by Brajendranath Seal For an introduction to Seal, please see Archishman Raju's essay here: indian-modernity-and-the-need-for-a-new-revolutionary-social-science.html
The Subject I have chosen for my paper---Comparative studies in Vaishnavism and Christianity---suggests several important questions, which should be cleared up, before the mutual relations of the two religions can be fruitfully discussed. In the first place, the comparative method of investigating the sciences relating to the history of the Human Mind requires elucidation and correction, for nothing has done greater mischief in this department of research than the ill conceived and blundering attempts of so many tyroes and ‘prentice hands’ to build ambitious theories and comprehensive systems on the shifting quicksands of loose analogy and vague generalisation in the name of scientific method. Again, historical comparison such as is here proposed implies that the objects compared are of co-ordinate rank, and belong more or less to the same stage in the development of human culture. Very few scholars in the West will be prepared to admit that any other religion can bear this relation to Christianity. Their study of the history of Civilisation has resulted in the conviction that all other races and cultures have been a preparation for the Graeco-Romano-Gothic type, which is now the epitome of Mankind, the representative of Universal Humanity, the heir of all the ages. A comparison between Christianity and any other religion must therefore be a comparison between a rudimentary and a developed organism, as, in the investigations of a biological laboratory, the homologist may trace the mature and perfect type of certain animal organs to their abortive rudiments and tentative or experimental forms in fossil remains,---perhaps even to monster births of Nature like the Ornitho-saurus or the Ichthyo-saurus. The hardy ‘oriental’ who would presume to question this almost axiomatic truth is likely to provoke ‘amused’ incredulity, if not unmixed erosion. I may at once say that to my mind this ‘axiomatic’ truth seems to be a mischievous error due to an essentially wrong conception of the philosophy of history and the evolution of culture, and an essentially perverse use of the historico-comparative method, and I therefore proceed to indicate the revision and correction which is now highly necessary, if the historical sciences are to march pari passu with the physical group. It has long been seen that the key to the investigation of the physical, the biological and the psychological sciences is not of much avail for the infinitely more complex and varied phenomena of the sociological group. An organon, more fruitful than the Aristotelian or the so called Baconian one, has been devised to grapple with the problem in its complexity. Even as transcendental analysis, the calculus of infinitesimals, of variations and of quaternions, must supersede the primitive algebraical analysis, in the investigation of physical phenomena in their subtlest manifestations and as world-worming agencies, so the historic method, the comparative method, and finally the formula of evolution, must banish the primitive Analysis and Synthesis, the primitive Deduction and Induction, in the study of the sociological organism, whether in its statical or dynamical aspects. These methods have accredited themselves in various ways in the fields of Ethnology Jurisprudence, Politics, Economy, Religion and Language. Minor generalisations and classifications, minor sequences of cause and effect, have been fairly established, and each department has been surveyed with sufficient care to determine the main sections or natural divisions of phenomena. What is more important of all, the historic method with the powerful help of evolution, has made it abundantly clear that the human sciences must be thorough ‘historical in character, that every dogma, institution or tradition every code, language, myth or system, has had its history,---its origin, growth and development,---a study of which is essential to a proper understanding of its function in society, its place and meaning and worth. But this is the utmost that can be said of the achievements of this method. The higher, more general, more fundamental problems in every one of the human sciences remain in a state of chaotic confusion, and furnish subjects for endless controversy, for the solution of which the current formulae of evolution or historic development seem to be hopelessly inept and ill equipped. No one ahs yet lifted the veil from the origins of the human institutions and arts. The origin and distribution of races, the structure of the primitive family, the origin of property in land and the earliest form of land tenure, the conception of customary law in relation to the Sovereign or the State, the historical relationship of the chief forms of linguistic structure, the source of religion in Animism, Naturalism, or the so called Euhuemerism, and the position of the great gods in the history of religious development, the interactions of myth, able and language, and the explanation of their present geographical distribution---these are questions on which diametrically opposed views are held by the chief authorities. The main difficulty is, no doubt, the complexity and interaction of the phenomena, but a great part of the present deadlock is due to an essentially false conception of the method of investigation. Comparison, in its earlier days, was a crude and loose device scarcely deserving to be ranked as a scientific method. Societies, institutions, creeds, dogmas, rites, laws, languages, myths, in fundamentally district stages of development, were recklessly compared, and generalisations framed, or unity of