The Mystery of Life: A Secret Inside chapter1

The Mystery of Life: A Secret Inside

Chapter1

BOOK ID

Title: The mystery of life: a secret inside secrets

Author (s): Allamah Muhammad Taqi Jafari

Publisher (s): Tehran: Allameh Jafari Institute 2005 1384

Category: General General

ISBN: 964-6608-28-0

Appearance: 416 p

Congress Classification: BBR۱۳۳۲/ج ۷آ۳۲ ۱۳۸۴

Dewey decimal classification: ۱۸۹/۱

National bibliography number: ۹۵۴۶۸۴

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A Secret Inside Secrets, Selections from the books written by Allamah Muhammad Taqi Ja’fariThis book deals with a myriad of subjects related to human life: philosophy, mysticism, anthropology, cultures, arts, history and much more.

Acknowledgments

This is our first step into the world of great human beings who have understood the harmonious rhythm of the universe – and even become part of it. We feel obliged to thank the Mr. Abdullah Nasri, Mr. Shahram Ansari and Mr. Karim Feizi for helping to compile this book. We would also like to thank and Ms. Ruqayya Alizadeh for editing and proofreading the book and Ms. Roya Azizi Mousavi for setting its computer layout, and Mr. M. Hemmathi for designing the cover of this book.

The contents of this book have been compiled and selected from the following books written by Allamah Ja’fari:

• from a Scientific and Qur’anic Point of View, 1982

• A Study of the Philosophy of Science, 1992

• A Study and Critique of David Hume's Thoughts on Four Philosophical Issues, 1992

• A Study and critique of The Adventures of Ideas, 1991

• The Relationship between Man and the Universe, 1953

• A Study and Critique of the Russell-Wyatt Dialogs, 1964

• The Message of Wisdom, 1998

• An Interpretation and Critique of Rumi's Mathnavi (15 vol. ) , 1969- 1973

• A Translation and Interpretation of the Nahj-ul-balaghah (27 vol. ) , 1979-1998

• Conscience, 1966

• Fatalism and Free Will, 1967

• The Philosophy of Life, 1968

• Man in an Elevating, Evolutionary

 Secrets

Life, 1984

• Intelligible Life, 1985

• Universal Human Rights, 1992

• The Philosophy of Islam's Political Principles, 1987

• Positive Mysticism, 1992

• Pioneer Culture to the Rescue of Mankind, 1993

• The Qur’an, A Symbol of Intelligible Life, 1995

We would like to end this book by adding that we would highly appreciate any suggestions readers of this book may wish to provide us with.

Preface

In the 1923, a child was born in northwestern Iran who would a few decades later become, for his scientific efforts and profound writings, one of the greatest thinkers of his time. His name was Muhammad Taqi Ja’fari.

Though born in a family who were by no means rich – which created many problems inhibiting his progress in education and academic endeavors – he persisted, and it was his tireless persistence and stamina that turned him into one of the richest men of the East in knowledge and mysticism. He soon accumulated a huge treasure of knowledge full of original, basic, innovative thoughts.

Muhammad Taqi Ja’fari never studied at any university; yet, his ingenious, delicate mental endeavors lead to the creation of invaluable amounts of knowledge, particularly in fields such as philosophy, anthropology, ideology and analyzing modern truths.

Ja’fari began his formal education at theological schools and seminaries, but his academic career mostly involves comprehensive viewpoints with the context of solving major ideological and philosophical dilemmas.

Searching for topics and posing fundamental questions was the most prominent aspect of Allamah Ja’fari's mentality; thus, he was constantly searching, excavating into new worlds few

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had stepped into – at least, the way he stepped into them.

His childhood was spent with his silent, boyish thoughts; his youth, however, involved studies mainly focusing on humanity and the universe. As time passed, these two issues became more and more important to him, though his peers did not think so.

His first book, The Relationship between Man and the Universe (The Change of Physical Mass in Man's Understanding from the Earliest Times up to the Twentieth Century) , written in three volumes, showed how distinctive his way of thinking was; even though he was just a young man, he had begun a journey that he spent the rest of his life on – studying humanity, the universe and the facts that sacrifice the universe for man and man for himself.

By considering things from a novel point of view, Muhammad Taqi Ja’fari tended to use historical issues with a new definition and for a new purpose. This made him be much more than a pure philosopher; other scholars paid attention to his thoughts on the basics of recognition and discovery and insights into science and philosophy.

Still, he never stopped at that, and tried open up a new road by using the latest findings in the humanities and also experimental sciences like physics and mathematics. In fact, his questions about the mystery of life and his stops at stations like how evolutions arises in culture, the secrets about education helped him swiftly pass through the narrow road of “what there is”

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and “what there should be,” and see life as an elevation.

That was when he reached a crucially fundamental domain called “intelligible life,” and then devoted all his capabilities into extracting a constructive truth out of obvious realities like culture, economics, science, history, philosophy, civilizations and technology that could save the world from falling into oblivion for the stormy hands of those who lack balanced thinking.

Since Ja’fari put a great deal of care into his work, and experienced and analyzed both Western and Eastern unsolved issues with incredible vigor and passion, and also probably due to his pioneer discoveries regarding issues where others failed, the second half of his lifetime had him change into an internationally renowned thinker.

Many Western scholars and thinkers from prominent universities all over the world visited him and held talks and discussions with him – over 100 major interviews, some of which have been published. Allamah Ja’fari and Bertrand Russell had correspondence with each other. Professor Rosenthal, Dr. Kenneth Alan Luther, Dr. Allal Al-fasi, Professor Gankowski, Professor Van Ess, Professor Koroda, Professor Muhammad Abdul-Salam, and many others were among those who came to Tehran to hold discussions with Allamah Ja’fari.

This book contains selections of but parts of the late Allamah's thoughts on some fundamental issues. It can be considered a way of thinking attempting to view truths from a new scope. Allamah Ja’fari's thoughts clearly show that he never confined himself to geographical boundaries; his main concern was mankind and the future – a future we

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cannot afford to neglect.

Those who knew him admit that he excelled at avoiding prejudiced or limited thoughts, and this book should also verify this fact – it is the cry of a thoughtful bird who sees the world as a garden to develop, fly and fly higher and higher in. He heeds us not to forget flying higher. Through his hundreds of comprehensive studies and analyses, he has told us that it is impossible to solve the mystery of life without making it face eternity.

Recognition in the Domain of Thoughts

The Possibility of Recognition

The basic question that first comes to mind is whether recognition is feasible or not? Ancient Greek Mystics believed that it is impossible to discover facts. Their reasons for this include:

1- Errors of Vision: When the recognizer has different viewpoints, the recognized points will also be different from one another. A high mountain appears to be a mere hill seen from far away, the rotating blades of a fan look like a circle, and railway lines seem to meet in the distance, for our knowledge – as Laozi quotes from Niels Bohr – is the product of our watching and playing around in the universe; we gain knowledge via “the object for its own sake” to “the object for us. ” Such ways of reasoning are not acceptable, for a change in position or location would reveal the truth. By getting closer to the mountain, for instance, it will seem high to us once again. Sensory errors can be compensated for by the other means.

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If recognition is not feasible, the senses, mind and tools of experimentation must be used to acquire various viewpoints needed for coming to a concrete conclusion.

2- Conflicts in Findings: Those against the possibility of recognition believe that different people have various points of view when identifying facts, and achieving unity in this matter is impossible. Man may be appealed by something today, but disgusted by it tomorrow. What seems extremely valuable to him today may prove worthless later. Such a conclusion is not acceptable, for conflicts in identifications either lies in observable affairs or human imagination. If the dispute arises from worldly affairs, it in fact proves that identification is real, for without it the mind would never react differently towards various facts. Conflicts in mental and sensory discoveries also convey that recognition is real, for the mind and the senses create certain discoveries under certain circumstances and conditions.

3- The Variability of the Universe: Some believe that the constant changes and developments occurring in the universe and its components defies identification, for not only external facts, but also the human mind and senses undergo change, and thus cannot fully reflect facts.

The solution for this source of error is that change and progress in the two worlds –mental and physically observable– alongside identification shows that the main factor is something beyond the mind and the senses, and therefore is not prone to change. The mind and the senses merely serve as to transfer the knowledge to the discoverer – the self,

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soul, character, or spirit.

4- What is reflected from the observable world into our mind is not well-defined enough to be able to be compared with the facts and have the mental concepts matched with the external facts. Thus, we are not certain what there is also in the mind – in other words, whether it is compatible with the world outside or not.

In response to this problem, we must say that the human mind is capable of absorbing facts from the universe and also process them. This shows how powerful and significant the human mind is, not its incompetence. Sophists, however, imagined that the mind should be like a mirror that only reflects the facts, with no external impression on them.

5- The intimate relationship and dependency among the components of the universe has brought some to believe that ignorance toward just one part will lead to total ignorance. Such reasoning is applicable only to those who claim they have knowledge of absolutely everything, not considering the knowledge they gain from their tools for observing the external world as relative. However, there are cases of absolute knowledge, which do not fit into any form of logic or reason – “the universe is real and follows certain laws,” to name one.

The Devices and Tools for Discovery and Gaining Knowledge

1- The Senses: Man's natural senses are his first tools for identification. His senses provide him with a means to gain facts. Phenomena that find way into the human mind by means of natural senses to not remain the same as they

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are outside. A smell we sense, for example, is not the same when it has entered us. Likewise, when we taste something sweet and the message about it is transferred to our nervous system, our nerves will not exactly feel that sweetness. Our nerves do not turn into different colors when we see different colors, either. When we lift a heavy object, our nerves do not become heavier. Therefore, we may conclude that having entered inside man, no phenomenon retains its identity. We undoubtedly have to eat something sweet to realize its sweet taste, but is the same sweet food passed on to our nervous cells? Furthermore, internal contents and conditions influenced by external factors can change the identity of the external factors, too. For instance, let's say we encounter a dead body. What we feel through our senses is the view of a dead person. If the dead body belongs to a close friend, it would cause sorrow, and if it belongs to an enemy it would delight us. Two different reactions to a single phenomenon; hence, how internal factors can influence our perception of external facts.

In fact, man's natural senses are justified through internal factors. In other words, phenomena that enter us through our senses are interpreted and accounted for by man's own wishes and knowledge.

2- Artificial Devices and Tools: Man has made tools and devices to help him explore nature and the universe. The invention of the telescope, the microscope, and many other

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devices has helped man discover phenomena he could never explore using his own senses. No matter how 

powerful these devices may become, they cannot eliminate the role of the senses and internal conditions; they cannot change the mind into a mirror which passes things into humans exactly as they are. The reasons for this are:

a) These tools and devices are man-made, so they are dependent upon man's selection or elimination.

b) What tools and devices reflect to man is limited to certain circumstances. For example, they reflect insect fur, the human body, mercury, leather and cement each in a different way. Any modification in the magnifying glass can influence the appearance of the observed phenomena.

c) Even if the artificial tools and devices reflect facts as they are, the internal passages they must go through will affect them, for they are being received by human senses and mind.

3- Man's innate talents and powers, such as intelligence, wisdom, imagination and thought can also serve as tools of discovery.

The Importance of Adjusting and Refining the Senses

Intellectuals studying identification and recognition have neglected the issue of adjusting and refining knowledge in both domains of the mind and in the real world. From the mental aspect, the function of the senses must be corrected, for any fault in the senses may deform the reality. Thus, man's internal management should take charge of adjusting the senses.

Apart from adjusting and refining the senses and tools that make possible the contact between man and facts, the mind also needs adjustment and refinement. Many powers are active

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in the human mind – imagination, memory, abstraction, comparison, aesthetic search, association of concepts, and others – which can, if not functioning correctly, damage man's process of gathering facts.

The Factors that Influence Recognition and Identification

Recognition and identification, like other phenomena, have a cause. As a mental phenomenon, identification and recognition can be caused by these factors:

1- The involuntarily natural, primary recognition and identification by the senses and the mind: Man's mental structure shows a variety of mutual influences to and from facts, and identification is one of them. In other words, once the mind establishes contact with the world outside, the phenomena are reflected into the mind.

2- The need to continue life: Human life is not possible without knowledge and discovery. Mental effort is the key to feeling what life really is like. This factor is also fatalistic, however, for its necessity lies in the need to continue life.

3- Selfishness: Man's selfishness makes him go after knowing things that are not crucial to his survival. There are various forms of human selfishness. When one considers oneself as the end and others as a means to the end, such a viewpoint will infiltrate all of his knowledge. Likewise, if man regards his identity as dependent upon other people in the society, his knowledge will definitely be much purer. The highest level, of course, belongs to the one who moves along the path to perfection.

4- Innate enthusiasm: mind. Man is innately eager to know more, and this is not merely for his own benefit; it goes far beyond that.

5-

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Moral ethics: Moral ethics form one of the most important and most dignified factors in recognition. Moral ethics means activating every human aspect on the path toward the highest aim of life. It can make the truth flourish for man, which in turn can make gaining knowledge the means and the end of his life – as the means, discovering knowledge can help man gain the facts on his way to perfection; as an end, it involves the expansion of man's identity in the universe.

6- The arousal of love: Love can also cause knowledge and recognition. When love is the motive for the discovery, man will see the facts as beautiful. Discoveries based on love ignore all logical reasoning.

7- Belief: Belief refers to the mental state in which all events are considered in a special way. When one believes in the struggle for survival, for instance, it will make the knowledge of power his first priority.

There are two kinds of belief – dynamic and static. In static belief, man sees everything in a specific, fixed way. For example, if an intellectual considers man as virtually evil, he will also interpret everything else from this viewpoint, too. In dynamic belief, however, man does not interpret all facts from a single, inflexible aspect; his belief makes him able to accept other phenomena and facts as they really are.

8- Faith: Faith is accepting the truth that is the most active element of the human character, and accounts for every aspect

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of man's existence. The knowledge brought about by faith is the most soothing and motivating. Faith is a truth that shines on all of man's darkness in life like an immortal sun and can save his character from falling apart and multiplicity, and adjust his life by means of patterns of order and harmony. Faith makes every action carried out on the path toward man's desired ideal feel like life itself.

The Process of Recognition

The steps the human mind must go through in order to achieve discovery and recognition are:

1- Establishing contact between the mind and the fact: No knowledge can be gained without making contact between the human mind and the truth, whether we believe that all knowledge potentially exists in the human mind, or believe that it is like a completely blank paper which can be affected by external facts. Physical phenomena, such as light, transfer facts from the outside into the mind. Facts pass through our senses and enter our mind.

2- Initial observation: The senses are exposed to many phenomena, but only some of them pass through the senses into the mind. In other words, the phenomena that we pay attention to can pass through the senses. Thus, purely natural reflection due to the openness of our senses cannot be a cause of gaining knowledge, for no conscious attention is included in it.

