong concrete intuition of things, his acute sense of universal realities; for in our experience of the cosmos we do ﬁnd always and inseparably this eternal coexistence and cannot really escape from it. Everywhere our gaze on the Many reveals to us an eternal oneness, no matter what we ﬁx on as the principle of that oneness; yet is that unity inoperative except by the multiplicity of its powers and forms, nor do we anywhere see it void of or apart from its own multiplicity.


Sri Aurobindo: One Matter, but many atoms, plasms, bodies; one Energy, but many forces; one Mind or at least Mind-stuff, but many mental beings; one Spirit, but many souls. Perhaps periodically this multiplicity goes back, is dissolved into, is swallowed up by the One from which it was originally evolved; but still the fact that it has evolved and got involved again, compels us to suppose a possibility and even a necessity of its renewed evolution: it is not then really destroyed. The Adwaitin by his Yoga goes back to the One, feels himself merged, believes that he has got rid of the Many, proved perhaps their unreality; but it is the achievement of an individual, of one of the Many, and the Many go on existing in spite of it. The achievement proves only that there is a plane of consciousness on which the soul can realise and not merely perceive by the intellect the oneness of the Spirit, and it proves nothing else. Therefore, on this truth of eternal oneness and eternal multiplicity Heraclitus ﬁxes and anchors himself


Sri Aurobindo: ; from his ﬁrm acceptance of it, not reasoning it away but accepting all its consequences, ﬂows all the rest of his philosophy.  Still, one question remains to be resolved before we can move a step farther. Since there is an eternal One, what is that?  Is it Force, Mind, Matter, Soul? or, since Matter has many principles, is it some one principle of Matter which has evolved all the rest or which by some power of its own activity has changed into all that we see?


Sri Aurobindo: The old Greek thinkers conceived of cosmic Substance as possessed of four elements, omitting or not having arrived at the ﬁfth, Ether, in which Indian analysis found the ﬁrst and original principle. In seeking the nature of the original substance they ﬁxed then on one or other of these four as the primordial Nature, one ﬁnding it in Air, another in Water, while Heraclitus, as we have seen, describes or symbolises the source and reality of all things as an everliving Fire. “No man or god” he says “has created the universe, but ever there was and is and will be the everliving Fire.”  In the Veda, in the early language of the Mystics generally, the names of the elements or primary principles of Substance were used with a clearly symbolic signiﬁcance. The symbol of water is thus used constantly in the Rig Veda.


Sri Aurobindo: It is said that in the beginning was the inconscient Ocean out of which the One was born by the vastness of His energy; but it is clear from the language of the hymn that no physical ocean is meant, but rather the unformed chaos of inconscient being in which the Divine, the Godhead lay concealed in a darkness enveloped by greater darkness. The seven active principles of existence are similarly spoken of as rivers or waters; we hear of the seven rivers, the great water, the four superior rivers, in a context which shows their symbolic signiﬁcance. We see this image ﬁxed in the Puranic mythus of Vishnu sleeping on the serpent Inﬁnite in the milky ocean. But even as early as the Rig Veda, ether is the highest symbol of the Inﬁnite, the of the Greeks; water is that of the same Inﬁnite in its aspect as the original substance; ﬁre is the creative power, the active energy of the Inﬁnite; air, the life-principle, is spoken of as that which brings down ﬁre out of the ethereal heavens into the earth. Yet these were not merely symbols.


Sri Aurobindo: The Vedic Mystics held, it is clear, a close connection and effective parallelism to exist between psychical and physical activities, between the action of Light, for instance, and the phenomena of mental illumination; ﬁre was to them at once the luminous divine energy, the Seer-Will of the universal Godhead active and creative of all things, and the physical principle creative of the substantial forms of the universe, burning secretly in all life.  It is doubtful how far the earlier Greek philosophic thinkers preserved any of these complex conceptions in their generalisations about the original principle. But Heraclitus has clearly an idea of something more than a physical substance or energy in his concept of the everliving Fire. Fire is to him the physical aspect, as it were, of a great burning creative, formative and destructive force, the sum of all whose processes is a constant and unceasing change. The idea of the One which is eternally becoming Many and the Many which is eternally becoming One and of that One therefore not so much as stable substance or essence as active Force, a sort of substantial Will-to-become, is the foundation of Heraclitus’ philosophy.


