In the position it assumes towards actuality science resembles a man who has reduced all language to mere grammar and now finds himself hard put to it to explain how purely grammatical signs and formulæ could ever have given rise to actual speech. As grammar presupposes actual speech—is secondary, derived from it—so the mechanical, re-actual view presupposes actuality—is secondary, derived from it—and it is against all common-sense to seek now to turn the tables with an endeavour to prove the possibility of the living language “actuality,” assess its title to existence, by the “grammar” of the scientific conception of things. From this position, the fact that anything ever happens at all, remains an eternally unfathomable mystery.

The first claim upon the genuine thinker is that he should understand clearly that a something given is present, whose simple existence represents also the power to exist; whose activity has no need of being proven, since proving itself by itself. The endeavours of science from its re-actual position, to govern and administer actuality itself also, betray a limitedness and crudity of thought at which later generations will stand amazed. So long as science fails to understand and respect her natural limitations, so long as she keeps trying to interpret the actual mechanically, so long is she as serious a danger to the world as faith.

In the treatment of the problem of physiology that follows I can be brief, because all the details here relate to a technical domain to which the majority of my readers are unlikely to bring either interest or ability to understand.

Just as physics—in the widest sense of the word—may be briefly designated as the teaching that informs us of the relations existing between “bodies,” so physiology may be succinctly termed the teaching that instructs us as to the relations existent between living beings and the external world.

Where living beings are comprehended as processes of combustion pure and simple, every relationship betwixt them and their environment becomes a form of alimentation. The intellectual as the vegetative, the psychic as the physical life, are here comprised under the one common, all-inclusive concept of alimentation. Whether I appropriate, assimilate something to myself through the organs of sense and thought or through the tongue and the digestive apparatus, both proceedings are the same—forms of alimentation.

Accordingly we find the Buddha calling living beings “āhāraṭṭhitikā,” i.e. “existing through alimentation,” and placing this expression—as synonymous—alongside “sañkhāraṭṭhitikā,” i.e. “existing through Sankhāra,” compounded, conditioned.

Here in their every movement the entire existence of living beings becomes a laying hold of the external world—a gross laying hold with hands and teeth as well as that subtle mental laying hold which we generally denominate “comprehension.” As the whole existence of a flame is a laying hold of the external world, as it subsists solely by reason of this prehensile activity, even so is it with the I-process.

Buddhist psychology distinguishes between four varieties of aliment. First, there is aliment in the common, vulgar sense of the word, be it in gross growth-promoting form as solid or liquid food, be it in fine growth-promoting form as respiration. Second, contact, as the mutual encounter of the senses and their corresponding objects. Third, mental apprehension; and fourth, consciousness; these two latter being the working up, the assimilating of what issues from contact.

From the commanding height of the position which Buddhist thinking takes up towards the process of life, it cannot possibly encounter that “problem” with which scientific physiology finds itself forced to wrestle.

Briefly stated, that problem runs as follows:—

“How can it ever be possible for a living being to appropriate something to itself, assimilate something, take up something into itself, whether this ‘something’ be of the gross growth-promoting variety—nourishment in the vulgar sense of the word—or of the intellectual sort, as sense impressions and the content of consciousness?”

There was a time in the history of natural science, more particularly in the history of the healing art—and that time is hardly past yet; we still stand within its fringes—when to work at all with the concept of a “vital energy” was regarded as synonymous with being unscientific, indeed, was esteemed mere blind faith. At every opportunity, seasonable and unseasonable, it was declared that “to-day” we had no longer any need of a “vital energy,” that the mechanical view explained all that very much better; yet, in actual truth, one only showed how wanting one was in the sense of actuality when one could accept as satisfactory a “reading” of life which presented it under the figure of endosmotic and diosmotic processes, and such like.

Here, however, is abundantly proved true that saying of Horace that nature is something which man cannot drag out even with a pitchfork; and it was with a pitchfork of the biggest sort that the mechanists took the field against actual life. To-day the antithesis of the mechanical view—the teleological—has found its way back into medical thought, and begins again to move about naturally and without restraint in the domain of therapeutics.