3- Attention: If man is appealed by what he notices, attention occurs. In other words, this step of the process is caused by either the attraction of the object

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or the person's own inclination. Furthermore, the deeper the attention is, the readier the mind will be to activate its forces about a subject.

4- Indirect understanding: In this step, we try to somehow gain an understanding of the subject; otherwise, its knowledge will never be possible. However, our understanding will be indirect, for all phenomena are interrelated. When we see colors, for example, we need proper light. Our distance from the subject is also significant.

5- Direct understanding: In empirical sciences, where the subjects are analyzed, researchers can gain direct understanding. In other words, the researcher can gain knowledge of the subject regardless of any relationship it may have with other phenomena. However, we must keep in mind that phenomena are interrelated, and each can be studied in different ways. The mutual interactions between phenomena reveal various identities for each, and a direct understanding of a phenomenon may not necessarily include its whole identity.

6- Direct grasp: Here, by “surrounding” we mean all-around understanding of subjects – it engulfs every aspect of the subject. However, in most cases of knowledge we are concerned with complete knowledge of one specific subject, not surrounding all aspects around it, too, for each field of science tend to study a particular aspect of a 

phenomenon.

7- Indirect grasp: Surrounding the effect by means of knowing about the cause. Usually, the human mind is influenced by the previous pieces of knowledge it has gained, and finds it quite hard to achieve a pure, absolute, direct grasp of the

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subject without being affected by the previous ones. Say, for instance, that we look at a bright light and then try to know what color something is; the difference in quality between the bright light and the color will affect our knowledge of the color. ”

Different Forms of Knowledge and Recognition

There are various ways for knowledge and recognition to take place, for the human mind can make contact with the facts in different ways:

1- Purely Educational Knowledge: When knowledge happens in the mind in a purely educational situation, not only is it an absolutely reflective process, but is also accompanied by two other kinds of knowledge: 1) the teacher teaches what he knows; 2) the truth is what I am learning. The risk this kind of knowledge includes is that the learner learns anything he is taught, without any consideration or thought. Learning different things from different scholars may throw the learner into confusion. The other risk is the weakening of the learner's own mental productivity. These are issues teachers must avoid while teaching.

2- Purely Developmental Knowledge: In this kind of development-included knowledge, the trainer inducts a series of concepts and realities to the trainee. If logical principles are observed during the training, the knowledge gained will also be deeper and longer-lasting, for it will be the result of change and contact with facts. For instance, when one correctly learns that telling the truth is necessary at all times, he will also be more profoundly interested in telling the truth, too. He feels the practical essence

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to tell the truth, which he believes will develop his character. The principles that say the practical element is more important than knowledge in human development does not mean that practical usage without knowledge is necessary; it means, in fact, that the important thing in human development is practical, knowledge-based development and change, not mere abstract knowledge piled up in the researcher's mind.

3- Imitational Knowledge: Imitation means accepting another person's words, actions, behavior and thoughts without any reason. Imitation consists of five elements:

a) The imitator

b) The imitated

c) The phenomenon or reality being imitated

d) The aim of the imitation

e) The credibility of the imitation

Some imitations are completely distinctive of original knowledge, whereas some others are not. Detectable imitations are harmless to human knowledge, but the ones not detectable can be quite dangerous. Some detectable imitations are, nevertheless, necessary, like consulting an expert.

4- Supposed Knowledge: In supposed knowledge, there is no observable evidence, and the researcher must take the relevant mental conditions and concepts into consideration.

5- Theoretical knowledge: Here, some of the knowledge is compatible with researchable items, but the whole issue cannot be interpreted by means of experimental evidence. These two forms of knowledge sometimes make scientific knowledge fade a little. Mixing suppositions and theories with scientific laws may cause little harm in issues concerning the observable world, but applying them to the humanities may bring about irreparable harm to human culture, as the theory of the originality of the sexual instinct did in interpreting human life, inhibiting man's evolution and

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changing all human values.

6- Purely Descriptive Knowledge: This kind of knowledge tends to set light on the facts in order to provide a bridge between the initial contact with the facts and the stage of true recognition. In the initial step, man merely photographs the facts, but in descriptive knowledge, facts are described from all viewpoints. The descriptions are sometimes so interesting that the initial state of mind feels that the original knowledge is not necessary, and this can make human thoughts stagnant.

7- Worship-based Knowledge: This form of knowledge concerns issues for which man does not know the reason, although they have reasons. For instance, man follows the rules he is instructed on how to worship God, and the reasons behind them are not completely unknown taking the aim of human life into consideration; they use their intelligible contents to adjust the relationship between man and God.

8- Experimental Knowledge: This kind of knowledge is not limited to the phenomena and relationships in the world of nature, for rather than testing an observable fact by means of human senses or laboratory devices in order to study it, experiencing something means exploration efforts about facts, and can apply to the analysis of these issues:

a) The experimenter, who possesses healthy senses and mental activities and is capable of making contact with facts.

b) Accepting definitely certain principles, like the principle of causality.

c) The motive of experiment in order to identify phenomena and make use of them.

d) The phenomenon or relationship being experienced to identify

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it is real, not imaginary or baselessly assumed. Realities are far vaster than our senses and observations can handle. Today science uses radioactive research to explore galactic changes millions of years ago in space, even about things that have disappeared now. By experiencing effects, human knowledge searches for the causes he could not trace while experiencing. Experience can study the actions and reactions in human organs and behavior, looking for facts which he undoubtedly accepts, without making contact with their identity directly.

In brief, all phenomena in the world, even imaginations, hallucinations, will, pleasure and sorrow, beauties, obligations and other observable issues can be experienced and identified.

9- Logical Understanding: includes understanding resulting from preliminaries based on logical principles.

Logical certainty is sometimes conscious and sometimes not. Many deductions and reasoning are done hastily and not consciously. Even many scholars and intellectuals come to logical conclusions about phenomena and their interrelations without sufficient attention, knowledge of logical principles and rules, but instead with much haste and uneducated omissions and selections.

The highly significant point here is that the formal logical method does not allow man to make direct contact with facts because it concerns general concepts (secondary rational ideas) and logical symbols (including coded symbols and mathematical symbols in logical mathematics) ; thus, the abstract aspect of formal logic, in any form it may be, overcomes direct realism, and the certainty it causes does not include the relaxed state brought about by direct contact with facts.

On the other hand, changing concepts by means

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of jargon and transforming them into symbols may dry them up so much that they will resemble human fictional products rather than the facts themselves. Therefore, some philosophers do not consider professional logic as very worthy, especially since many discoveries, inventions and great works of art have been produced by minds that never fell into formal or professional logic. Edison never read any books on formal logic to use it in his inventions.

We must say that the most formal logic can do is accurately arrange the concepts and realities that have been actually observed, or potentially exist in human knowledge; it should never be given the duty of pulling the unknown from behind the curtain of human senses or laboratories.

10- Supreme Understanding: Correct usage of facts and realities by means of complete mastery and dominance over them, in a way that facts are acquired like the levels and the identity of the human self are acquired intuitively. In supreme understanding, the refined form of realities and facts flow into man, which he absorbs like his self and its powers and actions – intuitively.

11- Deductive Knowledge: Deduction is known as achieving results without going through the preliminaries. Some thinkers, however, have objected to this definition, believing that it is impossible to leap from one point to another without going through certain steps. Considering the level of compatibility between guessing and realities, we can categorize deductive knowledge into three groups:

a) Guesses that are compatible to all facts, in which the

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whole reality is suddenly acquired as it is. This kind of guessing is directly proportionate with increase in knowledge and taste.

b) Guesses that agree with realities to some extent, in which a fraction – not all – of the facts are acquired.

c) Guesses that are compatible with realities, albeit in another form. We may assume, for example, that the society may be able to resist tyrants without the leadership of a powerful political figure, but in fact it happens in the presence of such a leader. We had guessed correctly about the people's resistance against atrocities, but not about how it was going to happen. The identity of guessing and deduction is not limited to the speed at which the preliminaries are gone through; the subject to be guessed about is also obscured from the mind.

12- Knowledge by Assumption: Here, indirect premises or inadequate facts lead to some form of acquisition of knowledge. It differs from guessing, because firstly, guessing moves so rapidly from the premises to the results that the preliminaries are ignored, and secondly, the subject is hidden.

In some people, assumptions are stable mental activities, but most assumptions are scattered, temporary and unpredictable. Some judges, despite the legal information and evidence at their hand, have a special taste for legal judgment. Some politicians have a good sense of politics apart from all the political authority and expertise they may have. Some people have an instinct for art or business. However, none of them say they make guesses.

13-

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Intellectualism: Here, we mean understanding facts without any illusions or mistaking them with superstitions or established traditions. Such knowledge is quite clear, like the clarity in seeing a physical phenomenon. On the other hand, there is decadence, which means being rigidly fixed with precipitated knowledge acquired before.

An intellectual – or “clear-minded” – person may therefore be considered as somebody who, having gained knowledge of the present and future, tries to make the ideals of his society embrace reality. The true intellectual is a person who has logically adjusted his relationship with vast facts during the course of time, and having achieved a correct understanding of causes and effect, and the changeable and unchangeable, feels himself responsible for making intelligible life become a reality in his society, and will undergo any sacrifice he must make to achieve that.

14- Intelligence: Confirming a theorem about which we know more than 50 percent but less than 100 percent has been called intelligence, idea, or opinion. Such conclusions and confirmations are frequently used in science, artistic analyses and complex affairs of daily life. “My idea is…” does not convey certain knowledge, but a knowledge that calls for further study.

15- Knowledge by Discovery: A quality consisting of a mixture of mental activity and reflections in an area free of the mind. The truth about this kind of knowledge is still unsolved; we can only identify the discoverer's state of mind prior and subsequent to the discovery. We do not know how the discovery actually takes place.

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There are a few points that can be observed about discovery:

a) The researcher's endeavor along with his devotion and eagerness about the concerned fact.

b) Gaining new knowledge about the concerned subject.

c) Hope for achieving the facts. Some discoveries happen without a certain goal, like X- rays which Roentgen discovered without having aimed for previously.

d) The most mysterious thing about knowledge by discovery is a kind of mental freedom. When making a discovery, the mind is released from all chains, laws and rules, and finds itself suddenly facing a true light.

e) Evidence shows that when making a discovery, the mind uses an unknown factor, which cannot be intelligence, talent or great knowledge, for many people possess them, but do not make any discoveries.

f) Having made the discovery, the discoverer experiences huge freshness and joy. Maybe it is because the discoverer sees some aspect of his discovery in himself, too.

16- Illuminative Knowledge: In this kind of knowledge, “the facts and the truth shine on the human mind without needing any previous sensory preliminaries or formal thought. ” A form of mental enlightening occurs upon the facts. An example is when man realizes that the universe has meaning, and each component in it influences the general harmony and flow of the universe. Knowledge by illumination can happen in everyone, but getting drowned in desires and wishes can prevent it.

17- Intuitive Knowledge: The direct contact between man's inside and facts non-observable to his senses – naturally or intellectually – is called intuitive knowledge. It differs

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from knowledge by illumination in the fact that intuition casts light on the subject itself, not the facts concerning or surrounding it. In intuitive knowledge, man uses his internal insight to see facts with a clarity far superior to his sensory sight or his intelligence.

18- Knowledge by Revelation: Revelations here are internal flashes. This kind of knowledge is similar to discovery, except knowledge by revelations has vaster domains, and can cover a great variety of realities. Discovery calls for a great deal of mental effort, but revelations can happen with a very meager background of knowledge.

19- Knowledge Based on Divine Revelations: In this form of knowledge, God reveals realities to a human being that deserves them. Holy Prophets of God had this attribute. Sometimes the prophet can directly receive the realities from God – through a certain power of recognition he has gained – and sometimes an angel is responsible for delivering the divine revelations to him. These are pure realities and truth, and convey what is useful for man's prosperity. Divine revelations are absolutely undoubted and certain.

Supreme Forms of Knowledge

Supreme forms of knowledge are not those supernatural activities of the mind that cannot be logically interpreted or justified; actually we mean the knowledge that man gains by means of purifying his inside of desires and wishes. In other words, man can achieve very high forms of knowledge having purified himself of selfishness. These forms of knowledge can be categorized into four groups:

1- Knowledge: Here, we mean all-around, dominant knowledge of the facts,

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the kind of internal light that is caused by making contact with reality. If a thinker studies man from not a purely one-dimensional point of view, but from various aspects, achieving the internal light that is the result of establishing contact with the identity and aspects of man's existence, he will accomplish knowledge. Kinds of science that serve selfish motives or self-benefit-seeking and are created by fatalistic factors of our senses or mind cannot fit into this definition.

2- Supreme Amazement: We may categorize amazement into seven groups:

a) Initial, Superficial Amazement: Here, the human mind wants to discover and identify the things it encounters, but with the previous knowledge it has, it cannot do so, and thus falls into amazement. The more we know about new facts, the less this kind of amazement will be in us. Children do not experience this form when they find something new, for they have no background knowledge about it.

b) Amazement due to Ignorance: When man encounters a phenomenon that amazes him, two things may happen: a) man may know nothing about his amazement; he may not realize that he is amazed because of his own lack of knowledge. b) His mind may recede, and ignorantly fight the amazement.

c) Amazement Caused by Doubt: Some people are infatuated by their knowledge, and have absolute trust in what they know. Thus, if they face something unknown, the doubt and uncertainty they will encounter puts them into a very disturbing state of amazement.

d) Amazement alongside the Known:

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There is some amazement alongside what man already knows about. It prevents him from becoming overconfident and arrogant about his knowledge, preserving his modesty.

e) Amazement far beyond Science and Thought: If the thinkers who are engaged in one or several fields of science or philosophical issues do not fall prey to mental arrogance and overconfidence and prevent themselves from being infatuated by their own knowledge, they will achieve a special kind of amazement, which can be of two kinds:

● Negative, static amazement, where one feels at a mental stalemate, and the progress comes to a total halt. Such people believe that all knowledge ends in uncertainty and doubt.

● Dynamic, positive amazement, which is a powerful force in discovering what we are amazed about. This form of amazement is a phenomenon full of feelings of greatness and attraction toward issues far beyond formal sciences, laws and principles. At this high state of knowledge, the contradictions and conflicts one observes in science and knowledge are replaced by supreme forms of unity.

As Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi (Rumi) says:

گه چنین بنماید و گه ضدّ این جز که حیرانی نباشد کار دین

نه چنان حیران که پشتش سوی اوست بل چنین حیرت که محو و مست دوست

Things change with time; indeed,

religion is merely creating amazement.

This amazement, however, is not absolute; it does not lead to a dead-end.

Rather, it makes man fascinated by God's love.

f) Supreme, Ideal Amazement: This form of amazement

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is neither a sort of doubt or uncertainty, nor direct abstracts of sciences and experiences. Here, man feels the divine light of God's beauty and greatness radiate into him.