Sri Aurobindo: Nietzsche, whom Mr. Ranade rightly afﬁliates to Heraclitus, Nietzsche, the most vivid, concrete and suggestive of modern thinkers, as is Heraclitus among the early Greeks, founded his whole philosophical thought on this conception of existence as a vast Will-to-become and of the world as a play of Force; divine Power was to him the creative Word, the beginning of all things and that to which life aspires. But he afﬁrms Becoming only and excludes Being from his view of things; hence his philosophy is in the end unsatisfactory, insufﬁcient, lop-sided; it stimulates, but solves nothing. Heraclitus does not exclude Being from the data of the problem of existence, although he will not make any opposition or gulf between that and Becoming. By his conception of existence as at once one and many, he is bound to accept these two aspects of his everliving Fire as simultaneously true, true in each other; Being is an eternal becoming and yet the Becoming resolves itself into eternal being.


Sri Aurobindo: All is in ﬂux, for all is change of becoming; we cannot step into the same waters twice, for it is other and yet other waters that are ﬂowing on.  And yet, with his keen eye on the truth of things, preoccupied though he was with this aspect of existence, he could not help seeing another truth behind it. The waters into which we step, are and are not the same; our own existence is an eternity and an inconstant transience; we are and we are not. Heraclitus does not solve the contradiction; he states it and in his own way tries to give some account of its process.  That process he sees as a constant change and a changing back, an exchange and an interchange in a constant whole, — managed for the rest by a clash of forces, by a creative and determinative strife, “war which is the father and king of all things.”


Sri Aurobindo: Between Fire as the Being and Fire in the Becoming existence describes a downward and upward movement — and — which has been called the “back-returning road” upon which all travels. These are the master ideas of the thought of Heraclitus.  WO APOPHTHEGMS of Heraclitus give us the startingpoint of his whole thinking. They are his saying that it is wisdom to admit that all things are one and his other saying “One out of all and all out of One.” How are we to understand these two pregnant utterances?


Sri Aurobindo: Must we read them into each other and conclude that for Heraclitus the One only exists as resultant of the many even as the many only exist as a becoming of the One? Mr. Ranade seems to think so; he tells us that this philosophy denies Being and afﬁrms only Becoming, — like Nietzsche, like the Buddhists. But surely this is to read a little too much into Heraclitus’ theory of perpetual change, to take it too much by itself. If that was his whole belief, it is difﬁcult to see why he should seek for an original and eternal principle, the everliving Fire which creates all by its perpetual changing, governs all by its ﬁery force of the “thunderbolt”, resolves all back into itself by a cyclic conﬂagration, difﬁcult to account for his theory of the upward and downward way, difﬁcult to concede what Mr. Ranade contends, that Heraclitus did hold the theory of a cosmic conﬂagration or to imagine what could be the result of such a cosmic catastrophe. To reduce all becoming into Nothing?


Sri Aurobindo: Surely not; Heraclitus’ thought is at the very antipodes from speculative Nihilism. Into another kind of becoming? Obviously not, since by an absolute conﬂagration existing things can only be reduced into their eternal principle of being, into Agni, back into the immortal Fire. Something that is eternal, that is itself eternity, something that is for ever one, — for the cosmos is eternally one and many and does not by becoming cease to be one, — something that is God (Zeus), something that can be imaged as Fire which, if an ever-active force, is yet a substance or at least a substantial force and not merely an abstract Will-to-become, — something out of which all cosmic becoming arises and into which it returns, what is this but eternal Being?  Heraclitus was greatly preoccupied with his idea of eternal becoming, for him the one right account of the cosmos, but his cosmos has still an eternal basis, a unique original principle.


