The Man Science Failed to Discover
Modern scholars have come to the conclusion that we may have succeeded in making great discoveries about inanimate matter, but that we cannot be certain of having been successful in discovering the facts of man’s nature and existence, for there exists a strange disparity between the sciences of inanimate matter and those of life. The sciences which concern themselves with the inanimate part of our world differ from the biological sciences in that the former are subject to definite laws whereas the latter are, to quote Dr. Alexis Carrel, inextricably lost ‘in the midst of a magic forest whose countless trees unceasingly change their place and shape.’ Unlike material phenomena, biological phenomena cannot be defined in terms of algebraic equations. The sciences of the material world are confined to description, a lower form of science altogether, because they do not unveil the ultimate nature of things, but only convey certain qualities such as weight and spatial dimensions. They do give us the power to predict future events, and often to determine at will their occurrence; in learning the secret of the constitution and properties of matter, we have gained the mastery of almost everything which exists on the surface of the earth excepting ourselves. The science of living beings in general, and of the human individual in particular, has not made such spectacular progress. It still remains at the descriptive stage, while the elucidation of the real nature of living beings requires much more than mere description.
The Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Alexis Carrel, who achieved unique fame in biological research at the Rockfeller Institute in New York, elaborates at some length in his book, Man, The Unknown, on what is meant by man:
Man is an indivisible whole of extreme complexity. No simple representation of him can be obtained. There is no method capable of apprehending him simultaneously in his entirety, his parts, and his relations with the outer world. In order to analyze ourselves we are obliged to seek the help of various techniques and, therefore, to utilize several sciences. Naturally, all these sciences arrive at a different conception of their common object. They abstract only from man what is attainable by their special methods. And those abstractions, after they have been added together, are still less rich than the concrete fact. They leave behind them a residue too important to be neglected. Anatomy, chemistry, physiology, psychology, pedagogy, history, sociology, political economy do not exhaust their subject. Man, as known to the specialists, is far from being the concrete man, the real man. He is nothing but a schema, consisting of other schemata built up by the techniques of each science.
He is, at the same time, the corpse dissected by the anatomists, the consciousness observed by the psychologists and the great teachers of the spiritual life, and the personality which introspection shows to everyone as lying in the depth of himself. He is the chemical substances constituting the tissues and humours of the body. He is the amazing community of cells and nutrient fluids whose organic laws are studied by the physiologists. He is the compound of tissues and consciousness that hygienists and educators endeavour to lead to its optimum development while it extends into time. He is the homoa-conomicus who must ceaselessly consume manufactured products in order that the machines, of which he is made a slave, may be kept at work. But he is also the poet, the hero, and the saint. He is not only the prodigiously complex being analyzed by our scientific techniques, but also the tendencies, the conjectures, the aspirations of humanity. Our conceptions of him are imbued with metaphysics. They are founded on so many and such imprecise data that the temptation is great to choose among them those, which please us. Therefore, our idea of man varies according to our feelings and our beliefs. A materialist and a spiritualist accept the same definition of a crystal of sodium chloride; but they do not agree with one another upon that of the human being. A mechanistic physiologist and a vitalistic physiologist do not consider the organism in the same light. The living being of Jacques Loeb differs profoundly from that of Hans Driesch. Indeed, mankind has made a gigantic, effort to know itself. Although we possess the treasure of the observations accumulated by the scientists, the philosophers, the poets, and the great mystics of all times, we have grasped only certain aspects of ourselves. We do not apprehend man as a whole. We know him as composed of distinct parts. And even these parts are created by our methods. Each one of us is made up of a procession of phantoms, in the midst of which strides an unknowable reality.
In fact our ignorance is profound. Most of the questions put to themselves by those who study human beings remain without answer. Immense regions of our inner world are still unknown. How do the molecules of chemical substance associate in order to form the complex and temporary organs of the cell? How do the genes contained in the nucleus of a fertilized ovum determine the characteristics of the individual deriving from that ovum? How do cells organize themselves by their own efforts into societies, such as the tissues and the organs? Like the ants and the bees, they have advance knowledge of the part they are destined to play in the life of the community. And hidden mechanisms enable them to build up an organism both complex and simple. What is the nature of our duration, of psychological time, and of physiological time? We know that we are a compound of tissues, organs, fluids, and consciousness. But the relations between consciousness and cerebrum are still a mystery. We lack almost entirely a knowledge of the physiology of nervous cells. To what extent does will power modify the organism? How is the mind influenced by the state of the organs? In what manner can the organic and mental characteristics, which each individual inherits, be changed by the mode of life, the chemical substances contained in food, the climate, and the physiological and moral disciplines?
We are very far from knowing what relations exist between skeleton, muscles, and organs, and mental and spiritual activities. We are ignorant of the factors that bring about nervous equilibrium and resistance to fatigue and to diseases. We do not know how moral sense, judgement, and audacity could be augmented. What is the relative importance of intellectual, moral, and mystical activities? What is the significance of aesthetic and religious sense? What form of energy is responsible for telepathic communications? Without any doubt, certain physiological and mental factors determine happiness or misery, success or failure. But we do not know what they are. We cannot artificially give to any individual the aptitude for happiness. As yet we do not know what environment is the most favourable for the optimum development of civilized man. Is it possible to suppress struggle, effort, and suffering from our physiological and spiritual formation? How can we prevent the degeneracy of man in modern civilization? Many other questions could be asked on subjects, which are to us of the utmost interest. They would also remain unanswered. It is quite evident that the accomplishments of all the sciences having man as an object remain insufficient, and that our knowledge of ourselves is still most rudimentary.
