Opening remarks
With the advent of Reason man’s thought strives to understand the secret law of things. It is this search that gives birth to science and Philosophy.
A world conceived
For the world seen she weaves a world conceived:
She spins in stiff but unsubstantial lines
Her gossamer word-webs of abstract thought,
Her segment systems of the Infinite,
Her theodicies and cosmogonic charts
And myths by which she explains the inexplicable.
Reason tends to conceptualise things based on its observations. It extrapolates the little known into the realms of the Unknown. Thus she weaves her systems of thought and abstractions of ‘truth’ taking bits and parts for the whole. She charts out the map of life and its curve by stretching the its observations and reason beyond its legitimate limits. She takes these tentative thought structures and explanations as truths.
Precise and absolute
At will she spaces in thin air of mind
Like maps in the school-house of intellect hung,
Forcing wide Truth into a narrow scheme,
Her numberless warring strict philosophies;
Out of Nature’s body of phenomenon
She carves with Thought’s keen edge in rigid lines,
Like rails for the World-Magician’s power to run,
Her sciences precise and absolute.
Truth is vast and infinite and it acts with freedom and plasticity. But Reason believes or assumes it to be mechanical and unconscious. Therefore it conceives of truth as something inconscient driven by blind rigid laws and narrow scheme of things. Thus it ends up shutting the Infinite into cults and religions and ideologies and creeds. Thus it limits the Freedom of the Divine into rigid unalterable laws.
Vast Encyclopaedia of thought
On the huge bare walls of human nescience
Written round Nature’s deep dumb hieroglyphs
She pens in clear demotic characters
The vast encyclopaedia of her thoughts;
An algebra of her mathematics’ signs,
Her numbers and unerring formulas
She builds to clinch her summary of things.
Reason builds systems of thought and understanding based on observation and analysis. This effort brings some kind of preliminary clarity about life and nature and the world around us. It discovers and devices geometry and algebra and the rule of numbers and equations to summarise the truth of things in a single mathematical formula.
Patterned arabesques
On all sides runs as if in a cosmic mosque
Tracing the scriptural verses of her laws
The daedal of her patterned arabesques,
Art of her wisdom, artifice of her lore.
She looks at the world and turns its movements into a fixed pattern governed by complex rules and complicated equations. This becomes now her stock of wisdom or the scripture of Science.
Her only stock
This art, this artifice are her only stock.
This understanding gained through analysis of a limited field by the limited senses is what she preserves as her stock of wisdom.
Closing Remarks
Science too becomes a religion when she regards her discoveries as absolute truths. True progress comes when we understand the relativity of all knowledge, most of all of the instruments we use to discern and discover Reality. Reason is one such instrument that nature has evolved. It is neither the first nor the last though at the present stage of human evolution it has its own limited uses.