Sri Aurobindo: That distinguishes his thought radically from Nietzsche’s or the Buddhists’. The later Greeks derived from him the idea of the perpetual stream of things, “All things are in ﬂux.” The idea of the universe as constant motion and unceasing change was always before him, and yet behind and in it all he saw too a constant principle of determination and even a mysterious principle of identity. Every day, he says, it is a new sun that rises; yes, but if the sun is always new, exists only by change from moment to moment, like all things in Nature, still it is the same everliving Fire that rises with each Dawn in the shape of the sun. We can never step again into the same stream, for ever other and other waters are ﬂowing; and yet, says Heraclitus, “we do and we do not enter into the same waters, we are and we are not.”


Sri Aurobindo: The sense is clear; there is an identity in things, in all existences,, as well as a constant changing; there is a Being as well as a Becoming and by that we have an eternal and real existence as well as a temporary and apparent, are not merely a constant mutation but a constant identical existence.  Zeus exists, a sempiternal active Fire and eternal Word, a One by which all things are uniﬁed, all laws and results perpetually determined, all measures unalterably maintained. Day and Night are one, Death and Life are one, Youth and Age are one, Good and Evil are one, because that is One and all these are only its various shapes and appearances.  Heraclitus would not have accepted a purely psychological principle of Self as the origin of things, but in essence he is not very far from the Vedantic position.


Sri Aurobindo: The Buddhists of the Nihilistic school used in their own way the image of the stream and the image of the ﬁre. They saw, as Heraclitus saw, that nothing in the world is for two moments the same even in the most insistent continuity of forms. The ﬂame maintains itself unchanged in appearance, but every moment it is another and not the same ﬁre; the stream is sustained in its ﬂow by ever new waters. From this they drew the conclusion that there is no essence of things, nothing self-existent; the apparent becoming is all that we can call existence, behind it there is eternal Nothing, the absolute Void, or perhaps an original Non-Being. Heraclitus saw, on the contrary, that if the form of the ﬂame only exists by a constant change, a constant exchange rather of the substance of the wick into the substance of the ﬁery tongue, yet there must be a principle of their existence common to them which thus converts itself from one form into another; — even if the substance of the ﬂame is always changing, the principle of Fire is always the same and produces always the same results of energy, maintains always the same measures.


Sri Aurobindo: The Upanishad too describes the cosmos as a universal motion and becoming; it is all this that is mobile in the mobility, , — the very word for universe,, having the radical sense of motion, so that the whole universe, the macrocosm, is one vast principle of motion and therefore of change and instability, while each thing in the universe is in itself a microcosm of the same motion and instability. Existences are “all becomings”; the Self-existent Atman, Swayambhu, has become all becomings,. The relation between God and World is summed up in the phrase, “It is He that has moved out everywhere,”; He is the Lord, the Seer and Thinker, who becoming everywhere — Heraclitus’ Logos, his Zeus, his One out of which come all things — “has ﬁxed all things rightly according to their nature from years sempiternal”, — Heraclitus’ “All things are ﬁxed and determined.”   Substitute his Fire for the Vedantic Atman and there is nothing in the expressions of the Upanishad which the Greek thinker would not have accepted as another ﬁgure of his own thought.


Sri Aurobindo: And do not the Upanishads use among other images this very symbol of the Fire? “As one Fire has entered into the world and taken shapes according to the various forms in the world,” so the one Being has become all these names and forms and yet remains the One. Heraclitus tells us precisely the same thing; God is all contraries, “He takes various shapes just as ﬁre, when it is mingled with spices, is named according to the savour of each.” Each one names Him according to his pleasure, says the Greek seer, and He accepts all names and yet accepts none, not even the highest name of Zeus. “He consents and yet at the same time does not consent to be called by the name of Zeus.”


Sri Aurobindo: So too said Indian Dirghatamas of old in his long hymn of the divine Mysteries in the Rig Veda, “One existent the sages call by many names.” Though He assumes all these forms, says the Upanishad, He has no form that the vision can seize, He whose name is a mighty splendour. We see again how close are the thoughts of the Greek and very often even his expressions and images to the sense and style of the Vedic and Vedantic sages.  We must put each of Heraclitus’ apophthegms into its right place if we would understand his thought. “It is wise to admit that all things are one,” — not merely, be it noted, that they came from oneness and will go back to oneness, but that they are one, now and always, — all is, was and ever will be the everliving Fire.