Thus, he achieves immense dominance over facts, drowns in the universe and enjoys peculiar pleasure and fascination. This is why the Holy Prophet of Islam asked God to increase his amazement. This form of amazement is far superior to all sciences and knowledge. As the renowned Iranian poet Attar Neishabouri describes it:

مرد حیران چون رسد این جایگاه در تحیر مانده و گم کرده راه

گم شود در راه حیرت محو و مات بی خبر از بود خود وز کاینات

هر که زد توحید بر جانش رقم جمله گم گردد، ازو او نیز هم

گر بدو گویند هستی یا ﻧئی؟ سر بلند عالمی، پست کیی؟

در میانی یا برونی از میان؟ در کناری یا نهانی یا عیان؟

فانیی یا باقیی یا هر دویی هر دویی یا تو نئی یا نه تویی؟

گوید اصلاً می‌ندانم چیز من وین ندانم هم ندانم نیز من

هر که در دریای کل گم بوده شد دائماً گم بوده و آسوده شد

(When man feels the light of God, he can

even go far beyond that, and reach the truth about God, and if he is asked, 'Do you exist or not? You are a highly developed being, why do you degrade yourself so much? Are you mortal or immortal? Or both? Are you both of them, or are you you, or are you nothing at all? ' He will reply, 'I don't know who I am, for anyone who drowns in the ocean of the whole, is lost forever, and thus has reached eternal tranquility. )

3- Mystical Knowledge: In this form of knowledge, man accomplishes an understanding of the universe with all of its components and interrelations that is truly crystal clear; he sees each component as a symbol of God's greatness.

4- Wisdom: Wisdom conveys knowledge of the components of the universe and their interrelations as a harmonious whole, which depends upon the Creator of the universe. Man acquires this form of knowledge by means of moving on the path of evolutional development. When he achieves it, he will see all human beings moving toward God, and anyone who deviates from this path has in fact fallen astray from the way to perfection and greatness.

The Various Forms of Practical Relationship between the Mind and the Phenomenon to be discovered

These forms of knowledge involve the activities of the mind itself, not pure contact with the outside, which includes reflection. Having made contact with facts, the mind does certain operations on them, which we will take into consideration here. There are three differences between mental activities and reflective activities in the mind:

a) The non-reflective activities of the mind

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are generally conscious.

b) Science has not yet found the internal factor that causes non-reflective activities.

c) When non-reflective activities take place consciously, definite aim becomes necessary.

The Activities of the Mind

1- Confirmation: In this mental activity, imaginations and speculations are related and associated. An example is the theorem of the spherical shape of the sun. Several units face us: a) the sun, b) spherical shape, c) the relationship between the sun and spherical shape, which is the claim or deduction that makes the contact between the subjects. We see two mental actions here:

● First, there is no external relationship between the sun and being spherical.

● Second, the claim or deduction we make about them is mental.

2- Confirmation with Abstract Units: This kind of confirmation consists of abstract concepts, like mathematical theorems which involve numbers and symbols; they are not symbols of real cases in the real world.

3- Abstraction: Abstraction includes the omission of the characteristics of an identity, like a whole circle, or man as a whole. When we say that man is a talking animal, every word in our theorem is an abstracted concept, caused by omitting observable characteristics and qualities.

4- Recall (Reminding): Recall means searching the contents of the human memory or the subconscious in order to remember things that have been kept there in the past. This incredible mental activity has several elements:

a) The elements stored in the memory or the subconscious.

b) The motive to find and remember the concerned elements.

c) The mental factor that finds the stored elements.

It seems

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that there is no relationship between the strength or weakness of recall and the little amount of contents in the memory or subconscious. Observations and experiences show that any unit considered as crucially important or put inside man by stronger influences also has stronger retention and recall.

5- Analysis: This kind of mental activity consists of analyzing a series into its components and units, and then studying them.

6- Combination: Here, the mind collects the components and discovers how they are interrelated in the whole series. Some philosophers, like Russell, consider the analytical method as extremely important, and name their method “logical atomism. ” Both the analytical method and the combination method should be taken into attention, as both are necessary to recognition and knowledge.

7- Understanding the Relationship between Mental Activities and the Subject: Occasionally, mental activities take place without complete awareness, but since mental activities are objective, sometimes man can become completely aware of them, and they can happen consciously. Such awareness allows the mind to adjust the relationship between the mental activity and the subject.

8- Careful Thought: This term conveys careful thought and prediction about the eventual and ultimate consequences, which is essential to those who wish to achieve ideal amazement; a balanced relationship between the past, present and future is necessary in order to move toward perfection. There are a few conditions that must be provided to accomplish correct states of careful thought:

a) curate identification of the laws and principles of life.

b) Studying the possibilities about events.

c) Taking unpredictable, unexpected

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events into consideration.

9- Harmonizing: This mental activity involves logically organizing affairs and things that help us reach our goals. Harmonizing the components, basic parts and the fundamental activities one must carry out are quite crucial for some goals; sometimes it is so important that it can indicate the individual's genius or mental advantage.

10- Logical Thought: There is a distance between the state man is in and the goal he must achieve. Without logical mental activity, filling that gap will not become possible. In other words, logical movement means starting out from the initial phase and going through the path to the goal. Man must also select and omit some of the items to do so.

11- Supreme Thought: The objective mental process that flows in the fundamentals of man's supreme relation with the universe, and the basic identity of the two, is called supreme thought. Here, the general basics and results of logical thought are formally put to use. With supreme thought, man's knowledge advances far beyond observable effects in order to reach the truth. For instance, man may see a small bird and realize things about the goal of the universe; observing the limited laws concerning a small part of the earth can help him understand the general laws dominating the universe – in fact, realize how harmoniously orderly the universe is.

12- Reasoning: This involves putting logical thought to work, together with awareness of thought units. Here, awareness and attention to the laws and principles of thought are necessary, whereas

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in pure thought the mental activity may take place unconsciously, although thoughts start to work according to the laws and principles. Awareness and objectiveness are quite crucial in reasoning.

13- Supreme Reasoning: What we mean here is that there are other supernatural concepts far beyond the issues and laws concerning the superficial natural world. Formal logical reasoning is merely making a relationship between man and nature and other human beings; it does not deal with the good, evil or responsibility concerning it. Supreme reasoning, on the other hand, always takes justice, supreme responsibility and real unity among men into consideration, and is concerned with logical interpretation of the universe. Avicenna has discussed supreme 

reasoning in the eighth and ninth part of his Esharat.

14- Dominant Understanding: Here, it seems that a special kind of “smell” guides the mind toward understanding the relationship between the general facts and all the details. This penetrative understanding of all details can apply to various domains, like hadith, law and politics, where one can reach the level of jurisprudence. Those who have not achieve high levels of science and knowledge cannot reach dominant understanding. Some people, however, have a quite penetrative, analytic understanding of life and the fixed and variable principles about it.

15- Imagination: This form of mental activity makes the observable facts about the world undergo changes in the mind, and the identifier considers these changes to be the same as the real facts in the world outside, and accepts their characteristics

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and effects. When imagining things, sometimes the mind makes up things that do not exist, and sometimes it destroys things that exist. For instance, on a mountainside on a dark night, where no living thing is in sight, man may imagine seeing a wild lion, and run away as fast as he can. Imagination consists of several steps:

a) The first step includes the imaginer's mental background about the fact. If he has not ever seen a lion, for instance, he will never be able to imagine one.

b) External circumstances must be ready for the imagination to take place. For example, one cannot imagine seeing a lion in the middle of a crowded city, or inside his house.

c) The mental state of the imaginer, like the factors of fear or keen interest in the fact being imagined, is also important. These mental states sometimes show the weakness, and sometimes the power of the imaginer's character. Those imaginations that arise from man's weaknesses generally lead to harmful results, whereas imaginations based on his powerful character put positive mental activities to work. All works of art arise from the latter.

When imagining something, two conflicting phenomena take place simultaneously:

a) one is the imagination action, which considers what is not to be and what is not to be, and

b) the other is the knowledge that what has been imagined is in fact false and wrong. For example, when we watch an actor play the role of a hurt, oppressed man, we know that he is

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only acting and is not really hurt, but still we may weep because we feel pity for the hurt, miserable person. Making a distinction between these two opposites – knowing that the actor is not really hurt, and feeling sympathy for him – is truly one of the most amazing and greatest functions of the human soul.

Various Relationships between the Mind and the Subject

The human mind can make contact with facts in different ways, which vary in their perfection or imperfection. As we know, knowledge has two aspects. First, the influence of external facts on the mind, which makes mental pictures. Second, the mental activities done on the reflected forms in our mind or in our imaginations. The human mind is influenced by external facts in different ways. For instance, the colors and the heaviness of an object leave different influences on our mind. Even various colors influence us differently. Red and green have different effects on us.

The various ways of mental contact can be categorized as:

1- Possibility: If we assume that a hundred percent contact with the subject means complete contact, less than fifty percent contact will mean possibility. If it reaches more than fifty percent, it is called doubt and uncertainty. The power to intrigue possibility also depends on the importance of the subject. In other words, the more important the subject, the more powerful too the intrigue of possibility.

2- Presumption: When our contact with the subject is more than fifty percent, our knowledge of it will be a presumption, and the higher it

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goes, the closer our knowledge will be to certainty.

3- Certainty: Here, we have a hundred percent contact with the subject. Two factors influence certainty:

a) Discovering the truth by means of man's reality-seeking exploration, industrious struggle with doubt and uncertainty and eagerness to reveal the unknown. This is called logical certainty.

b) The induction of the facts into the human mind by means of omitting any causes or motives for doubt. The weaker the human mind, the more it can be influenced, and the stronger the character of the inducer, the faster and better his ability to influence others.

c) Sometimes, social circumstances provide the grounds for removing any doubt or uncertainty about a particular subject, in a way that even the common public can reach certainty about it without much careful thought. This kind of certainty is called seasonal or mortal certainty.

4- Quiescence: This is much like certainty, except that here man feels ready to decide to act in accordance with the discovered realities.

5- Knowledge: Various definitions have been presented for knowledge. Some have called it the reflection of facts in the mind. For a subject or theorem to be included in knowledge, omission, selection, secondary knowledge about facts reflected in the mind, imagination, making them dependent upon laws and principles, and also paying attention to the possibility of it breaking up due to newer discoveries, are all elements that should be taken into consideration when interpreting and justifying scientific knowledge.

Three levels can be mentioned for knowledge to take place:

a) Initial Level:

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At this level, the mind faces many certainties and doubts. Any phenomenon the human senses face shows a truth independent and separate of other phenomena. At the initial level, the certainties and doubts that enter the human mind are like influences that come and go, and any conflict or contradiction between them is unimportant. In addition, man makes decisions based on his own knowledge.

b) Intermediate Level: At this level, man faces different aspects of facts, and realizes any conflict his perceptions may have. This is where the human mind falls into doubt and uncertainty. However, in the case of those of weak character, these doubts hinder the discovery of the truth, whereas in those who have a strong character, increased curiosity is most advantageous. All in all, knowledge has to go through doubt and uncertainty at this intermediate level, which is quite crucial to man's knowledge.

c) Supreme Level: The human mind is at the peak of knowledge at this level, and the universe expands in his eyes, and man feels quite confident.

6- General Knowledge: This kind of knowledge involves exploring an indefinite fact which is applicable to more than one individual, or can be considered as part of a whole. For instance, we may know that one person in the group of people we are facing is a teacher and the rest of them are students, but we are not sure which one is the teacher. The mathematics of probabilities involves inexact knowledge, which is also quite essential in discovering

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the laws and principles of the universe.

7- Detailed Knowledge: If a fact is identified with a hundred percent certainty in the human mind, its knowledge can be called precise knowledge, like knowing exactly who the teacher is among the group of people in our previous example.

8- Certainty: At this level, man (the one who becomes certain) seems to see the truth. This kind of knowledge is more effective than the three previous steps, for if the opposite of what man feels certain of is proved, it will deeply affect him mentally. Certainty is divided into three steps:

Step One: Here, certainty is like a mirror, showing facts crystal clear.

Step Two: The subject is explored in a way that all of man's mental levels are deeply impressed by it.

Step Three: The subject man is certain of becomes a part of him.

9- Gained Knowledge: A reflection of facts occurring in the mind is called gained knowledge, like the reflection of facts in the mind.

10- Intuitive Knowledge: Intuitive knowledge involves human knowledge of the human nature itself, along with 

its internal effects, like pleasure and pain, will and decision-making, thought, imagination, speculation and association of meanings. We can thus classify intuitive knowledge into several levels:

a) The known is an unknown nature. In other words, it is a nature that we know about in the observable world. This level of intuitive knowledge is merely a raw awareness. Undeveloped minds know nothing more about themselves than the collection

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of organs that make up the human body. They think that the limbs, the eyes and the ears, etc, are the “self. ”

b) In the next level, the “self” is considered as a truth that is in charge of human life in nature and its various interrelations. Man's behavior is based on correct goals, and he attempts to put all of his potentials and abilities to work in order to advance his character by using all laws and principles of life.

c) The “self” becomes independent of anything apart from the “self. ” In other words, at this level the “self” realizes its own independence. This is where the highest possible level of intuitive knowledge occurs.

11- Passive Knowledge: This kind of knowledge has two meanings:

a) It can mean the reflection of facts in the mind, which is related to factors and motives beyond the human nature.

b) It can be any dependent kind of knowledge, even if it does arise from the human nature, for the knowledge that is caused by the human nature – albeit seeming independent and beyond being influenced by factors and motives – cannot be totally independent, for its nature is dependent upon God, who does not depend on anything at all. Those who have developed themselves along the path to discovery and knowledge realize this kind of dependence quite well, both in its initial steps and final levels.

12- Active Knowledge: This kind of knowledge is not dependent on any factor or motive, and although it can cast clarifying light

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on everything we know, it does not depend on any of them. This kind of knowledge undergoes no change or development. It is only God who possesses such knowledge; just some levels of it can intuitively occur in man in the form of knowledge being present in the human mind.

The Relationship between the Mind and the Observable Facts in Discovery

The Relationship between the “Self” and “Other than the “Self” in Cognition

Recognition is based on two pillars:

1- The “self,” the innate pole, or the recognizer that discovers facts and realities.

2- All apart from the “self,” which are the observable facts of the universe; the target of discovery.

The human self has some tools for making contact with facts. The question here is whether these two pillars mutually influence each other or not – in fact, they do. To find out how, we must first study the factors affecting each pillar.

Pillar 1: The “Self” and the Factors that Influence the Process of Gaining Knowledge

There are nine factors that must be taken into consideration about the first pillar:

1- The “Self,” the “Ego” or the “Personality: ” The self is in charge of man's life, soul and cognition. Any disorder or disturbance that affects its various aspects can definitely influence its management of the cognitive factors. The human ego serves two purposes in the process of cognition:

a) Managing the factors of cognition and bringing them on the way to the adapted goals.

b) Refining the cognition that infiltrates man through his means of gaining knowledge.