Beyond all else, it was the progress made in physiological chemistry, the peculiar, seemingly inexplicable facts here observed, which perforce impelled towards this inversion of positions.

Here in the domain of physiological chemistry there come to light processes, reactions, which make a mock of all the rules and laws got from reagent tubes. Here in the living organism it is found that the “strongest” acid—sulphuric acid—is crowded out of its combinations by the “weakest”—carbonic acid; which means nothing else but that the concept of “strength” as it has been taken over from inorganic nature does not apply here at all. By reason of such experiences it has been found necessary to introduce a new concept, that of “avidity”; in other words, here as everywhere, one hobbles along at the heels of the facts of actuality, being obliged ever and again to adapt oneself to them anew as best one may.

Here in the living organism, albumen, fats, and carbohydrates are worked up at temperatures at which they undergo no change under the action of the oxygen of the atmosphere. The most marvellous thing of all, however, is the action of the glands, which, in taking up the material to be elaborated, display a power of choice that, so far as our ideas go, defies all explanation. Not the least regard is here paid to chemical and physical laws as abstracted by science from inorganic nature. Complete arbitrariness prevails. The epithelium of the stomach, for example, possesses the power of always despatching the hydric chloride set free from sodium chloride in one direction—namely, into the excretory ducts of the rennet glands, and of always sending the sodium carbonate formed in another direction, back into the lymph and blood circulation.

Examples such as this might be multiplied to almost any extent, did we here aim at completeness.

The key-word to it all, as revealed to us by the latest researches in physiological chemistry, is—arbitrariness!

Of course, as everywhere so also here, only give her time enough and science will come round to adjustments in thought, and with that to the formulation of all such facts into laws. In respect of such facts, however, it must clearly be understood that the purely mechanical view is no longer able to hold the field; that the teleological view has broken through the artificial embankments of the mechanical view and again poured forth over the level lands of scientific thinking.

That which has hitherto given such weight to the mechanical view in physiology is the possibility, up to a certain degree, of reading the physiological facts mechanically. One can “read” the eye so far as its external apparatus is concerned, according to the laws of catoptrics and dioptrics; but the bearing of this upon the faculty of seeing or upon an explanation of that faculty is simply nothing. This is not the fitting place to deal with the revolting outrage upon sound thinking of which the scientific theory of vision is guilty in its interpretation of the reversed retinal image: that demands a chapter to itself.

One may “read” the heart and the vascular system as a pumping contrivance, and the osseous system and its joints as an arrangement of levers. One may reckon in heat-units the nutrition-values taken in and given off, and equilibrate them with tolerable success, as can also be done with a calorimeter; that is to say, one can “read” the living organism in accordance with the formula of the law of the conservation of energy. But nothing thereby is gained that is of the slightest assistance towards a comprehension of the actual energies at work in all these functions, except in so far as to the genuine thinker all this makes more vital and pressing the question as to what precisely that wonderful something is which pulls the strings. And if one school of science would like to make us believe that on the basis of an ever-increasing facility in “reading” the organism mechanically the question as to actuating energies may in the end be completely disposed of, as referring to quantities so minute as to be negligible, it need not be taken seriously; it only resembles a man who would account for the revolution of a wheel solely from the shape and texture of the wood.

That which along with the results of physiological chemistry helped towards the overthrow of the mechanical view, was the new tendency in therapeutics—serum therapeutics, to wit—which, put briefly, amounts to a working out of specific affinities between the living organism and certain organic substances.

As the physiological chemist was forced to note that he had fallen out of the realm of crude but easily-handled quantities into the realm of unaccountable qualities—that is, out of re-actuality into actuality—so was it with the experimenter in these specific remedies. One was obliged to take note that in this field the grossly quantitative according to mass and weight no longer went for anything. Ehrlich calls the antitoxins “magic bullets” which hit their mark immediately. Here it is no longer a question of the mere more or less by which one has hitherto been accustomed to gauge effects, but of an attunement more or less fine and delicate. In short, one has forced one’s way into the domain of actual energies and seeks gropingly after one or another method of accommodation. For the quantitative position may not be abandoned entirely if one would remain scientific. One must be able to measure. Actual energies, however, do not admit of being measured by dead material. They are only to be measured through themselves, i.e. through their working.