Sri Aurobindo: All seems to our experience to be many, an eternal becoming of manifold existences; where is there in it any principle of eternal identity? True, says Heraclitus, so it seems; but wisdom looks beyond and does see the identity of all things; Night and Day, Life and Death, the good and the evil, all are one, the eternal, the identical; those who see only a difference in objects, do not know the truth of the objects they observe. “Hesiod did not know day and night; for it is the One,” —, . Now, an eternal and identical which all things are, is precisely what we mean by Being; it is precisely what is denied by those who see only Becoming. The Nihilistic Buddhists insisted that there were only so many ideas,, and impermanent forms which were but the combination of parts and elements: no oneness, no identity anywhere; get beyond ideas and forms, you get to self-extinction, to the Void, to Nothing.


Sri Aurobindo: Yet one must posit a principle of unity somewhere, if not at the base or in the secret being of things, yet in their action. The Buddhists had to posit their universal principle of Karma which, when you think of it, comes after all to a universal energy as the cause of the world, a creator and preserver of unchanging measures.  Nietzsche denied Being, but had to speak of a universal Will-tobe; which again, when you come to think of it, seems to be no more than a translation of the Upanishadic, “WillEnergy is Brahman.” The later Sankhya denied the unity of conscious existences, but asserted the unity of Nature, Prakriti, which is again at once the original principle and substance of things and the creative energy, the of the Greeks. It is indeed wise to agree that all things are one; for vision drives at that, the soul and the heart reach out to that, thought comes circling round to it in the very act of denial.


Sri Aurobindo: Heraclitus saw what all must see who look at the world with any attention, that there is something in all this motion and change and differentiation which insists on stability, which goes back to sameness, which assures unity, which triumphs into eternity. It has always the same measures; it is, was and ever will be. We are the same in spite of all our differences; we start from the same origin, proceed by the same universal laws, live, differ and strive in the bosom of an eternal oneness, are seeking always for that which binds all beings together and makes all things one. Each sees it in his own way, lays stress on this or that aspect of it, loses sight of or diminishes other aspects, gives it therefore a different name — even as Heraclitus, attracted by its aspect of creative and destructive Force, gave it the name of Fire.  But when he generalises, he puts it widely enough; it is the One that is All, it is the All that is One, — Zeus, eternity, the Fire.


Sri Aurobindo: He could have said with the Upanishad, “All this is the Brahman”, , though he could not have gone on and said, “This Self is the Brahman”, but would have declared rather of Agni what a Vedantic formula says of Vayu, , “Thou art manifest Brahman.”  But we may admit the One in different ways. The Adwaitins afﬁrmed the One, the Being, but put away “all things” as Maya, or they recognised the immanence of the Being in these becomings which are yet not-Self, not That. Vaishnava philosophy saw existence as eternally one in the Being, God, eternally many by His nature or conscious-energy in the souls whom He becomes or who exist in her. In Greece also Anaximander denied the multiple reality of the Becoming.


Sri Aurobindo: Empedocles afﬁrmed that the All is eternally one and many; all is one which becomes many and then again goes back to oneness. But Heraclitus will not so cut the knot of the riddle. “No,” he says in effect, “I hold to my idea of the eternal oneness of all things; never do they cease to be one. It is all my everliving Fire that takes various shapes and names, changes itself into all that is and yet remains itself, not at all by any illusion or mere appearance of becoming, but with a severe and positive reality.” All things then are in their reality and substance and law and reason of their being the One; the One in its shapes, values, changings becomes really all things.


Sri Aurobindo: It changes and is yet immutable: for it does not increase or diminish, nor does it lose for a moment its eternal nature and identity which is that of the everliving Fire. Many values which reduce themselves to the same standard and judge of all values; many forces which go back to the same unalterable energy; many becomings which both represent and amount to one identical Being.  Here Heraclitus brings in his formula of “One out of all and all out of One”, which is his account of the process of the cosmos just as his formula “All things are one” is his account of the eternal truth of the cosmos. One, he says, in the process of the cosmos is always becoming all things from moment to moment, hence the eternal ﬂux of things; but all things also are eternally going back to their principle of oneness; hence the unity of the cosmos, the sameness behind the ﬂux of becoming, the stability of measures, the conservation of energy in all changes. This he explains farther by his theory of change as in its character a constant exchange.