The active elements of the self, which are like the refining factors of the self, influence the functions of the self and the knowledge it gains. Optimisms, pessimisms, reasoning, being influenced by emotions, haste, patience, tendencies toward

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knowledge or stupefaction, are all factors that can indeed influence the domain of the self, and color knowledge, particularly regarding theoretical and receptive facts in the humanities.

2- The Behavior of the Characters: The internal active element that determines how one acts is called his character, his behavior, like artistic character, political character, legal character, etc. Sometimes man's character is so influential that it affects man's knowledge profoundly. If one has artistic character, for instance, “influences the basics, characteristics or results of the knowledge he gains with his artistic feelings. By discovering one's behavior, we can guess what his viewpoint is regarding facts.

3- Various Factors of the Brain: Factors like imagination, confirmation, memory, thought, speculation, abstraction, allocations, the conscious and the subconscious, intuition, and revelations can play an active role in the human mind. They affect our knowledge and viewpoints. Any disorder in our conscious, subconscious or unconscious domains can influence our scientific outcome. If one of man's dearest relatives dies in a terrible incident, the grief of the incident will affect his mind when making judgments about it. As Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi (Rumi) says:

چون تو با پرّ هوا بر می‌پری لاجرم بر من گمان بد میبری

هر که را افعال دام و دد بود بر کریمانش گمان بد بود

چون تو جزو عالمی پس ای مهین کل آن را همچو خود دانی یقین

چون تو برگردیّ و برگردد سرت

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خانه را گردنده بیند منظرت

ور تو در کشتی روی بر یَم روان ساحل یم را همی بینی روان

گر تو باشی تنگدل از ملحمه تنگ بینی چو دنیا را همه

ور تو خوش باشی به کام دوستان این جهان بنمایدت چون بوستان

(Since you see everything as serving to fulfill your whims and desires, you become pessimistic about me. If one behaves like wild beasts, he/she will become suspicious about great human beings. Man, as generally a part of the whole universe, sees the universe similar to himself. If you turn your head, it will seem that the world is revolving, too. If you are in a ship, you may think the shore is moving away from you. If something distressing happens, the whole world will become miserable to you, and if you are happily spending time with your friends, it will be like a paradise. )

4- Natural Senses: One of man's channels for establishing contact with facts is his senses. Man's natural senses comprehend objects and actions in a particular way. Man's eyes or ears cannot, for instance, see or hear all sounds or scenes. The natural senses can make contact with certain phenomena in accordance with their special structure, and the slightest change in their structure will affect man's knowledge.

5- The Secondary Effects of the Natural Senses: Illnesses and changes that occur in

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man's natural senses are some of the secondary effects of the natural senses. In some diseases, for instance, man may see everything in a particular color.

6- Sensory Activities that Affect the Conscious: Continual contact between the human senses and natural phenomena makes the mind unable to make direct contact with them. When man encounters a phenomenon like sunlight, for instance, he is affected in a way that his subsequent contact with sunlight will be influenced with it. As Farabi says, the human eye gets the light from the sun, and uses that light to see the sunlight.

He adds, “Each of our senses is affected by what it observes, and the influence is similar to the quality of the observed facts. If the effect is strong, it will remain for some time after the direct contact with the observed fact is over, like the human eye looking at the sunlight. If man stops looking at the sun, the effect will remain for a while. Also, if the ear hears a long, tiring sound, it will keep hearing it a while after the sound goes away, too. ”

Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi has also pointed out man's manipulative role in his famous story about the elephant:

پیل اند ر خانة تاریک بود عرضه را آورده بودندش هنود

از برای دیدنش مردم بسی اندر آن ظلمت همی شد هر کسی

دیدنش با چشم چون ممکن نبود

اندر آن تاریکیش کف میبسود

آن یکی را کف به خرطوم اوفتاد گفت همچون ناودانش نهاد

آن یکی را دست بر گوشش رسید آن براو چون بادبیزن شد پدید

آن یکی را کف چو بر پایش بود گفت شکل پیل دیدم چون عمود

آن یکی بر پشت او بنهاد دست گفت خود این پیل چون تختی بُدست

هم چنین هر یک به جزئیکاو رسید فهم آن می‌کرد هر آن می‌تنید

از نظرگه گفتشان شد مختلف آن یکی دالش لقب داد آن الف

در کف هر کس اگر شمعی بدی اختلاف از گفتشان بیرون شدی

(An elephant was brought into a dark room, and many people came to see it. But since the room was dark, the people touched, and each person came to a different point of view. One who had touched the elephant's trunk said the elephant is like a drainpipe. Another, who had touched the ear, said it resembled a big fan. One man touched the elephant's leg, and claimed the elephant was like a pillar. Another touched the elephant's back, and said it was like a bed. Each person expressed the

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knowledge he had gained based on what he had found; the ideas were quite diverse. Had they candles, however, their remarks would be united, and accurate. )

Thus, men have diversities due to several factors:

a) Limitations in their ways of contact with facts

b) The reflections in the mind – each man, having discovered one part of the elephant's body, interpreted it merely based on that one part.

c) Being content with the initial impression. If one man touched the trunk, for instance, he said it was like a drainpipe. Another, who had touched the elephant's ear, said it looked like a fan. In other words, each of them remained content with what they had initially found.

7- Tools Used for Expanding Knowledge: The tools and laboratories man uses in order to expand his knowledge definitely affect his ways of discovery. Each machine shows facts in accordance with its own particular structure; a telescope, for instance, is by no means comparable with man's senses in showing heavenly bodies, and any change in its structure will also influence our view of space. Each object has different characteristics. If the temperature of a room is 27 degrees, for instance, each object in it, like the carpet, the windows, wooden objects or woolen clothes will have different temperatures.

As Max Planck says, “The physicist's ideal desire is to discover the real world outside. Despite all the tools of discovery he has, his measurements will never tell anything about the real world. Measures are merely somewhat

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uncertain messages; as Helmholtz says, they are signals transmitted to the real world, from which man attempts to get conclusions, like a linguist trying to decipher documents dating back to an ancient civilization.

The linguist must accept the fact that the document has some meaning if he is to succeed. Likewise, the physicist must believe that the real world follows laws and principles that we cannot fathom; he may even have to abandon hopes of totally discovering them, or determine their identity with any certainty. ”

Man's tools and devices of discovery lead to two forms of manipulation on man's behalf. If he looks at tiny particles through a microscope, for example, the particles are revealed to him having gone through two tunnels: the machine itself and man's own senses.

8- Man's Methods and Goals: How man tends to discover and identify things and his goal both influence his process of discovery. When man focuses all of his senses and thoughts upon a certain goal, his knowledge will be limited to that particular end. If a man heads for a mountain in search of firewood, he will not pay attention to anything else on his way, and if asked whether he saw anything else there, he will say “No. ” If one studies facts in order to achieve a certain goal, he will not understand the facts accurately. Basically, scientific fairness implies that if studies with a certain goal fail, the scientist should not claim that he studied but could not find anything; they had

better say that he was not able to find what he needed with the tools he had.

9- The Various Situations Facts Have: Farabi believes that since knowledge and the known are correlated, if the existence of the known is complete, the knowledge about it will also be complete. Likewise, if there are any contradictions about the known, its knowledge will not be complete, either, such as movement, time, infinity and oblivion.

The truth about movement is gradual exit from potentiality to activity, and each moment of it involves proof and defiance. The dependency of movement upon the moving subject and its relationship with the cause brings about contradiction. If we could gain knowledge about any kind of motion from the moving subject and its cause, our knowledge would be more complete.

Not all of the above nine factors influence recognition at the same time. One or several of them usually affect the knowledge we have of a subject.

Pillar 2: Other than the Self, or the Realities about the Universe

This pillar includes the identification of all creatures and phenomena that are to be recognized by the self. The self can, however, also be recognized by the selves of other human beings. There are two important points here:

1- The more the mental development the human ego makes, the less dependent it will be on factors, tools and imaginations outside the human nature for its discoveries.

2- Intuitive knowledge concerning the self does not mean that man is able to discover every coordinate and characteristic the ego has.

The “other than the self” pillar is of three

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kinds:

a) Realities being discovered for their own sake, which includes all of the creatures of the world.

b) Tools and objects used for gaining science and knowledge.

c) Objects that serve as a transit between the recognizer and the recognized, like the light needed to see physical objects.

A Criticism of Idealism

External facts cannot be denied. What some people like Berkley say – “External beings arise from human cognition and the facts that can be mentally conceived” – is totally wrong. There are three reasons why facts exist independent of cognition about them; reasons that prove idealism is incorrect:

1- The Unity and Harmony between the Recognizer and the Recognized: Our eyes, as we know, see objects and shapes. When they see a table or a chair, they see its shape, and know that it is not a pencil, pen or anything else. If objects and facts did not exist outside our cognition, we could never have such understanding of different facts.

2- A fact cannot be in doubt between itself and other than itself. The reality is the specific object outside us, not an object uncertain about itself. For example, when we see an object in the distance and we are not sure whether it is a man or a stone, we still admit that the reality is only one of them – either man and not stone or stone and not man. No idealist will admit that what he sees is the doubtful object.

3- Man's Approaches to External

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Facts: Cold weather, for instance, forces man to put on warm clothes. He escapes wild animals. If he sees a hole on his way, he steers away from it, or searches for light to identify things. Such approaches we have in regard to facts are the best reasons to prove that they really exist.

Responding to a Point of Criticism

As we have already mentioned, the “self “ – the discoverer – cannot make contact with facts and realities without certain factors, means and passageways. The question here is whether reaching pure, original knowledge is truly feasible or not.

Among western physicists, Max Planck believes that we are able to discover a great many facts by means of our senses and the scientific tools we have, and although the discoveries we make are increasingly expanding, we will never reach the end of it. Presenting the two following principles, we will achieve an even more convincing response:

Principle One: Both the “self” and the “other than the self” – in other words, the recognizer and the external word – are orderly and disciplined. The expansion of objects due to heat is a natural law in the external world, as is the sensation of warmth felt by our senses which is caused by a series of various factors. The warmth our sense of touch feels on warm glass differs from what wool, wood or rocks feel in contact with something hot. There is no denying the discipline, order and harmony in the domains of the self and other than that; that's

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how physicists discover the laws governing nature.

Principle Two: Harmony between the recognizer – the mind – and the facts in gaining knowledge; in other words, cognition behaves equally towards all facts. For instance, the human eye always sees large objects small from a distance, or the rotation of the blades of a fan always seem circular, not sometimes.

This is how man has made a great many discoveries throughout history.

Because of scientific knowledge, we must say that purely scientific approach to facts is one of the highly significant and crucial methods for revealing facts; however, it is not the only way. Having accepted this point, and provided that we do not deviate from the truth, powerful minds may attempt to find other ways to discover facts, and even achieve better results. Doesn't the fact that spiritual witnessing of facts can lead to the discovery of thousands of secrets in knowledge prove that there must be ways to discover facts apart from formal scientific methods?

When discussing the relationship between the self (the recognizer) and facts we must keep in mind that if the subject of study is man and his various aspects, the self (the recognizer) and its cognitive tools and methods will be more influential. For example, when man thinks about will, he takes into consideration the will in him and what he knows about it, and even lets other humans know about it. Or if hedonism is the dominant element in the mind of an intellectual, he will use it

to interpret the characters of other men, too.

This is why we say that when Machiavelli describes man and his moral, political and social virtues, he definitely does so based on his own beliefs and thoughts. Machiavelli cannot understand the character of a fair, just person who follows his logical responsibilities; Machiavellian accounts of such a man's character would be purely based on selfishness.

From Science to Philosophy: A Look Inside

point

As we know, science has two meanings. In one sense, it conveys absolute awareness. In logic, it is referred to as the picture an object makes in the mind. Its second meaning pertains to empirical sciences, which include studying the relationships among phenomena in order to discover a law. Understanding and science are quite distinct from each other; cognition is absolute perception, and there are two kinds of understanding:

a) Initial Understanding: includes the reflection of an observable phenomenon, like the face of a person or a tree, in the mind, or the perception of an unobservable fact, like realizing justice and beauty.

b) Continuous Understanding: involves the continuation of the reflection of initial understanding in the mind. This type of understanding was called imaginative cognition by ancient philosophers.

We cannot find a comprehensive definition for science on which all scholars and intellectuals would agree. Some of them have considered science as the reflection of facts in the human mind. They do not consider mental activities to have a significant role in the development of science, for if a topic is to fall into scientific domains, omission, selection,

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secondary knowledge of the realities reflected in the mind, imagining them, their dependence on laws and rules, and also the possibility of their breaking away from the old laws and rules owing to new discoveries, are other elements necessary for knowledge.

The Definition of Science

Science involves discovering the fact whose general occurrence is independent upon the self and cognitive tools of man's existence and establishing a relationship with it. Any theorem depicting such a discovery can be called a scientific theorem.

Any scientific theorem based on facts consists of components that may disrupt the whole theorem by their least change. For example, changes in the relationship of the observer and the facts, i. e. any shift in his line of sight or distance from the object, will alter the entire scientific theorem.

Thus, science is the recognition of phenomena accompanied by the complete domination of man’s soul over them – therefore, not all forms of imagination or perception can be called recognition; the domination of the soul over the issue is essential. Science is one of the human self’s discovery activities, not merely a reflection and subsequent perception.

The Levels of Science

Regardless of pre-determined principles, science can be classified into two degrees:

1- The beginning level of science includes the pure reflection of a subject into the mind by means of our senses and other devices. At this level, our mind is like a mirror except for issues without observable effects, like causality, which is far different from seeing something in the mirror. This level is called “pre-science. ”

2- In the next

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level, the subject reflected in the mind falls into the streams of side information, concentration and universal laws, and principles. We now have a clearer knowledge of the subject, for it is no longer a mere reflection. In this step, the mind learns a lot about a phenomenon, and begins to discover how it relates to other phenomena. For example, when observing a leaf, the mental awareness of the observer does not only make him study the physical aspects of the leaf; he will go beyond that and study its other aspects, considering it as a link of the chain of the universe.

Considering science according to the state of mind the scientist may be in, science will have three steps:

a) Elementary: in this step, the mind encounters a great deal of certainties. Any phenomenon man realizes is considered as a separate fact.

a) Intermediate: the mind encounters various aspects of phenomena, and figures them out, provided there is no conflict between them; thus, the mind passes doubt and enters the higher stage.

b) Advanced: the mind is at the peak of its awareness here, and reaches complete certainty by means of total knowledge of all phenomena.