origin asserted, on a basis of indefinite agreement. THe havoc which the method thus did in its earlier and cruder form is one from which the comparative sciences have not yet entirely recovered. The conception of society as an organism---the biological view---first showed the limits within which comparison must be applied. The historical method came next to check and correct its vagaries. It is now more or less recognised that the origin and development of a social phenomenon must be first historically studied, and organic connection or a similar stage of development, established or presumed, as a necessary precondition of scientific comparison. The historic method itself, in the hands of Montesquieu and his school, was scarcely more worthy of credit, and had it not been for the conception of biological growth and the formula of evolution, which have given it definiteness and evidential value, it would have failed to achieve its chief triumphs in the study of social phenomena. But the historic method, as reinforced by biology and evolution, requires one more fundamental correction to fit it as an organon for the investigation of social phenomena. As employed by Mr. Herbert Spencer and his school, the historico genetic method is vitiated by an unhistorical and unreal simplicity, a desire to reduce the variety of Life and Nature to a uniform formula. In the result, the method breaks down in its application to the higher stages in each department. In biology, reproduction and neurosis in the higher forms of organisms, --in psychology, the functions of the understanding and the reason,---in sociology the more developed institutions like the Greek State or the Poor Lag system, the University and the Church;--in Ethics the conception of Personality, personal rights and duties, and the balance and adjustment of Reason and Instinct;---in politics, the principle of social co-operation which checks the laissen faire of individualism;-- in Religion, the spiritual experiences of the race;---in short, the higher, more advanced, more complex stages in the history of life, civilisation and culture, are altogether inexplicable on this method, and have been quietly ignored or else traverstied. Mr. Spencer has no other explanation for social, ethical, political and religious codes, in widely differing environments and stages,---whether the constitution of Solon, or the Codes of Brahmana Sturakaras-- than his formula of the military and the industrial regime, in which he sums up the varied history of human civilisation! The German schools of sociologists, following in the wake of Hegel, have a more comprehensive conception of the historico-genetic method, and a surer perception of different stages of development; but here also the different races and cults are measured and adjudged by an abstract and arbitrary standard derived from the history of European civilisation, and the ethnic varieties are given only a subsidiary and provisional place, as if they were either monstrous or defective forms of life like the monotremata or the marsiupialia of a biological laboratory, or only primitive ancestral forms, the earlier steps of the series that have found their completion in European society and civilisation. Indeed the historic method requires the same correction and extension that the doctrine of biological evolution received at the hands of Darwin. The Lamarckian speculation concerning the origin of species was vitiated by the assumption that the development series was linear, that the countless species of living organisms might be arranged in a single line of gradual and unbroken ascent from the original gelatinous bodies, which induced ‘orgasm’---a series in which each later form grew by reproduction out of each prior one under the influences of wants, exercise, transmission of acquired characters, and adaptation to environments, exercise, transmission of acquired characters, and adaptation to environment (food, climate, habitat, etc.). In the same manner the Hegelians conceive the history of civilisation as a single line of progress, which, in realising the successive stages of the Absolute Idea, flows continuously from one race or nation to another, each representing a single phase of the Absolute, a single moment in the dialectic process. This punctual conception of races and epochs, and this linear view of development, are essentially false. In biological doctrine, it is a truism to say that development is best represented, not by a line, but by a genealogical trees. The absurdity of supposing that men have been developed out of the gorilla or the chimpanzee, or animal organisms from vegetable ones, has been long exploded. Whether we begin with Lamarck’s gelatinous bodies, or with Haeckel’s Moneron, with the Diatomacae or the unicellular microscopic organisms, or as Darwin himself suggests, with four or five distinct structures, it is now universally accepted that from the very first there have been ramifications or branchings along different lines of development and that existing genera and species have resulted from endless subdivision and multiplication. In the same way, in psychological evolution, the linear view of Condillace with his une sensation trasnformee has been abandoned by the genetic school; and Professor Bain, in starting with distinct primitive factors of sensation and movement, and of intellect and will, as well as in recognising Spontaneity and Self-conservation, at the sources of mental genesis, only showed how faithfully he had assimilated the new biological teaching of accidental variation and natural selection. The same correction and extension of the historical method isa crying necessity of our age., if it is to lay the foundation of a true Philosophy of Universal