This passage more than adequately demonstrates that we still have not formulated a true science of man. About the material part of human existence, we are fairly well informed, but we are completely ignorant of who or what controls it. Life is still a mystery to us, and until it is unveiled, there can be no proper apprehension of what, in essence, it is. Alexis Carrel’s book, Man, The Unknown, is an attempt to make scientific approach to its discovery.
Today man can split an atom; he can make icy lands habitable; he has walked on the moon and sent probes into outer space. Such instances of advanced technological progress give the impression that if man can learn so much about his material environment that he is able to exploit it at will, he should certainly be able to discover himself and in the process, set right whatever ails him. But there are strong indications in our known world that man can never be understood in the same way that matter can.
Let us look at this entity, called man, on a purely physiological basis. He is composed of millions and millions of cells of protoplasm. And what is protoplasm? We can say with certainty that it is a viscous, translucent, homogeneous, structureless substance endowed with contractility and a chemical composition allied to that of albumen: it is the physical basis of life and, clearly, we know a great deal about it as such. Yet we have to concede that we do not know why it should have this unique property of life, or how this came to be so. Moreover, it is a fact that the methods we employ to study the material world cannot be applied to protoplasm in any way which should elicit an answer to these awesome questions. All that is visible to us is a compound of certain things.
If we had the means and the resources, we should be able not only to destroy but also to create such compounds. Indeed, science has discovered the elements of which protoplasm is composed and the particular proportion of those elements have also been learnt. But it is in vain that we join together the two distinct forms of protoplasm, the nucleus and the cytoplasm, albeit in the correct proportions, for no protoplasm is thus formed which has the property of life. While other chemical compounds can be formed by combining their elements in the correct proportions, (e.g. one molecule of water is made up of one atom of oxygen and two atoms of hydrogen) the life-giving matter which is the main constituent of a human being’s body can in no way be brought into existence by human agency. Our powers of creation extend only to inanimate matter, never to living entities.
This is the area in which we are the most helpless, and we have no option but to admit it. The greatest irony is that although all our physiological studies are concerned with the living man, the results they yield bear more relevance to this cadaver. Science has discovered both the elements which constitute protoplasm and their correct proportions, yet the particular order or arrangement which is responsible for the life-property of protoplasm has still to be revealed. The moment this arrangement disintegrates, the protoplasm is rendered lifeless. It is as if a particular arrangement were responsible for the existence of soul in the protoplasm. But the difficulty that confronts us is that so long as we keep this arrangement intact, the protoplasm cannot be chemically analyzed. The moment we break it, life vanishes. Whenever protoplasm is subjected to chemical analysis, the soul has already left it. And this will always be the case. Science will always remain in the dark regarding the reality of life. But this is not the end of our problem. It goes much deeper than this.
Let us suppose someone sets out to unveil reality, thus disclosing to man the law of life, and, to this end, he begins the study of human settlements. After prolonged examination of different societies, he comes to the conclusion that, since society is composed of human beings, he had best concern himself with the individual, the better way to understand the group. So, he reduces his focus accordingly. His first preoccupation then is with psychology. But he soon realizes that no single philosophy emerges, because there are several schools of thought on the subject, all arriving at different conclusions. One school claims that the senses are central to all human actions while others say that all man’s responses are reactions to impressions received consciously or unconsciously from the external world. Yet others say that it is sexual desires which provides the stimulus for all of man’s actions. A different type of study shows that an unrecognized urge to realize a certain set of ideals keeps man active. Some schools of thought take consciousness to be a reality and explain the whole of man’s being in relation to this; others hold that the mind and intellect have no existence, and that there is no central power commanding the various parts of the body. Rather the parts which receive most attention are better developed and that is what makes it possible, for example, for one man to be highly skilled in dancing, another in archery and yet another in profound reflection. These differences in thinking in the field of psychology go to such extremes that one might be led to wonder if there were any such unified science as psychology.
On seeing this jungle of ideas, our inquirer thinks of studying another aspect of human existence - biology - in order to come to more cogent conclusions. But in this discipline he finds that man is treated as an amalgam of the metabolism, the respiratory system, the blood circulation and so on. These systems are based on certain chemical changes and, judging from their action and reaction, it would appear that the different parts of the whole bodily system are sub-functions of the metabolism.
After deep reflection, he comes to the conclusion that since the existence of the human body and its development are related to chemical actions and reactions, the principles according to which chemical changes take place should first of all be properly understood, failing which no satisfactory information about man could ever be discovered. So, he engrosses himself in the study of physics and chemistry and, indeed, devotes a major part of his life to it. This branch of study leads him on to an investigation of the molecule and the atom, from which he proceeds to study the electrons and protons of which the atom is composed. The realization then comes to him that the whole universe is nothing but electric waves, and he becomes immersed in the study of the latest discoveries in nuclear science. He thus collects a huge mass of facts, but at the end of it all, he fails to arrive at any firm conclusions about the reality of man. He has become lost in a world, which, in spite of being visible, has remained impenetrable. According to Dr. C.E.M. load, matter is something unreal, which cannot be grasped. It is a part of the four-dimensional space-time continuum, a network of electric waves, or a ‘wave of probability which perished on being looked at; and it has even been considered an extension of the observer’s consciousness instead of something solid and tangible.
This pathetic end to the quest for the secret of life in the material sciences shows that the secret of life is not discoverable by man. Now just as a sick man cannot treat his disease himself and is forced to consult a doctor, so a man who is in need of spiritual sustenance cannot provide this for himself without turning to God. The fact that he cannot discover the secret either of life or of his own nature is a sure indicator that he is in need of the God who created him in the form in which he exists. Just as God has created man in such a way that he needs oxygen and then has given him oxygen in abundance, similarly, He has made him yearn to know the secret of life and then has sent His messengers to him so that all veils should fall from reality.