Factors that Make Man Seek Science

The basic factor that arouses the interest for science in man is the necessity for a correct, clear relationship with the facts that surround the human character. Such a necessity arises from the “self-love,” or the “need for self- preservation. ”

If the need for science persists, the necessity to establish a correct, clear relationship with facts can appear in

various ways. In other words, people recognize facts by means of different factors, namely:

1- Expanding the dominance of the “self” upon nature in order to make use of its physical and spiritual benefits,

2- The enjoyment of science,

3- Eagerness for discovering facts,

4- Literal advantage-seeking, whether the greed for wealth, fame or popularity.

5- Spiritual flourish and elevation through establishing contact with the truth.

Each of the above-mentioned factors is rooted in self-preservation and the perfection of the soul, and has advanced science throughout history. The third and fifth factors were more dominant in the past, but nowadays the factors which mostly aid man to govern nature are considered more significant.

Endeavors toward the flourishing of the soul are considered by some philosophers as the highest aim of philosophy.

Islamic philosophers also believe the primary purpose of seeking science to be perfecting the soul and flourishing the spirit.

Scientific Laws

What makes a law scientific? What criteria make scientific laws? Various answers have been posed, each of which cast light on one aspect of the question. For instance, when a thinker says, “A scientific law is a theorem that is repeated in the observable, physical world,” his statement does not conflict much with another thinker's statement,

“A scientific law is a theorem applicable and compatible to numerous cases, and is general enough to apply to more than one person or one case. ” Thus, both thinkers state that if a phenomenon cannot apply to more than one case, it cannot be a scientific law. So, all thinkers agree that partial, specific

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cases and facts which only arise at times, never qualify as a scientific law, even if they still may be worth studying from a scientific point of view.

Likewise, when a thinker says, “Every scientific law proves that any phenomenon arising in the physical, observable world depends on the existence of certain circumstances and the absence of inhibiting factors which, if distorted, the phenomenon will fall apart,” describes the same aspect about scientific laws as this statement, “If there were no order and harmony in the universe, there would be no laws in human knowledge, either. ” Such theories not only do not conflict as definitions of scientific laws, but even verify one another, studying the same truth from various – and very useful –points of view.

Generally speaking, a scientific law is a general theorem showing a harmonious process in the universe, the occurrence of which calls for certain conditions and circumstances; if any of the required conditions are not fulfilled, the process cannot take place. The continuation of the needed circumstances make the process last, and the continuation the conditions provide is what gives the scientific law its generality.

When taking a scientific law into consideration, the following four aspects should be studied about it:

1- The Reality of a Scientific Law is the harmony existing in nature, protected by God. If we do not believe in God, we will have no logical way to account for the harmony and order in nature, the continuation of which is the origin of scientific laws.

As

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we know, there are several theories on the laws of nature:

a) Laws are innate,

b) Laws are not innate, or the instructional the theory about laws

c) The theory of observable, orderly symmetries,

d) Laws are conventional.

In the first theory, the scientific law discovers the innate why others are related to other phenomena. In other words, it is unsolved how the original law is to be interpreted. The other problem with this theory is that the internal relationships and characteristics of an action are considered absolutely relative. Characteristics that are innate and internal to one process may be external in another.

The instructional theory, which we approve of, states that there is no extended rope to pull phenomena after each other, and prove that Phenomenon A must definitely be followed by Phenomenon B. We have failed to directly observe the essential relationships that form the laws of nature even with the most accurate tools. We know that the essential relationships that make up the laws of nature are not mental, and that the laws of nature show each scientist various constants that science is based on. Will there be a day when we can observe these constants? Thus, the best of these theories on the nature of the laws of nature is the instructional one, for it accounts for the more important hows and whys.

According to the instructional theory, the universe and everything in it are constantly changing, for God's blessing flows into it from the world of supernatural. Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi (Rumi)

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has supported the instructional theory in these verses of his poetry:

قرنها بگذشت و این قرن نُویست ماه آن ماه است و آب آن آب نیست

عدل آن عدل است و فضل آن فضل هم لیک مستبدل شد این قرن و امم

قرن‌ها بر قرنها رفت ای همام وین معانی بر قرار و بر دوام

شد مبدّل آب این جو چند بار عکس ماه و عکس اختر برقرار

پس بنایش نیست بر آب روان بلکه بر اقطار اوج آسمان

(Many centuries and eras have gone by, but the reflection of the moon shining on the stream of times is still coming from the same moon. Justice, for instance, is still as it was; greatness has remained unchanged. It is only the centuries and the people who have changed. O Noble One! Centuries have gone by, but truly original human concepts and virtues are still standing firm. The water in the stream of the universe keeps changing by the moment – not even two moments are the same – but the picture reflected upon the water from the moon and the stars (the truth) is firm and steady. Thus, the basis of the reflection of the moon and the stars cannot be on the water; it must be connected to higher things. )

In fact, Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi

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(Rumi) is pointing out that time passes us by, relationships change and peoples and social trends evolve, some disappear forever, but the basic concepts and truth about man and the universe prevail firmly.

The instructional theory believes that the creatures of the universe do not innately possess the ability to continue 

their existence, but receive it from a higher, greater world. In other words, the fact that A must have the Characteristic B, or B must be the result of A is not their innate quality, but divine blessing. Let us quote from Albert Einstein: “I consider God the protector of laws. ”

And also from Max Plank:

“A physicist's ideal is to externally discover the truth; yet, his sole tool – his devices of measurement – never tells him anything about the real world. Measures are merely doubtful messages to him. As Helmholtz believes, they are signals the real world sends him, and he tries to make a conclusion from them, just like a linguist attempting to read a document found from a lost civilization. In order to achieve any results, the linguist must accept the fact that the document has some meaning. Likewise, the physicist has to base his work on the rule that the universe follows laws we cannot comprehend. ”

Bertrand Russell believes that by imagining that the realities about the universe come from another eternal world, we will have a pleasant picture of our world.

2- How Scientific Laws Are Discovered: the first factor in discovering scientific laws is the concrete belief

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and intelligent understanding of the fact that no phenomenon in the world is without a law. If a scientist tends to discover the laws of nature, he must basically have faith in the harmony in the universe. As Einstein writes:

“ For even the slightest rays of intelligence and logic to be able to shine on the world, deep faith that the universe is harmonious is essential. A burning desire to understand is necessary. Men like Newton and Kepler undoubtedly had such faith and desire. ”

Ever since man became capable of relating to other creatures from a scientific point of view, his primary motive for discovering the laws of the universe arose.

The steps the mind must go through in order to discover a scientific law are:

a) The communication between his senses and tools with the subject.

b) Experiencing and completing the observation by means of the senses and technical tools. In this step, trial and error observations are carried out until the scientific law is established.

c) In the third step, the mind proceeds to consider the puzzling points, and deletes those that do not comply with the law studied.

d) The last step includes a general theorem in the mind of the researcher forming a law, abstracting itself from observable cases in the world.

3- The generality of the scientific law, and its origin: A theorem cannot become a scientific law unless it applies to a great many cases. The generality of a law originates from the continual order dominating nature, which brings about effects

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and similar results. The two factors that influence the generality of scientific law are:

a) The generality of the characteristics found in all creatures, like the law of self-preservation. The generality of the characteristics among creatures is a result of the experiencing and generalizing all cases concerning the subject. For example, in order to study reproduction in living creatures, all animals must be studied. Direct observation of every case is, however, quite difficult, but observing a large number of them can lead to a generality, and turn the hypothesis into a scientific theorem.

Experiencing each single case is neither possible nor necessary. By realizing the original identity and elements of a subject, a general theory about its cases can be presented. For instance, when we discover the identity of water by means of knowing its basic elements, we may consider it as a scientific theory, and present general principles on it. Nevertheless, the mere discovery of identity is not sufficient in order to discover all forms of a kind, and all characteristics must be taken into consideration. General knowledge about a certain animal, for example, cannot mean knowing about all animals.

b) Abstracting the facts about the universe and understanding how they are related; we call this abstract composition, which involves mental activity aiming to find the identity of facts not needing observation of all cases, like understanding numbers, geometric shapes and the principles concerning them. 2 × 2 = 4, for instance, is a result of abstracting numbers and the relationships

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among them.

4- The criteria for being scientifically valuable: any fact identifiable according to the following aspects can be considered as a scientific subject. In other words, the characteristics a scientific subject should have are:

a) The possibility of determining its identity and characteristics,

b) The possibility of studying the conditions which promote and /or inhibit its occurrence,

c) The feasibility of studying and logically calculating its effects and results,

d) The feasibility of distinguishing cyclic phenomena (like the four seasons) from those phenomena that are related by means of a cause-and-effect relationship,

e) The phenomenon should be comparable to its similar and opposite cases,

f) The principles and laws governing scientific laws (such as the impossibility of combining opposites in philosophy, two opposites neutralizing each other, and many others) should apply to it.

Thus, many natural phenomena like mines and trees, and also social, economic, political, and psychological topics, and even valued facts such as justice and duty can be studied scientifically.

Therefore, higher facts like dignity, virtue, duty, justice, etc, can be investigated scientifically in the same manner 

as physical phenomena can. Justice, for example, can be studied scientifically if these six characteristics are taken into consideration:

1- Justice is a topic that has a definite identity and can be defined. The identity of justice is “behaving in compliance with law,” or in fact the innate quality that prevents man from breaking the law.

2- Justice follows the cause-and-effect law. It cannot occur in man's life without a cause. Justice cannot deviate from the cause-and-effect law.

3- Justice keeps man

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away from committing evil deeds and falling into psychological disorders, and can also make his free will flourish. It is impossible to imagine man without this quality, which motivates him toward the good and dutifulness.

4- It is not possible to have justice without its effects and results. Justice certainly brings about outcomes, which must be identifiable, for justice itself is identifiable, too. For example, scientific research can show that just people are well-balanced, confident, and enjoy a good reputation in their society.

5- As other scientific topics, justice is also comparable with similar cases. Justice can be compared with other human virtues.

6- Certain conditions and circumstances are required before justice can embrace reality. Not everything can provide those conditions, which is also the case for any physical phenomenon to occur, too.

The Definitions of Philosophy

Ever since thought and intellect arose, many definitions for philosophy were presented throughout the East and the West. Having studied them, we will discuss three groups of them:

1- Philosophy means, Efforts towards knowing the causes, effects, and the analytical and combination flows in a problem. Once a question is posed about a problem, the first step toward its philosophical analysis has been taken.

2- Philosophy is the mental activity in these five domains:

a) The fundamental principles of knowledge: Is there any reality if we ignore the ego? Can realities really be known? If they can, how and how much?

b) Issues prior to the formation of scientific theorems, such as the objects in the observable world can be separated up to a point

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where further separation is impossible. This philosophical perception had been accepted before science had discovered the facts about atoms and molecules. Is the order in the universe in its particles – where laws are abstracted – or is it non-innate and non-innate, and laws are conventional?

c) The problems that arise after making contact between scientific laws and facts. For instance, when science discusses the various kinds of movement in nature, the movement of creatures can be used as the basis of a series of philosophical problems.

d) Problems that arise simultaneous with the arising or continuing of scientific theorems, such as the mortality or immortality of matter, time, space, and the basics about values and virtues. In any period, with our scientific knowledge reaching a certain level, such theorems and concepts come into the eye of human thought, too.

e) Other issues that fall into philosophical discussions concern the characteristics of the “self,” and its supernatural activities, like the survival of the “ego” throughout man's life, the constant qualities of the human self or the abstraction of generalities and numbers and concepts that balanced, sound minds are capable of.

3- The knowledge caused by “scientific understanding, guesses, innovations, inspirations and observations,” is called philosophy. For example, science shows the order in nature, and the perceptions we get from guessing prove that natural flows are not baseless; both of them show that the universe must have a meaning and a highly significant rhythm. Some people realize the glory and elegance of nature by means

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of evidence and observation, which is also a form of philosophical perception.

The Principles of Philosophical Systems

Philosophical systems are based on two kinds of principles:

1- Established principles that prove philosophical systems, and are two kinds:

a) Principles that have established themselves in Eastern and Western philosophical schools throughout the history of human thought, such as Aristotelian philosophy eras ago, medieval abstraction principles, and positivist philosophies nowadays.

b) Established principles that are dynamic and unlimited, like the principle of the necessity of discovering and knowing realities, perfection-seeking and greatness-seeking by man, which is one of significance in philosophy.

2- The principles and mental activity of the intellectuals based on pure reasoning, abstraction and principles of imagination. Sometimes an intellectual's perceptions so strongly dominate his spiritual states that they can even fatalistically justify his thoughts, and consider them as absolute. For instance, philosophers like Machiavelli and Hobbes believed that the human nature is pure evil with such certainty and realism that they could not imagine anything else to be true.

The intellectual is deceived by the fatalistic justification of the domination of his hidden spiritual levels. Some intellectuals like Machiavelli and Hobbes believe so firmly that the human nature is pure evil that it had occupied all of their mental states, becoming their internal, active element; they were so firm in their claim that it seems they had created man themselves.

We should not think that all intellectuals produce their thoughts regardless of all absolutes or imaginations. Sometimes the intellectual becomes so passionately prejudiced about an issue that it controls his

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spirit deeply, making him ignore some realities.

The Criterion for a Subject Being Scientific or Philosophical

It is the researcher or the observer's approach that determines whether a subject is scientific or philosophical. How observers see the relationship between the realities and facts in the universe can influence the research – in fact, this relationship can define the individual's investigation as being scientific, philosophical, or imaginary.

The scientific or philosophical nature depends, in other words, on how the observer relates to the reality. If he pays attention to the superficial aspects of the subject, his knowledge will be scientific; if he focuses on the principles and fundamentals of knowledge concerning the subject, his knowledge will be philosophical. There are four principles about this:

1- The realities and facts in the universe are interrelated. In order to scientifically study a subject, it must be studied clearly determined from various aspects and points of view. Thus, any scientific theorem involves a reflection of the selection and determination of a subject (realities current in the external world) and serious efforts to explore aspect or aspects of the focused current reality.

2- The universe is very vast, and man's mental and spiritual activities are greatly varied; thus, the contents of scientific theorems should never be regarded as absolute and continual explorations and research is always needed. As Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi says,

تازه میگیر و کهن را میسپار که هر امسالت فزون است از سه پار

چیست نشانیّ آنک، هست جهانی

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دگر نو شدن حال‌ها رفتن این کهنه هاست

روز نو و شام نو، دام نو و باغ نو هر نفس اندیشه نو، نو خوشی و نو عناست

عالم چون آب جوست بسته نماید، ولیک میرود و میرسد نونو، این از کجاست

نو زکجا می‌رسد؟ کهنه کجا میرود؟ گرنه ورای نظر عالم بی منتهاست

(Don't let yourself get stuck in the past and the old; remember that your current year is worth more than your last three years altogether. What does all that exists indicate? Another world. The newness of the present is the fading away of the old. New days, new nights, new problems, new gardens; each breath signals a new idea in new clothes. Though the universe may seem limited like a stream, but it continually flows on; where does it originate from? Where does all the new come from? Where does all the old go off to? Indeed, beyond what we see lies an endless world. )

3- From any scientific theorem, many analytical and combination theorems can be derived. In other words, when a reality is determined as a scientific theorem for an observer, it can become the starting point for his progress to analyze and combine things and make a great deal of scientific theorems.