Sri Aurobindo: But is there then no end to this simultaneous upward and downward motion of things? As the downward has so far prevailed as to create the cosmos, will not the upward too prevail so as to dissolve it back into the everliving Fire? Here we come to the question whether Heraclitus did or did not hold the theory of a periodic conﬂagration or. “Fire will come on all things and judge and convict them.” If he held it, then we have again another striking coincidence of Heraclitus’ thought with our familiar Indian notions, the periodic, the Puranic conﬂagration of the world by the appearance of the twelve suns, the Vedantic theory of the eternal cycles of manifestation and withdrawal from manifestation.


Sri Aurobindo: In fact, both the lines of thought are essentially the same and had to arrive inevitably at the same conclusions.  ERACLITUS’ account of the cosmos is an evolution and involution out of his one eternal principle of Fire, — at once the one substance and the one force, — which he expresses in his ﬁgurative language as the upward and downward road. “The road up and down” he says “is one and the same.” Out of Fire, the radiant and energetic principle, air, water and earth proceed, — that is the procession of energy on its downward road; there is equally in the very tension of this process a force of potential return which would lead things backward to their source in the reverse order. In the balance of these two upward and downward forces resides the whole cosmic action; everything is a poise of contrary energies.


Sri Aurobindo: The movement of life is like the back-returning of the bow, to which he compares it, an energy of traction and tension restraining an energy of release, every force of action compensated by a corresponding force of reaction. By the resistance of one to the other all the harmonies of existence are created.  We have the same idea of an evolution of successive conditions of energy out of a primal substance-force in the Indian theory of Sankhya. There indeed the system proposed is more complete and satisfying. It starts with the original or root energy, , which as the ﬁrst substance,, evolves by development and change into ﬁve successive principles.


Sri Aurobindo: Ether, not ﬁre, is the ﬁrst principle, ignored by the Greeks, but rediscovered by modern Science; there follow air, ﬁre, the igneous, radiant and electric energy, water, earth, the ﬂuid and solid. The Sankhya, like Anaximenes, puts Air ﬁrst of the four principles admitted by the Greeks, though it does not like him make it the original substance, and it thus differs from the order of Heraclitus. But it gives to the principle of ﬁre the function of creating all forms, — as Agni in the Veda is the great builder of the worlds, — and here at least it meets his thought; for it is as the energetic principle behind all formation and mutation that Heraclitus must have chosen Fire as his symbol and material representative of the One. We may remember in this connection how far modern Science has gone to justify these old thinkers by the importance it gives to electricity and radio-active forces — Heraclitus’ ﬁre and thunderbolt, the Indian triple Agni — in the formation of atoms and in the transmutation of energy.  But the Greeks failed to go forward to that ﬁnal discrimination which India attributed to Kapila, the supreme analytical thinker, — the discrimination between Prakriti and her cosmic principles, her twenty-four tattwas forming the subjective and objective aspects of Nature, and between Prakriti and Purusha, Conscious-Soul and Nature-Energy.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore while in the Sankhya ether, ﬁre and the rest are only principles of the objective evolution of Prakriti, evolutionary aspects of the original , the early Greeks could not get back beyond these aspects of Nature to the idea of a pure energy, nor could they at all account for her subjective side. The Fire of Heraclitus has to do duty at once for the original substance of all Matter and for God and Eternity. This preoccupation with Nature-Energy and the failure to fathom its relations with Soul has persisted in modern scientiﬁc thought, and we ﬁnd there too the same attempt to identify some primary principle of Nature, ether or electricity, with the original Force.  However that may be, the theory of the creation of the world by some kind of evolutionary change out of the original substance or energy, by, is common to the early Greek and the Indian systems, however they may differ about the nature of the original. The distinction of Heraclitus among the early Greek sages is his conception of the upward and downward road, one and the same in the descent and the return.


