Man The Unknown: The Role Of Science and Self Realisation :
The sciences of inert matter have made immense progress, while those of living beings remain in a rudimentary state. The slow advance of biology is due to the conditions of human existence, to the intricacy of the phenomena of life, and to the form of our intelligence, which delights in mechanical constructions and mathematical abstractions. The applications of scientific discoveries have transformed the material and mental worlds. These transformations exert on us a profound influence. Their unfortunate effect comes from the fact that they have been made without consideration for our nature.Our ignorance of ourselves has given to mechanics, physics, and chemistry the power to modify at random the ancestral forms of life.
Man should be the measure of all. On the contrary, he is a stranger in the world that he has created. He has been incapable of organizing this world for himself, because he did not possess a practical knowledge of his own nature. Thus, the enormous advance gained by the sciences of inanimate matter over those of living things is one of the greatest catastrophes ever suffered by humanity. The environment born of our intelligence and our inventions is adjusted neither to our stature nor to our shape. We are unhappy. We degenerate morally and mentally. The groups and the nations in which industrial civilization has attained its highest development are precisely those which are becoming weaker. And whose return to barbarism is the most rapid. But they do not realize it. They are without protection against the hostile surroundings that science has built about them. In truth, our civilization, like those preceding it, has created certain conditions of existence which, for reasons still obscure, render life itself impossible. The anxiety and the woes of the inhabitants of the modern city arise from their political, economic, and social institutions, but, above all, from their own weakness. We are the victims of the backwardness of the sciences of life over those of matter.
The only possible remedy for this evil is a much more profound knowledge of ourselves. Such a knowledge will enable us to understand by what mechanisms modem existence affects our consciousness and our body. We shall thus learn how to adapt ourselves to our surroundings, and how to change them, should a revolution become indispensable. In bringing to light our true nature, our potentialities, and the way to actualize them, this science will give us the explanation of our physiological weakening, and of our moral and intellectual diseases. We have no other means of learning the inexorable rules of our organic and spiritual activities, of distinguishing the prohibited from the lawful, of realizing that we are not free to modify, according to our fancy, our environment, and ourselves. Since the natural conditions of existence have been destroyed by modern civilization, the science of man has become the most necessary of all sciences.