4- No clear issue exists without there being theoretical theorems

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around it, and vice versa. Thus, no theoretical issue is without an apparent theorem, either. The farther you get from the issue you are scientifically studying, the slower your progress will be after some time, for the path will get darker and darker.

A Scholar's Philosophical Rise

Provided that the developed thinker is not confined to pre-established mental and spiritual principles, he can discover delicate scientific theorems by means of his effort, accuracy and passion, and descend to exploring the highest secrets of the universe. Such advance can happen in both purely natural sciences and also the humanities. For instance, Niels Bohr, the renowned physicist, had to consult the philosophy of the ancient Chinese intellectual, Laozi, and use one of his philosophical principles:

“In the great theatre of existence, we are both actors and spectators. ”

Another scientist who explored many of the amazing secrets of the universe and the relationship between nature and the supernatural was Max Planck. He said:

“Tending to believe that powerful, mysterious factors are at work in this world is one of the most significant characteristics of our times. ”

“The fact that while researching on the phenomena and processes of nature we try to omit all 'ifs' and 'maybes' and reach what is essentially necessary, shows that our endeavors are continually dependent upon something vital far beyond the relative – something absolute, eternal. That is what we want to reach. I believe that this is not a quality only of physics, but all sciences. ”

Hence, we see how purely scientific theorems can provide the grounds to

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rise to the highest of philosophical and supernatural issues.

Researchers and scientists who possess deep insight and sharp observation, like Albert Einstein and Max Planck, are able to see higher aspects of the universe – things unintelligible to those who devote themselves to nature. Nature scientists of pure mind and accurate actions can use their knowledge of this world to reach “evidence about the perfect absolute,” achieving a certain originality and brilliance. Thus, these mountains, jungles and fields – though seeming to be obeying purely natural laws – can be seen as meaningful parts of a meaningful whole that possesses a great rhythm having made the ascend.

The Essence of Supernatural Knowledge

Supernatural knowledge is of crucial importance to man. The reasons for this are:

a) Man's curiosity makes him not confine his study of the facts about the world to the apparent relationships; he attempts to get into the depth of the fact, and explore all their aspects.

b) Experimental sciences are not capable of answering all of man's fundamental questions. The human mind tends to move from the details up to the generalities, and explore the principles and foundations of the facts about the world. Science cannot do him much help here.

c) If man's intense need to discover the fundamentals of the world is to be fulfilled, and the anxiety created by the incapability of man in solving the basic problems on knowledge is to be quenched, highly supernatural concepts and issues are necessary.

We must keep in mind that the supernatural knowledge we believe necessary is one

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that pays considerable attention to not only intelligence and wisdom, but also the purification of the human will; it prevents man from abusing his relationship with himself and the truth. Supernatural knowledge defines the range, level and harmony of natural sciences. Supernatural knowledge is not limited to the knowledge of the facts about the world; it should discover what is useful to man's development and emancipation. When supernatural knowledge does not ignore the realities about human life, it will lead to these advantages:

1- Achieving such knowledge, man will regard the other sciences he has as part of his supernatural knowledge;

2- It presents man with the principles and fundamentals of knowledge and discovery, enabling him to find his ultimate aims.

3- Natural sciences identify the components of nature for us, but they say nothing about the highest of its principles and the purpose of its creation; supernatural knowledge, however, reveals not only the ultimate principles and ends, but also provides man with the most elevated of feelings and emotions. It shows him the highest aim of life. Despite all the recent scientific advance, attention to the philosophy of life has unfortunately not only not increased, but rather diminished.

4- If man defies supernatural knowledge, his knowledge will be limited to phenomena and their inter-relations. He would ignore the discovery of the real truth of what they all depend on.

5- Supernatural knowledge is higher than all forms of human knowledge, not at their service, for it is not confined to the discovery of short-lived

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events and mortal phenomena. “Supernatural knowledge, the pinnacle of which is the knowledge of God, cannot be regarded as a device. ” It is far too high to be that. Without paying attention to knowledge about God, man cannot make any spiritual advance.

Ever since late 17th century, the West has ignored the supernatural. The viewpo ints that have led to this ignorance are:

a) Auguste Comte – who divided the history of mankind into divine, philosophical and scientific periods – and some others believe that we are living in the era of science, not philosophy, so there is no need for talk about the supernatural. We must say that if philosophical issues were unnecessary, there would not be so much discussion about the highest of philosophical matters between philosophers during the last few centuries. Comte has categorized history based on human cognition.

For instance, he believes that during the divine period, when man was unable to understand the reasons underlying natural phenomena, he assumed that they had supernatural reasons, but now that man has discovered how they happen, he does not need supernatural elaboration for physical phenomena. Yet, understanding philosophical issues requires a great deal of mental effort, and man has to be at the peak of his mental development – which Comte believes is our era – to understand them. Furthermore, if we accept Comte's categorization, we cannot logically interpret the philosophical schools of thought before Jesus Christ was born, or even the medieval ones.

b) Another reason why the supernatural has been

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ignored is that man feels he has no need for advanced philosophical issues now that science has made immense progress; since he has been able to make contact with phenomena by means of scientific developments for a few centuries, he thinks there is no room for philosophical discussions any more. Those who support this belief have forgotten that experimental sciences are too limited to be able to answer certain philosophical questions.

For example, the human mind is interested in moving from the specific to the general and vice versa, which is beyond what science can do for him.

c) Combining scientific methods with philosophical ones by philosophers of the past also led to the neglect toward the supernatural. In the past, scientific and philosophical problems were intertwined, and philosophers did not necessarily use scientific methods to solve scientific problems, so some people have come to think that only scientific methods are to be used for studying phenomena, and philosophy should be put aside totally. They ignore the important fact that separating science from philosophy and all their issues and problems does not omit one of them in favor of the other. Philosophy deals with things that science can never consider.

The supernatural should be protected from superficial approach. Philosophy is not a science easily presentable to people. However simplified advanced philosophical issues may become, they will only torture the average mind, for they are far above it to be fathomed.

These days, some intellectuals have fallen into superficial approach, and try to present

the highest of philosophical concepts in a way the public can enjoy. Although presenting thoughts in a simple way is important, it should not fall into superficiality, where even supernatural issues can be made understandable to the public. Having studied some philosophical books and terms briefly, some people think they can easily understand them, so they begin giving opinions and remarks about it.

The Analytical Method or the Combination Method?

One of the issues in scientific and philosophical discussions and debates is which method is more suitable: analytical or combination. Some philosophers defend the analytical method, believing that a phenomenon must be analyzed into its components up to a point where further separation is not possible, and then it can be studied and explored.

Bertrand Russell, for instance, was one of the intellectuals who named his method “logical atomism. ” He believes, “The only label I have ever given to method is 'logical atomism,' although I have always avoided being labeled with something. I believe that logical atomism means the only way of discovering the nature of objects is analysis as exhaustively as possible; the resulting components are 'logical atoms' – or that's what I've named them – for they are not small physical particles, [but] components of ideas, outside the issues concerned with the structure of things. ”

The problem with purely analytical knowledge and discovery is that it studies a phenomenon totally regardless of other phenomena. In other words, it does not see each component as related to the other beings and phenomena it is surrounded by.

The analytical method

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is of importance in discovering facts about the universe, but it is incapable of a full discovery. The combination method can serve as its complementary.

Extreme applications of the combination method makes man cast doubt upon the most obvious of realities, and be left with a scattered collection of knowledge. Nowadays some people think that the analytical and combination methods belong to scientific domains and the combination and generalist approaches suit philosophy. We must keep in mind that the scientific method is not solely analytical, nor is the philosophical method entirely combination. A harmony between the two methods is what can provide man with accurate knowledge.

The analytical method is suitable for studying sets where the components have no interactive relation with each other. In other words, the analytical method is best when if by discovering each component, accurate knowledge is achieved. But when the components interact with each other and their combination results in a new phenomenon, the analytical method does not suffice. Merely mentioning that water consists of oxygen and hydrogen, or that salt is a combination of sodium and chlorine is not enough – merely identifying hydrogen and oxygen tells us nothing about the qualities and characteristics of water.

Knowledge gained by the analytical method, therefore, ignores the combinatory characteristics of the whole.

The problem with the analytical method is that having separated the whole and studying each component, the researcher considers each component as absolute. In other words,

The most serious harm the analytical method can do to knowledge is that

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by following this method, the thinker, having separated and analyzed the whole, a component becomes the absolute reality of his study, affecting everything else.

As an example, George Sarton believes that, “The history of science is one of the major parts of the spiritual history of human beings, and the other major parts are the history of art and religion. ” On the other hand, he has said that, “In order to account for man's progress, the history of science should be the basis of the explanation. ” In fact, he is following an analytical method; therefore, he is considering the history of science, a mere part of the history of human evolution, as the absolutely basic part.

The Differences between Science and Philosophy

Some of the differences between science and philosophy are:

1- As Whitehead believes, “Philosophy searches for generalizations that determine the entire reality of the truth, without which no reality could escape being abstract. Science, on the other hand, creates abstraction, content with knowing only some basic aspects of the entire truth, just a relative part of it. ”

2- Science cannot provide us with absolute dominance over the universe; each scientist can discover only aspects of realities, whereas by means of philosophy one can dominate the knowledge of the whole universe.

3- Philosophical systems are more stable than scientific systems, for they are based upon principles and generalizations far beyond the interpretations that form science. Philosophy has many fixed principles, such as the existence of realities in the world outside the mind, movement in the universe, objects for objects'

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sake and objects for the self's sake, the reliance of variables on unchangeables, and the uniformism of the mind.

4- In philosophy, we can achieve a form of certainty mixed with some vagueness, but in science we cannot achieve any certainty because of the influence of factors like the tools of knowledge.

There are a great many subjects which science fails to discover, such as the final value of good and evil, or in general any phenomenon that has absolute value and cannot be measured like natural issues; issues like absolute reality, absolute nonexistence, etc are also among them. ”

Philosophy is putting all its efforts into finally solving problems that have existed since the earliest times. In other words, philosophy still endeavors to discover the truth about philosophical matter, absolute values, the relationship between man and the universe, and the extent of the mind's judgment in realities. Another part of philosophy tends to understand general principles including various scientific results.

Despite the disputes scientists and philosophers have, they need each other. Contemporary philosophers believe that science can help them by proving the preliminaries to some philosophical proofs, and also by providing new problems for philosophical analysis.

The philosopher knows things that the scientist can neither deny nor study on by means of scientific methods. However, the sometimes the scientist becomes concerned with the possible necessity of gaining such philosophical knowledge and their influence on scientific explanations or the foundations of those explanations.

For example, when a physicist discusses movement in physics or when a chemist

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studies interactive movements in chemistry, each have a certain concept of movement in his mind; likewise the philosopher attempts to perceive a kind of movement that involves everything. When the physicist or chemist assume that the meaning of movement according to the philosopher is vaster than what physics and chemistry (or experimental sciences, in general) offers, they may conclude that by taking the philosophical meaning of movement into consideration, they may both discover new meanings and even develop their approaches.

Science also explains various forms of physical matter with all their specific characteristics to us. The flow of human thought, however, does not stop at that; it attempts to discover the truth that can be the absolute matter in all external objects, and then come to a general relationship regarding movement. Thus, it is in such philosophical problems where science seems to be at the service of philosophy.

The philosopher knows quite well that science has discovered some of the realities and facts of the universe, and that scientific contact with facts – if accurate – is more reliable than the philosophical one, but purely scientific knowledge cannot bring us to the discovery of all components and levels of the universe. In other words, the mind may even playfully inhibit the progress of thoughts, so using science whenever possible is necessary. The philosopher should, however, keep in mind that his scientific contact with facts can only reveal to him some limited aspects of the facts, and he should never expect science to

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introduce him to all components and levels of the universe.

The Classification of Philosophy

Some philosophers have preferred a geographical classification:

1- Eastern philosophy

2- Western philosophy

They have then proceeded to point out a series of characteristics for each category, sometimes even making them conflict. Here are five points of difference between Western and Eastern philosophy:

a) Eastern philosophy focuses on supernatural realities, but Western philosophy is more naturalistic, focusing on the physically observable.

b) Eastern philosophy makes use of pure thought and reasoning when studying the facts and realities of the universe, whereas Western philosophy – particularly since the Renaissance – uses the senses and other technological devices.

c) In order to discover general principles accounting for the universe, Eastern philosophy takes into consideration the post-experimental principles, whereas Western philosophy insists on using experimental methods.

d) Unlike Eastern philosophy, Western philosophy tends to criticize and reconsider general philosophical fundamentals and principles of the past.

e) Western philosophy emphasizes that when discussing man and the universe, “what there is” and “what there should be” be separated, but Eastern philosophy does not.

Such an approach and distinction between Western and Eastern philosophies is not acceptable. The issues

thinkers and intellectuals face depends on the conditions and circumstances they are surrounded with, so any intellectual or thinker may come up with the same issues and problems as his peers when facing the same conditions. If the conditions make him feel it absolutely crucial to discuss time and movement, for example, any other intellectual or thinker would do the same feeling the necessity.

The important point

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is the intellectual's mind becoming engaged with the problem – if this happens the intellectual will start his work on it, whether belonging to Western or Eastern philosophy. Industrial advances, changes in social relationships and the rise of a new meaning of Epicurean freedom led to new issues in the West, the study of which even infiltrated their philosophy and created special philosophical principles and basics. If such phenomena had arisen in the East, however, the same would definitely have happened to Eastern philosophy, too.

Th e points of criticism on the characteristics of thought systems in Western and Eastern philosophies are:

1- The claim that Eastern philosophy focuses on non-physical facts and Western philosophy pays more attention to materialistic issues is not acceptable. Although Western philosophy did find some tendency toward naturalism thanks to Francis Bacon, many Western thinkers did not follow it. In the twentieth century, many Western thinkers focused on the supernatural, and their naturalistic tendencies never prevented this. Einstein, Planck, Bergson and Whitehead had a comprehensive approach to the issues about man, both natural and supernatural.

2- Stating that Eastern philosophy is based upon pure reasoning and intelligence and Western philosophy is founded on experimental methods shows how ignorant one can be toward the developments of thought systems in the West.

If the West has paid more attention to naturalism – which certainly follows experimental methods – throughout the recent centuries, it is due to the needs of those countries; if the East also felt the need to study

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the qualities and characteristics of vegetables and plants and physical and chemical phenomena, they would have used such methods too, rather than the al-vahed theory, which states that only a single, unique thing can arise from the nature of a single, unique thing. In the early stages of the development of Islamic culture, when Muslims paid a lot of attention to naturalism, experimental methods were put to frequent use.