Sri Aurobindo: It corresponds to the Indian idea of and, the double movement of the Soul and Nature, —, the moving out and forward,, the moving back and in. The Indian thinkers were preoccupied with this double principle so far as it touches the action of the individual soul entering into the procession of Nature and drawing back from it; but still they saw a similar, a periodic movement forward and back of Nature itself which leads to an ever-repeated cycle of creation and dissolution; they held the idea of a periodic. Heraclitus’ theory would seem to demand a similar conclusion. Otherwise we must suppose that the downward tendency, once in action, has always the upper hand over the upward or that cosmos is eternally proceeding out of the original substance and eternally returning to it, but never actually returns. The Many are then eternal not only in power of manifestation, but in actual fact of manifestation.


Sri Aurobindo: It is possible that Heraclitus may so have thought, but it is not the logical conclusion of his theory; it contradicts the evident suggestion of his metaphor about the road which implies a starting-point and a point of return; and we have too the distinct statement of the Stoics that he believed in the theory of conﬂagration, — an assertion which they are hardly likely to have made if this were not generally accepted as his teaching. The modern arguments against enumerated by Mr. Ranade are founded upon misconceptions. Heraclitus’ afﬁrmation is not simply that the One is always Many, the Many always One, but in his own words, “out of all the One and out of One all.” Plato’s phrasing of the thought, “the reality is both many and one and in its division it is always being brought together,” states the same idea in different language. It means a constant current and backcurrent of change, the upward and downward road, and we may suppose that as the One by downward change becomes completely the All in the descending process, yet remains eternally the one everliving Fire, so the All by upward change may resort completely to the One and yet essentially exist, since it can again return into various being by the repetition of the downward movement.


Sri Aurobindo: All difﬁculty disappears if we remember that what is implied is a process of evolution and involution, — so too the Indian word for creation,, means a release or bringing forth of what is held in, latent, — and that the conﬂagration destroys existing forms, but not the principle of multiplicity. There will be then no inconsistency at all in Heraclitus’ theory of a periodic conﬂagration; it is rather, that being the highest expression of change, the complete logic of his system.  F IT is the law of Change that determines the evolution and involution of the one downward and upward road, the same law prevails all along the path, through all its steps and returns, in all the million transactions of the wayside. There is everywhere the law of exchange and interchange,.  The unity and the multiplicity have at every moment this active relation to each other.


Sri Aurobindo: The One is constantly exchanging itself for the many; that gold has been given, you have instead these commodities, but in fact they are only so much value of the gold. The many are constantly exchanging themselves for the One; these commodities are given, disappear, are destroyed, we say, but in their place there is the gold, the original substanceenergy to the value of the commodities. You see the sun and you think it is the same sun always, but really it is a new sun that rises each day; for it is the Fire’s constant giving of itself in exchange for the elemental commodities that compose the sun which preserves its form, its energy, its movement, all its measures. Science shows us that this is true of all things, of the human body, for instance; it is always the same, but it preserves its apparent identity only by a constant change. There is a constant destruction, yet there is no destruction.


Sri Aurobindo: Energy distributes itself, but never really dissipates itself; change and unalterable conservation of energy in the change are the law, not destruction. If this world of multiplicity is destroyed in the end by Fire, yet there is no end and it is not destroyed, but only exchanged for the Fire. Moreover, there is exchange between all these becomings which are only so many active values of the Being, commodities that are a ﬁxed value and measure of the universal gold. Fire takes of its substance from one form and gives to another, changes one apparent value of its substance into another apparent value, but the substance-energy remains the same and the new value is the equivalent of the old, — as when it turns fuel into smoke and cinders and ashes. Modern Science with a more accurate knowledge of what actually happens in this change, yet conﬁrms Heraclitus’ conclusion.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the law of the conservation of energy.  Practically, the active secret of life is there; all life physical or mental or merely dynamic maintains itself by constant change and interchange. Still, Heraclitus’ account is so far not altogether satisfactory. The measure, the value of the energy exchanged remains unaltered even when the form is altered, but why should also the cosmic commodities we have for the universal gold be ﬁxed and in a way unchanging? What is the explanation, how comes about this eternity of principles and elements and kinds of combination and this persistence and recurrence of the same forms which we observe in the cosmos?