History, and not to give us mere European side-views of Humanity for the world’s panorama. In fact, we must provisionally start with different types of culture. It serves no scientific purpose to ignore the irresolvable typical differences of social structure, of economic, political or religious organisation, that mark the most primitive cultures hitherto accessible by us. Future generalisations may reduce all this diversity to harmony, but it is no good to bow to the one God of Fetichism, of Animism of village community, or Mutterrecht, of ‘Headless’ social structure, when so many other well-attested claimants are ready to contest our allegiance. The philologist has recognised this truth earlier than his congeners of the other human sciences, and now starts with six or seven primitive linguistic structures. So in economic organisation, in religious beliefs and practices, in social customs, in political institutions, it would be well, if that ‘idolus tribus,’ the desire for more simplicity than the matter can bear, were signally and finally overthrown. BUt my present concern is with the other aspect---the recognition of ramification, or progress along different lines, and the overthrow of the linear conception of the historic method. With the ethnological material at our disposal, it is a gross and stupid blunder to link on Chinese, Hindu, Semetic, Greek, Roman, Gothic Teutonic cultures, in one line of filiation, in one logical (if not chronological) series. At the present stage of sociological research, this amounts to ignorant quackery, a true anachronism, and is totally unworthy of any man of scientific pretensions. No race of civilisation with a continuous history represents a single point or moment. In fact, even Chinese civilisation like the Chinese language has had a development of its own and though in all this race history, the Chinese race=consciousness has subsisted, it has still been a differentiation of the homogeneous, a development of a coherent heterogeneity out of an incoherent homogeneity. Hindu culture, too, has passed through most of the stages observable in the growth of the hebraico-Graeco-Romano-Gothic civilisation. The same may be said of Arabic of Mohammedan culture. To conceive these statistically, to reduce each living procession to a punctual moment in a single line, is to miss their meaning and purpose. Universal Humanity is not to be figured as the crest of an advancing wave, occupying but one place at any moment, and leaving all behind a dead level. Universal Humanity is immanent everywhere and at every moment---I will not say, a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere,---but at any rate, generically present in each race-consciousness, though each race may not have reflected the perfect type or pattern. From the statical point of view, Universal Humanity, though present in each race, is diversely embodied, reflected in specific modes and forms. The Ideal of Humanity is not completely unfolded in any, for each race potentially contains the fulness of the idea, but actually renders a few phases only, some expressing lower or fewer, others, higher or more numerous ones. To trace the outlines of this Universal Ideal, we must collate and compare the fragmentary imperfect reflections, not at all in electric fashion, but as we seek to discover a real species or genus among individual variations and modes; and a Congress like this fulfils a glorious mission in helping to realise the Vision of Universal Humanity, a Vision no less wondrous than the manifestation of the Universal-body of the Lord in the Gita to Arjuna’s wandering gaze. The moral unity of the Human Race is fast taking the place of many of the out-worn creeds of the ancient or medieval world, and the Vision of Universal Humanity, of which we get a tantalising glimpse beneath the Protean transformation of race and cult, is only the yet unrisen sSun which looms in the horizontal mists on which it has cast its image. Speaking dynamically, the Ideal of Humanity is realising itself more and more fully in the total assemblage of the races. In spite of multiformity, in spite of the diverse ethnic developments, all very real, all very special, there has been a general history of human culture and progress, the unfolding of a single ideal plan or pattern, a universal movement toward ‘one far-off divine event, to which the whole creation moves’. Human progress has one law, one direction, one movement, and the races, if moving at all, move towards one goal, though here also the developing Ideal is only potentially present in its fulness in each, some rendering lower or fewer aspects, others higher or more. Universal culture, therefore, in the abstract, has had a history; and a comparison and collation of the several culture-histories, in which this has been more or less imperfectly, more or less meagerly, embodied and mirrored, is essential, if we want to lay the foundation of a true Philosophy of History, and to rise to a Vision of that Absolute Humanity, the true Logos of God, to which Universal History testifies as its only authentic Scripture and Gospel. This is the new, corrected extended Historic Method which, in consonance with the formula of Evolution rightly understood, and in cooperation with the comparative Method properly qualified, will serve as the organon of the human or Sociological Sciences. This is the genuine Historical Method that will solve the Sphinx's riddles of Comparative Jurisprudence, Politics, Religion and Mythology, Sciences which to-day have been brought to a stand-still. And finally this is the Method that will found the science of Comparative Philosophy, most sovereign of the sciences of the sociological group.
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