Scientists like Zachariah Razi, Avicenna and Hassan ibn Heissam used laboratory devices in fields such as chemistry, physics and medicine. Neither Islamic thinkers nor Western intellectuals, however, were ignorant toward the basic principles of philosophy, and the necessity of abstraction and mental generalization, for without them they could never have abstract natural laws from the order and harmony dominant over the universe.

3- Another point of criticism is the statement that Western philosophy shows little emphasis on general concepts and fundamentals, whereas Eastern philosophy searches for general laws that interpret the universe. Positivism – which aimed to categorize sciences and give philosophy a positivist aspect – failed in the West, and was criticized by many Western philosophers, who turned to non-experimental methods. No intellectual can defy a series of mental fundamentals and still believe in observable facts that cannot be analyzed without those fundamentals.

4- The claim that there is no criticism or reconsideration in Eastern philosophy, whereas Western philosophy criticizes and reconsiders the fundamental philosophies of the past quite often is not correct. All books on Eastern philosophy include a criticism of

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the thoughts and ideas presented before. Islamic thinkers and intellectuals have never been mere followers of their predecessors' thoughts.

For instance, though Farabi and Avicenna have accepted some of the philosophical ideas of Aristotle and Plato, they never completely followed them. In his book Asfar, Mollasadra has discussed and criticized many of the philosophical thoughts before him, and presented new ideas, too. If Eastern philosophy were truly obedient of prior thoughts, there would be no valuable works like Qazali's Tahafat-ul-phalasefe or Ibn Rushd's Tahafat-ul- tahafat.

We must remember, however, that philosophers have also sometimes turned to indirect criticism; in other words, they have criticized the thoughts of others alongside presenting their own ideas. Some of them have even interpreted the thoughts of other philosophers, for sometimes a thinker cannot properly word his own thoughts, but another intellectual may be able to correctly interpret them in a better way. This has been an important step toward eliminating the disputes between philosophers. Furthermore, respecting others' views is a highly significant principle in scientific and philosophical research; even in the West, there are both inconsiderate figures like Bertrand Russell and also quite morally well-adjusted ones like Whitehead and Planck.

5- It also incorrect to say that in Western philosophy there is much attention to making a distinction between “what there is” and “what there should be” when discussing mankind and the universe, whereas Eastern philosophy shows little emphasis on it.

First, we cannot make

any separation between what exists and what there should exist concerning man, for human life is drowned in an ocean of “propers. ”

Second, such a distinction is merely an excuse for some people to make a negative approach toward morals and religion which are the basic factors of human development.

Third, we cannot speak of “what there should be” without discovering the existence of man and activating his positive potentials; this is what neither Western nor Eastern philosophy knows how to do.

The Advantages of the Collaboration between Science and Philosophy

The cooperation between science and philosophy can lead to the following advantages in favor of human knowledge:

1- Most scientists of experimental sciences believe that philosophers generalize, so they live in a world apart from the one scientists spend their time discovering; this is why scientists sometimes consider philosophers' work as worthless.

2- By means of his experimental information, the scientist tries to analyze unities; the philosopher, on the other hand, tends to achieve comprehensive unities. Cooperation between the two can lead to even more comprehensive unities in science.

3- Due to technological advances and changes in scientific aims, science is always changing; philosophical principles, on the other hand, are fixed, and provide the best tool for quenching man's mental desire for combining. The generalizations philosophy includes can save science from falling into a scattered mess, and prevent it from becoming trapped in its own technological devices.

4- By making contact with science, philosophy can study and reconsider some of its fundamentals and principles. For example, science can help revise the law of

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causality and its details, thus eliminating its vagueness.

5- Science has made amazing progress in discovering some parts of nature. If these advances are put to use on the path toward human unity – which philosophy is responsible for – man can make correct use of nature, and move from “what there is” to “what there should be. ” Science and philosophy should join ships to solve the problems of mankind. If the scientist and the philosopher are to have stronger cooperation, they should first acknowledge each other and then follow these principles:

a) The scientist and the philosopher should both know that analyzing the components of nature for the purpose of scientific research does not damage their interrelation, for:

اگر یک ذرّه را برگیری از جای خلل یابد همه عالم سراپای

(Disturb one particle, and the harmony of the whole universe will be disturbed. )

b) Scientists should avoid statements like, “It's definitely this, and nothing else,” for the universe is quite open, and man's limited senses and devices and internal ideals shouldn't let make such generalizations.

c) Scientists should accept the fact that there is a start and an end to the universe, even though science cannot verify them as observable physical phenomena. The scientist should not fall into such a superficial approach in which:

ما ز آغاز و ز انجام جهان بی خبریم اول و آخر این کهنه کتاب

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افتاده است

(We know nothing about the beginning and the end of this world; it seems that it is an ancient, great book whose first and last pages have been lost. )

d) The scientist should realize that his contact with facts is done through his senses and experimental devices, so he can never directly achieve contact with all the facts of the universe:

ای خدا بنمای تو هر چیز را آن چنان که هست در خدعه سرا

(O God, Who is aware of all obvious and hidden! Reveal everything in this deceitful world as it truly is. )

Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi (Rumi)

e) The scientist should realize that unless he understands and acknowledges the existence of divine wisdom and philosophy in the universe, he cannot claim to have gained any – not even the slightest – knowledge of the universe, for his knowledge and sensory and mental activities are components of the universe themselves, and should be added to the components of nature. The wise human should say that:

کاشکی هستی زبانی داشتی تا ز هستان پرده‌ها برداشتی

هر چه گویی ای دم هستی از آن پرده ای دیگر بر آن بستی، بدان

(If only the universe could speak, and would thus reveal all its secrets, for all the theorizing, imagination, reasoning and contradicting made by man about the universe cannot possibly

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provide him with complete knowledge about the universe, for they are merely phenomena and parts of the universe. )

Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi (Rumi)

f) The scientist and the philosopher should believe in God so that they can interpret the flow of natural laws and the movement in them.

Following the above principles can not only provide the grounds for science and philosophy to cooperate, but also make them both work together on the path of wisdom. If science can help man discover one or many components of the world inside or outside, philosophy can show us the general principles dominant over the universe.

Wisdom and philosophy are able to make the human soul flourish. If science and philosophy were the two wings of a bird, wisdom would be its soul, which can take it from “what there is” to “what there should be. ” It is wisdom that provides man with the truly original feeling of being.

The Humanities

The humanities are the sciences concerned with man and various aspects and approaches related to him – that is why it is not limited to a particular field of science. Every science studies man from a certain point of view. Politics, for instance, involves the study of “man from the point of view of his management of social life in order to achieve the most desired goals,” or economics concerns man from the viewpoint of his material life management and adjustment.

The humanities can be categorized into seven groups “according to their various aspects in relation to the central point

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of the study of man – the human character: ”

1- The humanities that concern man's natural life, like biology, physiology, pathology, and man's relationship with his surroundings.

2- The humanities that relate to history, such as the natural history of man, the political history of man, etc.

3- The humanities related to economics, like work and its values, production and distribution, economic development, etc.

4- Those that are related to man's social life, like sociology, anthropology, management, politics, law, etc.

5- The humanities that pertain to man's evolutional “propers,” like culture, civilizations, literature, aesthetics, art, etc.

6- The humanities that concern man's mental potentials and activities, like psychology, psychiatry and identifying faculties such as the memory, imagination, will, choice, genius and discovery.

7- The humanities that are related to values or virtues of individual or social evolution, like morals, religion and positive mysticism.

The above seven forms of the humanities should move on the path that can take the human character – the “self” – to perfection. The human character and its needs and potentials should always be the main factor in the humanities. Alas, it is not so nowadays, and the humanities have fallen into merely considering phenomena; they study the effects – human behaviors – instead of the real truth. Today's humanities are obsessed with statistics instead of scientifically accurate discussions. Ignoring the human “self” and its pivotal role in human life has led to these effects:

a) Important phenomena in man – like emotions, thought, intelligence, and will – have been studied without taking

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into consideration the influence of the “self” in managing them. Due to the neglect toward the human “self,” some scholars of the humanities have even come to ignore issues like thought, intelligence, imagination, will and freedom of choice, and only study their resulting behaviors.

b) Some great values that are innately planted inside man have been ignored, like religion, morals and mysticism. Thus, ignorance toward the “self” has caused little attention to be paid for it to flourish, which is brought about by moral values and the sense of duty; the final goal of the “self,” being attracted by divinity, has been forgotten.

c) Misinterpretation of free will – flourishing freedom on the path to development and perfection – is a result of studying free will without considering the “self's” dominance over the positive and negative poles. Ignoring the “self” leads to misinterpretations of free will, and also other effects like nihilism and alienation. In other words, man's advances in providing his own luxury, he will feel totally void. Ignoring the “self” arises from two factors: one is hedonism and selfishness, and the other is various thoughts and beliefs, among which the following are the ones that have caused the major deviations in the humanities:

1- Extreme naturalism: Man has never been moderate in his mental endeavors. Intellectuals both past and present have damaged evolutional flow of science. Due to their extreme naturalism, scientists and intellectuals have focused on analyzing physical phenomena and issues that are measurable, and pay little attention to the

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essence of life and the human “self. ”

2- The theory of the evolution of kinds, presented by scientists like Darwin, and Lemark which brought great harm to the greatness and sacred value of the human “self. ”

3- The theory of the originality of power, supported by intellectuals like Nietzsche. Although power is the primary condition for man's intelligible life in both domains of individual and social life, it must be the power with which each person respects the right for others to live too, not enslave them to his own advantage. People like Nietzsche have in fact interpreted themselves, not power and its usage.

Do these supporters of the essence of power mean to describe that up to now it has been the powerful who have controlled life, or are they commanding the powerful to do so?

They cannot be claiming to be describing the truth, for ignoring all the humanitarian deeds, the sacrifices human beings have made for each other, the resistances they have shown against atrocities and their struggle for freedom throughout history would mean ignoring the whole of history altogether! Thus, we must say that these supporters in fact express their own internal ideals and wishes, not a real historic trend.

4- Freud's extremist theory concerning the sexual instinct also degraded the value of the human “self” and human moral virtues. Some of Freud's theories on various forms of sleep and his classifications of man's conscious (consciousness and unconsciousness) are considerably useful, but his negative approach toward man's qualities

and mental greatness and also his misinterpretation of morals and religion deserve criticism; these theories caused a great deal of confusion and misjudgment among the simpleminded.

In brief, the humanities should move on the path of correctly interpreting the “self,” and also respond to these six questions:

a) Who am I? b) Where have I come from? c) Where have I come to? d) Who am I with? e) Why have I come here? f) Where do I go from here?

The Necessary Aims of the Philosophy of Science

Other philosophers of science generally focus on the methodology of science, and are not concerned with issues like the duties of science and the scientist; there is, however, much more in the philosophy of science. Philosophers concerning science should take value-based issues into consideration, and determine the role of science in man's evolutional life. In other words, the philosophy of science should not ignore the relationship between science with man's life and the mission it has regarding human evolution.

If the philosophy of science is to move toward the development of human knowledge, it should undertake these duties:

1- The philosophy of science should express the necessity of the proportionate relationship between the cause and the claim.

Unfortunately, some scientists, particularly in the humanities, do not present suitable reasons for their claims, for example when an intellectual claims that “man is evil by nature” or “man is pure good by nature” merely by observing human behavior. If the scholars of the humanities expressed the reasons for their claims clearly and properly, man would never have

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to name the twentieth century 'The Century of Alienation from Himself and Others,' nor would he become a tooth of rigidly cold machinery with all the emotions, aesthetics and humanitarian tendencies he possesses.

2- The philosophy of science must take any measures necessary to avoid proving facts by means of statistics. Statistical proof and deduction in scientific theorems needs careful evaluation. Statistical studies can sometimes shows us an aspect of a phenomenon, but it should be never considered as a form of absolute discovery. Statistics cannot identify a phenomenon from various points of view.

3- The philosophy of science should make scientists realize that they should consider science like rays that first light up the insides of the scientists, then light up the whole society. In other words, the philosophy of science is to remind scientists that science consists of two values:

a) Science is innately brightly illuminated, and can enlighten man up too, so it is innately valuable.

b) It also has value as a means; it can be used on the path of human life, which can be quite suitable and advantageous, too.

4- The philosophy of science should reduce man's playfulness and pretension concerning cognitive factors, like his senses, laboratory tools and any device that can help man make contact with facts.

5- By discovering the relationship between various fields of science and presenting general viewpoints on ideologies, the philosophy of science can save researchers from being trapped in the vicious circles of their own fields, and make them seek the fundamental goals

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of life.

In other words, the philosophy of science should make researchers understand that although they may be experts in their own particular field, they may know little about the domains beyond it, especially the fundamentals and aim of life.

6- Though presenting methods of discovering facts in science is quite difficult, here is how the philosophy of science can help:

a) Showing how to think correctly.

b) Evaluating entirely theorems that are presented to researchers in form of theories.

c) Freeing researchers from inadvertent reliance on predefined principles.

7- Determining the importance and criterion for preferring various branches of science to one another. The philosophy should prove that sciences are not equally important, and some may be preferred to others. The philosophy of science can identify the criterion by means of vast research and study. The criteria should be the intelligible life of human beings.

8- Research on the philosophical origins and basics of each branch of science and discovering their inter- relationships in order to discover the greater unity of sciences.

9- “Revising continually the principles and laws of science and nature and their corresponding tools,” the primary factor of which is establishing a free relationship with the concerned principles and laws; in other words, accepting them should not be as sacred as believing in divine rules, so that man might feel free to put them to use at his wish.

The philosophy of science should on one hand provide the crucial necessity to constantly revise scientific laws and theories and on the other hand show

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acceptable, mental methods for the revision. This does not mean, however, that there is no fixed scientific law; what it means is that there should be a modernist approach to various scientific principles if different aspects of issues are to be considered.

The point that is of high significance and calls for complete awareness and care is that even the mental aspects of science and knowledge – which are considered as unchangeably correct – need continual reconsideration; they must be exposed to the latest information and discoveries every day, as if we were discovering them again and again, for as we said, most scientific and industrial discoveries are caused by the modernist dynamism and mental endeavor of thinkers who thought the principles and laws of their times should have been revised.

The Philosophy of Science and the Humanities

Nowadays, the philosophy of science is focused mostly upon natural sciences rather than the humanities. The complexity of man's nature and identity makes it highly difficult for the philosophy of science to deal with. As we know, the humanities concern man, with all of his countless physical and spiritual aspects, which are further influenced by his will, decision, induction, imagination, wishes and ideals. Thus, we cannot easily establish a set of laws and principles for the philosophy of science to comment on their preliminaries, results, stability or variability.