Sri Aurobindo: Why in this constant cosmic ﬂux should everything after all remain the same? Why should the sun, though always new, be yet for all practical purposes the same sun? Why should the stream be, as Heraclitus himself admits, the same stream although it is ever other and other waters that are ﬂowing? It was in this connection that Plato brought in his eternal, ideal plane of ﬁxed ideas, by which he seems to have meant at once an originating real-idea and an original ideal schema for all things. An idealistic philosophy of the Indian type might say that this force, the Shakti which you call Fire, is a consciousness which preserves by its energy its original scheme of ideas and corresponding forms of things.


Sri Aurobindo: But Heraclitus gives us another account, not quite satisfactory, yet profound and full of suggestive truth; it is contained in his striking phrases about war and justice and tension and the Furies pursuing the transgressor of measures. He is the ﬁrst thinker to see the world entirely in the terms of Power.  What is the nature of this exchange? It is strife,, it is war,! What is the rule and result of the war?


Sri Aurobindo: It is justice.  How acts that justice? By a just tension and compensation of forces which produce the harmony of things and therefore, we presume, their stability. “War is the father of all and the king of all”; “All things becoming according to strife”; “To know that strife is justice”; these are his master apophthegms in this matter.  At ﬁrst we do not see why exchange should be strife; it would seem rather to be commerce.


Sri Aurobindo: Strife there is, but why should there not also be peaceful and willing interchange? Heraclitus will have none of it; no peace! he would agree with the modern Teuton that commerce itself is a department of War. It is true there is a commerce, gold for commodities, commodities for gold, but the commerce itself and all its circumstances are governed by a forceful, more, a violent compulsion of the universal Fire. That is what he means by the Furies pursuing the sun; “for fear of Him” says the Upanishad “the wind blows . . . and death runs.”


Sri Aurobindo: And between all beings there is a constant trial of strength; by that warfare they come into being, by that their measures are maintained. We see that he is right; he has caught the initial aspect of cosmic Nature. Everything here is a clash of forces and by that clash and struggle and clinging and wrestling things not only come into being, but are maintained in being.  Karma? Laws?


Sri Aurobindo: But different laws meet and compete and by their tension the balance of the world is maintained. Karma? It is the forcible justice of an eternal compelling Power and it is the Furies pursuing us if we transgress our measures.  War, contends Heraclitus, is not mere injustice, chaotic violence; it is justice, although a violent justice, the only kind possible. Again, from that point of view, we see that he is right.


Sri Aurobindo: By the energy expended and its value shall the fruits be determined, and where two forces meet, expenditure of energy means a trial of strength. Shall not then the rewards be to the strong according to his strength and to the weak according to his weakness? So it is at least in the world, the primal law, although subject to the help of the weak by the strong which need not after all be an injustice or a violation of measures, in spite of Nietzsche and Heraclitus. And is there not after all sometimes a tremendous strength behind weakness, the very strength of the pressure on the oppressed which brings its terrible reaction, the back return of the bow, Zeus, the eternal Fire, observing his measures?  Not only between being and being, force and force is there war, but within each there is an eternal opposition, a tension of contraries, and it is this tension which creates the balance necessary to harmony.


Sri Aurobindo: Harmony then there is, for cosmos itself is in its result a harmony; but it is so because in its process it is war, tension, opposition, a balance of eternal contraries.  Real peace there cannot be, unless by peace you mean a stable tension, a balance of power between hostile forces, a sort of mutual neutralisation of excesses. Peace cannot create, cannot maintain anything, and Homer’s prayer that war might perish from among Gods and men is a monstrous absurdity, for that would mean the end of the world. A periodic end there may be, not by peace or reconciliation, but by conﬂagration, by an attack of Fire,, a ﬁery judgment and conviction.  Force created the world, Force is the world, Force by its violence maintains the world, Force shall end the world, — and eternally re-create it.


Sri Aurobindo: ERACLITUS is the ﬁrst and the most consistent teacher of the law of relativity; it is the logical result of his primary philosophical concepts. Since all is one in its being and many in its becoming, it follows that everything must be one in its essence. Night and day, life and death, good and evil can only be different aspects of the same absolute reality.  Life and death are in fact one, and we may say from different points of view that all death is only a process and change of life or that all life is only an activity of death. Really both are one energy whose activity presents to us a duality of aspects.