Already more than a hundred years ago, Hahnemann, the founder of the homœopathic method of treating disease, consciously and completely abandoned the crude quantitative position in the field of medical science. He had freed himself entirely from the quantitative conception of curative effect. He called his remedies “potencies,” and this potency was determined not according to mass but according to the fineness, the delicacy of the mutual accord between the organism and the remedy. This mutual accord, however, grows subtler, more acute, with progressive dematerialization, with the freeing of the active energies resident in the remedies from the burden of their ballast of material. Hence the apparently paradoxical idea that the curative effect augmented with the diminution of the dose—an idea which has given the doctors of the orthodox schools such abundant occasion for misunderstanding and barbed raillery. The effectiveness is not increased with the lessening of the dose, but with the subtilization of the unique accords concerned. Hahnemann had the courage to bring his thinking into line with the actual energies and their manner of working—a courage which modern serum therapeutics does not possess, and quite likely never will possess, so that we may look to see the wave of actuality which here has burst upon therapeutic life again crushed under by re-actual tendencies.

Wherever opposites are found, there mere dialectical problems form the subject of contention. The contradictions between the mechanical and the teleological views with respect to the living organism are also of a purely dialectical nature. Both take up the position that the organism is an identity, and accordingly a something so constituted that it can take nutriment into itself. Both alike, teleology as mechanism, looking upon the cell as life itself, make it their endeavour to master the miracle of that life; the former, as a result of its efforts, coming to the conclusion that a vital force, an incomprehensible something in itself, must somewhere lie concealed in this wonderful machinery; whilst the latter pushes on unswervingly towards the goal it has set before itself—that of becoming, by ever closer and closer description, master at length of the great riddle.

As everywhere, so also here, the Buddha stands between and above these two opposites, inasmuch as he teaches:—

A living being so constituted that it must and can take up something into itself simply does not exist. Such a living being is only to be found where one is dealing with the concept of identities. But identities are nowhere to be found within the domain of actuality. Here are only processes of combustion. If one sets out with the concept of identities, one creates for oneself a problem whose insolubility proceeds as much from its purely dialectical nature as the problem of telekinesis in physics. If one abides by the actual, if one holds strictly to the insight that living beings are individual processes of combustion, then there exist nothing but energies which for a certain period of time put a body of material specifically belonging to themselves in a specific condition of tension, for a time maintain it so, and then after a time again abandon it. Here the cell is not life itself, but simply the most primitive structural expression of the fact that certain materials find themselves in a certain state of tension, in the same way that the ridges and furrows in a Chladni’s sound-figure are a structural expression of the fact that a certain material—some sand on a glass plate—finds itself in a certain state of tension.

This whole body of phenomena is by physiology termed the “circulation of matter.” But there is here no “I” as an identity that takes up matter into itself, melts it down, and—so to speak—gives it forth again as new coinage. Nowhere in the universe are there any unstamped values, nowhere is there any raw material of substance, but always and everywhere only a recoining: a continuous change in the individual conditions of tension which as little warrants the idea of “resorption”—taken literally—as the flame, or the wind that for a certain space of time whirls up and holds a certain particle of sand in a certain form. An appropriation, a taking up into oneself, can only take place where there is a proprietor able to take something into his house. But actuality does not permit of any such comfortable ideas. Here are nothing but energies that continuously lay hold, pull to themselves, and maintain what has thus been pulled, under the influence of their individual tendency, until such time as other energies make their presence felt in superior force, whereupon the tension is dissolved here, only to assert itself anew elsewhere.

Whatever may be manifest as form in the living being, from the gross forms of the limbs down to the cell, to its protoplasm, to its nucleus, to the ever-new marvels of the structure of its body—it is all alike one material, maintained by one individual energy in an individual state of tension.

I do not have the marvel of alimentation as my function, but I am all this itself; and beyond this, nothing! That, however, I am this individual, unique being—of this the antecedent conditions lie buried deep in beginninglessness.

Kamma is an individual energy: as such it is a thing unique: as unique it seizes hold of Kammic, i.e. unique material, whereof the uniqueness is proven in the fact that Kamma evolves therefrom a unique being, an individual. If all this marvel of alimentation, this marvel of sight, hearing, and so forth, were obliged to come about as a something entirely new only through external preconditions, never could it come about at all. I learn to see, hear, taste, and so forth, as the flame learns to burn, the flower to blow. All this, down even to the minutest detail, lies ready, prepared beforehand, in the material; and it needs but the stimulator—which, just because it is a question of a unique material, must also be a thing unique—in order to have all these properties brought into play, have them set in full activity.

The material lineage of the living being is perforce as beginningless as the Kamma lineage; but whilst the beginninglessness of the latter manifests itself only immediately in consciousness, the beginninglessness of the former admits of being comprehended only mediately as a logical deduction.

“Suppose, O monks, that a man were to cut down all the grass and leaves in this Jambudīpa [India], and, gathering them together, take one handful after another and say (at each handful), ‘This is my mother; this is my mother’s mother,’ there would never be any end to the mother’s mother of such a man; but all the grass and leaves in Jambudīpa well might run out, well might come to an end.”⁠[15]

Both lineages, the material as the Kammic, are a beginningless, reciprocal, each-to-other self-attunement, in a universe that in its every motion is law itself.

To this we shall have to return in the succeeding essay, in treating of the problem of heredity.

The man of science will say, “It is no very difficult matter to explain everything if one simply refers everything back to beginninglessness, and assigns as reason for the fact that everything is as it is, that in accordance with the natural conditions of growth it has been obliged to come about thus and not otherwise.”

To this it may be said in reply that the Buddha-“reading” of the play of world-events is productive of but little for science, being that reading which is actuality itself—which takes and leaves actuality as that which it is, thereby shutting off the very possibility of all those learned and profound researches which accrue to science in such abundant measure through its endeavours to have actuality become actuality only under its own hands, so to speak; in somewhat the same way that I, the living being, exist to a magistrate, not as myself, but only in virtue of certain identification papers.

Besides, the Buddha-thought is an intuition. And the value of an intuition is made manifest solely in its use as a working hypothesis.

As a working hypothesis, then, of what service is the Buddha-thought in the domain of physiology?

The answer is:—

It alone explains the possibility alike of disease and of cure.

Neither for science—that is, in the purely mechanical manner of regarding the living being—nor for faith—that is, where living beings are represented as endowed with soul—is disease—and therewith cure—a conceivability. As well to a thing divine as to a purely mechanical fall, disease were an unattainable capability. Man only can fall ill—the man whom the Buddha points out to us, the man who through and through is a combustion, an alimentation-process, with whom at every moment of his existence energy and material stand in mutual functional dependence each upon the other. Correspondingly, it is only in a process thus constituted that the fact of cure is capable of explanation.

By the term cure I understand the fact that a single incitation develops a reaction which no longer stands in any kind of working relationship to the original impulse, but goes on developing itself as a self-acting increase. Such a proceeding is possible neither with a purely mechanical process of compensation nor yet with a “force in itself.” It is only possible there where an energy and its material stand in a relation of mutual functional dependence.

The fact also that diseases permit of being affected by the power of the mind, by thought, is possible of explanation only where an individual energy and its material stand in a relationship of mutual dependence.

All the numberless instances of the influence of the mind over the body, of the body over the mind; all our “moods” of good and ill-humour; further, the acquisition of habits and the physical necessity of sleep, are explicable only in the Buddha-thought.

It may be interposed:—

“We have not the least need of the Buddha in order to see that. We have long since recognized the mutual dependence of mind and body as a necessity.”

Very good! But if you have really recognized that, you must also draw the conclusions unavoidably consequent upon the same, and these consist in the intellectual necessity of individual beginninglessness. If you have not understood that, then you have understood neither the Buddha, nor actuality, nor yourselves. You have not understood the truth; you only meet it, as two cross-roads meet one another and then pass on in opposite directions. Individual beginninglessness is the key-word, the guiding clue to the Buddha-thought.

And with this we come to that most important of all problems, the problem of heredity.