Sri Aurobindo: From one point of view we are not, for our existence is only a constant mutation of energy; from another we are, because the being in us is always the same and sustains our secret identity.  So too, we can only speak of a thing as good or evil, just or unjust, beautiful or ugly from a purely relative point of view, because we adopt a particular standpoint or have in view some practical end or temporarily valid relation. He gives the example of “the sea, water purest and impurest”, their ﬁne element to the ﬁsh, abominable and undrinkable to man. And does not this apply to all things? — they are the same always in reality and assume their qualities and properties because of our standingpoint in the universe of becoming, the nature of our seeing and the texture of our minds.


Sri Aurobindo: All things circle back to the eternal unity and in their beginning and end are the same; it is only in the arc of becoming that they vary in themselves and from each other, and there they have no absoluteness to each other. Night and day are the same; it is only the nature of our vision and our standing-point on the earth and our relations of earth and sun that create the difference. What is day to us, is to others night.  Because of this insistence on the relativity of good and evil, Heraclitus is thought to have enunciated some kind of supermoralism; but it is well to see carefully to what this supermoralism of Heraclitus really amounts. Heraclitus does not deny the existence of an absolute; but for him the absolute is to be found in the One, in the Divine, — not the gods, but the one supreme Divinity, the Fire.


Sri Aurobindo: It has been objected that he attributes relativity to God, because he says that the ﬁrst principle is willing and yet not willing to be called by the name of Zeus. But surely this is to misunderstand him altogether. The name Zeus expresses only the relative human idea of the Godhead; therefore while God accepts the name, He is not bound or limited by it. All our concepts of Him are partial and relative; “He is named according to the pleasure of each.” This is nothing more nor less than the truth proclaimed by the Vedas, “One existent the sages call by many names.”


Sri Aurobindo: Brahman is willing to be called Vishnu, and yet he is not willing, because he is also Brahma and Maheshwara and all the gods and the world and all principles and all that is, and yet not any of these things,. As men approach him, so he accepts them. But the One to Heraclitus as to the Vedantin is absolute.  This is quite clear from all his sayings; day and night, good and evil are one, because they are the One in their essence and in the One the distinctions we make between them disappear. There is a Word, a Reason in all things, a Logos, and that Reason is one; only men by the relativeness of their mentality turn it each into his personal thought and way of looking at things and live according to this variable relativity.


Sri Aurobindo: It follows that there is an absolute, a divine way of looking at things. “To God all things are good and just, but men hold some things to be good, others unjust.” There is then an absolute good, an absolute beauty, an absolute justice of which all things are the relative expression.  There is a divine order in the world; each thing fulﬁls its nature according to its place in the order and in its place and symmetry in the one Reason of things is good, just and beautiful precisely because it fulﬁls that Reason according to the eternal measures.  To take an example, the world war may be regarded as an evil by some, a sheer horror of carnage, to others because of the new possibilities it opens to mankind, it may seem a good.


Sri Aurobindo: It is at once good and evil. But that is the relative view; in its entirety, in its fulﬁlment in each and all of its circumstances of a divine purpose, a divine justice, a divine force executing itself in the large reason of things, it is from the absolute point of view good and just — to God, not to man.  Does it follow that the relative view-point has no validity at all? Not for a moment. On the contrary, it must be the expression, proper to each mentality according to the necessity of its nature and standpoint, of the divine Law.


Sri Aurobindo: Heraclitus says that plainly; “Fed are all human laws by one, the divine.” That sentence ought to be quite sufﬁcient to protect Heraclitus against the charge of antinomianism. True, no human law is the absolute expression of the divine justice, but it draws its validity, its sanction from that and is valid for its purpose, in its place, in its proper time, has its relative necessity. Even though men’s notions of good and justice vary in the mutations of the becoming, yet human good and justice persist in the stream of things, preserve a measure. Heraclitus admits relative standards, but as a thinker he is obliged to go beyond them.