If we fit man's physical, spiritual, mental and psychological talents and behaviors into rigid molds and frames, we will degrade man down to the domain of other living beings, or even machines. Furthermore,

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no science – not even philosophy – can be expected to be able to comment on man as it would about abstract mathematical topics. Mathematical activities are based upon quantity, whereas the humanities deal with qualitative issues and a series of realities. There are two factors that generally make the philosophy of science fail regarding the humanities:

● The difficulty of the identification of the laws and principles governing man's four relationships. Although a great deal of effort has been put into discovering humanity and human potentials and various aspects, he general knowledge and agreement on it is quite little, therefore the philosophy of science cannot successfully describe the fundamentals and methods of the humanities.

● The diverse, contradicting reactions man shows in response to different situations has also created complications for the philosophy of science making progress in the domain of the humanities. Man endeavors in many ways to fulfill his economic, legal and health needs, and since many of these needs are fixed, the humanities are able to describe basic economic needs and their consequences according to general laws and principles.

They can be studied from a philosophical point of view, but having fulfilled man's needs, it is impossible to foresee how the society will then be. We cannot predict, for example, after the fulfillment of the needs, whether people will definitely have a fine religion, culture, politics and moral ethics or not. In other words, when man's specific needs have been satisfied, his status regarding his

four relationships – with God, himself, the universe and others – cannot be defined.

Philosophical Doubt

Doubt implies the equality in the possibility of proving or denying a fact. Science, contrarily, is the undeniable discovery of facts. Doubt is naturally invariable, so philosophical doubt is not much different from other forms of doubt. When in doubt, the discoverer cannot discover the facts fully, for he feels himself in an obscured darkness. In other words, doubt can be described as a mixture of light and darkness. In primary ignorance, there is only darkness, whereas in doubt, there is some light. If man knows nothing at all, he will have no doubt, either. Doubt arises when there are both unknowns and certainties concerning a subject. We can categorize doubts into two groups:

1- Normal doubts, which arise from conflicts between reasons of the mind and those of sensory observations. It is the result of mistakes and lacks of knowledge man encounters in life, and has no solution except stronger scientific endeavor.

2- Doubts concerning divine issues and man's highest of uncertainties, like the supernatural. Such doubts cannot be resolved by thought – and heading toward God is the only way to repel them.

Even in normal doubts, contact with God can relieve man of the psychological stress and suffering it may lead to. As Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi (Rumi) says:

هر که را در جان خدا بنهد محک هر یقین را بازداند او ز شک

(If man desires spiritual and mental development, God

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will be his best guide through the darkness of life, creating a light in him that can be the criterion that can distinguish fake from genuine and right from wrong – in other words, certainty from doubt. )

It is necessary to have a criterion that can distinguish certainty from doubt. As Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi believes, no matter how scientifically advanced man becomes, he will not be able to purify his soul completely of doubt. However, if he can relate his knowledge to divine knowledge, his doubts will not upset him anymore, for his soul will find a light that will serve as the criterion, providing him with serenity and accuracy.

No matter how accurate man's senses and tools may be, he will never be able to keep away from his doubts about his knowledge of the universe. Therefore, this doubt will always remain with him: what are the boundaries of his role as actor and spectator in the universe? However, if we can somehow make contact between the drop-sized knowledge we have to dive in the oceans of divine knowledge; then our doubts would no longer make us suffer.

The factors leading to doubt can be divided into two groups:

a) Some believe that doubt arises from man's acts in discovering facts about the world. In ancient times, some people believed strongly in doubting, for they thought that errors of their senses influenced their judgment of facts. Now that man knows about sensory mistakes, this factor has been eliminated. The playfulness of

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the senses only leads to doubt in facts when we cannot guide their playfulness toward our observation's advantage; with technological advances now, we cannot consider our senses to play a crucial role in creating doubt any longer.

b) Some others believe that since there are a few unknown things in the world, and all components of the universe are interrelated, philosophical doubts are inevitable.

There are shortcomings in this viewpoint, too. There are a great many facts that are clear to man without the least shadow of a doubt; furthermore, without accepting a series of unquestionable realities, human knowledge would never be able to exist. On the other hand, having doubt in some components does not conflict with belief in the whole system.

For instance, we may see a painting full of hundreds of lines, shapes and colors, and we are certain that the artist has had a definite subject in his mind to use them for; however, we may not be able to clearly understand all of them. If we believe in the overall harmony in the world of nature, our lack of knowledge about some phenomena and relationships do not contradict the whole system.

Doubts vary in subject and the degree of certainty in the units surrounding them. Here, we can divide doubts into deep and superficial kinds. If our knowledge of a subject we are doubtful of is superficial, our doubt about it will also be superficial. If we know a lot about it, however – that is, if there

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is more light on the subject – we will be in deep doubt. For instance, if we do not know much about whether “internal freedom is variable or not,” we will have superficial doubt about it, but the more we know about internal freedom and change, the more dark points there will be, and the deeper our doubts will become.

The doubts thinkers and intellectuals have should not be considered to be the same in all cases, either. Bertrand Russell, for example, had a profound knowledge of logic, mathematics and Western philosophy, but he did not know Eastern philosophy, psychology, ethics and religion; his doubts on all of the mentioned topics cannot be regarded the same.

Doubt is a phenomenon essential to the progress of human culture and civilization. Doubt about formal knowledge, however, must be for the purpose of discovering newer facts and secrets, and it should not cause man to cast doubt on everything. If he does not intend to discover new knowledge, he may question the whole fundamentals of human thought patterns. This is no longer philosophical doubt; it is a mental illness. In facts, doubts should not be regarded as originally, innately desirable, but rather as a means to escape decadent, archaic knowledge, and make efforts to reach new facts. Some have referred to doubt as the “means to flee from rigid, fixed laws and principles. ”

Science and Philosophy in Intelligible Life

Some scientists and intellectuals have done research on whether realities like science, art, management and 

politics are virtually valuable or not. Some believe

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that science, art and politics are virtually desirable, whereas some others think that without mental endeavors on the path of human life, they would be worthless. The value of science and philosophy should be considered in connection with intelligible life.

Intelligible life is the life in which all of man's positive aspects are fulfilled, and as we know, one of the most fundamentals of positive human aspects is seeking the supreme aim of life, that can interpret and justify life intelligently and logically.

In natural life, science can intoxicate man and make power overcome righteousness.

Science can cast light upon one aspect of man, granting him the power to reveal facts. This kind of using this power is only possible in intelligible life. We know that gaining awareness of facts is one thing, and adjusting man's relationship with them is something totally different, as being aware of many issues concerning righteousness and justice is quite different from behaving righteously and justly toward others. In intelligible life, science never serves to inflate the natural self, promote arrogance and boastfulness or taking advantage of others.

In brief, science can be used in two different ways:

1- Discovering facts in order to adjust and moderate the four relationships:

a) Man-God

b) Man-himself

c) Man-the universe

d) Man-other human beings

This form of science is like a pure light shining onto man's nature. This science is pure light, created by God, the One who enlightens the whole universe. It is with this form of science that man can activate his abstract perfection and greatness

(i. e. , innate light) toward reality.

2- Understanding realities in order to reinforce man's desires, or inflating the natural self. When science is used in this way, man considers himself as the end and others as the means. In other words, he intends to dominate others. Such a science will lead to nothing but disaster and doom for man. It will alienate man from himself, which will make him also alienated from the universe and other human beings.

Anthropology: A New Scope

Theories on Human Nature

There are four theories on the reality of human nature:

1- Some intellectuals believe that they know man’s nature quite well, and consider man a meritorious being. This theory may be categorized into two sub-theories:

a) Some believe man to be the most well developed being found in nature, the absolutely perfect creation.

There are some points of criticism to this theory: firstly, we do not have enough knowledge of nature to claim man to be its perfect being. Second, we must not confuse man’s complex aspects and diverse talents with his being the most complete of all creatures.

a) Some other intellectuals believe that although human beings are great, meritorious creatures, they cannot be entitled as the most perfect in nature, for apart from a meager few, mankind is drowning in its selfishness and desires for pleasure.

2- Some intellectuals believe that man is cruel by nature. They see man as a selfish, inconsiderate being who thinks of nothing but his own benefit. As Nero once said, “If only all men had one

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neck, so I could kill them all with one single stroke! ” Anastas, who taxed the air people breathed, is another example.

If we study the history of mankind, we will not come to accept this theory, for despite all of the animal-like conceited figures, there have also been men of great valor and glory.

3- Some believe that the fundamentals of human nature are still unknown to us, but we do know that man has shown on great many occasions his selfishness and desire for pleasure. Many human beings have considered themselves the end, and many others have assumed the role of being the means to the end. This theory suffers from two weaknesses: first, we cannot claim that we know nothing at all about the fundamentals of man's nature. We are aware of some aspects of man. Some physiological, psychological and social aspects of human nature have been identified. We cannot deny the endeavors anthropologists have made. Secondly, although history has seen selfish vultures of human beings, it has also witnessed men of the highest human values.

4- Man is believed to have a great variety of potentials and talents, only some of which have been investigated or known. We can study the activation of man's potentials from two points of view:

a) Activating the human potentials related to man's compulsory life.

b) Man's attention and great eagerness for his own perfection. Some human beings have been successful in activating their potentials. These seekers of greatness and perfection have always

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saved human virtues from annihilation. According to this theory, man possesses both glorious, incredible virtues as well as evil and corruption.

The Human Nature in the Qur’an

Some verses of the Qur’an show some of man's psychological elements and positive and negative aspects, not the nature and identity of man. A few of such verses are:

خلق الانسان ضعیفا

“Man was created a weakling. ” (4: 28)

خلق الانسان من عجل

“Man was created of haste. ” (21: 37)

ان الانسان خلق هلوعا اذا مسه الشر جزوعا و اذا مسه الخیر منوعا

“Surely man was created fretful; when evil visits him, impatient, when good visits him, grudging. ” (70: 19-21)

It is impossible to take the true identity and nature of man into consideration using these verses. In fact, since man's degrees of elevation and degradation are truly infinite, he cannot be totally discovered. The potentials and talents mentioned by the Qur’an express not only man's identity, but some of the characteristics and qualities he can show. If the Qur’an did explain the elements of man's congeniality and nature, it would not need to mention some exceptional human beings or condemn others.

والعصر ان الانسان لفی خسر الا الذین امنو و عملوا الصالحات

“By the afternoon! Surely man is in the way of loss, save those who believe and do righteous deeds. ” (103: 1-3)

The Qur’anic verse mentioning that man has been created of haste does not imply the nature or identity of man either, for haste is a certain quality about how we move from a starting-point to a destination; it is not an external, independent fact about the movement that can be considered

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a part of human nature. Furthermore, the following verse cautions man for his haste, so if it were all or part of his innate nature, it would be impossible for him to give it up.

خلق الانسان من عجل ساریکم ایاتی فلا تستعجلون

“Man was created of haste. Assuredly I shall show you My signs; so demand not that I make haste. ” (21: 37)

Human Characteristics

There are various anthropological theories. One theory, pertaining to materialists, believes that man is a harmonious machine that has achieved perfection and complexity through the laws of nature. According to this theory, human beings should be considered just like other creatures, for he has no identity different from them.

There are a great many differences between man and machines, the least of them being the element life. Man has a huge number of characteristics no machine can have. We have listed 232 human characteristics based on man's identity and relationships with others. However, some are so diverse themselves that the list can be actually considered to include 950 characteristics. Some of them are:

1) Man's ego, 2) Man's awareness of his ego, 3) Man's attitude, which shows the quality of his character, 4) Endeavoring for perfection, 5) Reinforcing his will, 6) Autolysis, 7) Macro mania, 8) Self-consciousness and self-alienation toward peers, 9) Self-ignorance and the possibility for self-discovery,

10) Self-loss, 11) Self-denial, 12) Conscious conscience, self-conscious conscience and unconscious conscience, 13) Moral conscience (with 50 different functions) , 14) Pride and glory, 15) Desire for fame, 16) Self-defense, 17) Psychological complexes, 18) Internal

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emotions, feelings and anxieties (over 100 different types) , 19) Introversion and extroversion,

20) Analytical and combination thought, 21) An existent called the heart, with over 100 functions, 22) Intellectualism and solidity of thought, 23) Hope, 24) Dissatisfaction of monotony, 25) Wishing, 26) Denial, 27) Sacrifice, 28) Seeking benefit over others, 29) Idealism, 30) Worship, etc.

Human Nature

The nature and temperament of man – his original creation, his fundamental existence – is one of the most important issues of anthropology. There is much debate whether man has a nature or not. There are three reasons upon which those against human nature deny its existence:

1- Man's psychological, instinctive, and mental forces and activities have been identified by various branches of science, and no sign of human nature has been discovered by any of them.

2- If there were human nature, the various aspects of human existence would not suffer so much change and upheaval.

3- The diversity and differences among the individual and social behavior of human beings, is in conflict with the existence of a commonality called human nature.

However, if the human nature is defined correctly, the three problems mentioned above will vanish. The definition of the human nature is:

The human nature – the natural disposition of the human heart – is the natural, orderly flow of the forces inside man. Therefore, there is a nature for each of man's instinctive, mental and psychological forces, which also forms its natural, logical flow.

According to the above definition, each of man's powers and potentials are included in

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man's nature. In other words, the orderly, logical flow of every power and potential of mankind is called its nature. Now we can present counterarguments for the three problems we posed above:

First, we cannot deny their claim that human nature is not included among man's psychological, mental and instinctive activities, for those who believe in human nature do not intend to prove a separate, psychological reality or a body part which may be denied; every power man possesses, in its natural, logical course of action, is a part of human nature.

The second problem – stating that the changes man undergoes conflict with human nature – does not seem correct if we take into consideration the survival of human aspects throughout all the changes mankind has seen. For instance, thought, one of man's aspects, does not undergo change during all the ups and downs of man's life. Only the raw material or subjects related to human thought are interpreted.

Thirdly, the third problem – defying human nature based on the differences existing between individual and collective thoughts and behaviors – also appears to be incorrect, for if we are to recognize human differences as the criterion, we should not recognize any other of the human aspects, either. For example, do people not differ in their ideas? Are humans not different in the emotions and reactions they show in response to motivations and conscientious activities? Must we defy thoughts, emotions and the conscience?

As we have already mentioned, the human nature consists of the

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logical, orderly flow of each of the human forces. Now, by means of comparing it with each of the human forces, we can come to a more accurate analysis of the human nature:

1- Thought: Thought includes activities done on known things in order to discover the unknown, or activities done on the means in order to achieve a goal. If human thought acts logically and omits or selects the means correctly to achieve his end, he has moved on the path of his intrinsic nature; however, if he falls astray from the correct way of thinking, and behaves illogically, we may say that his thought has deviated from human nature.

2- Will: If the human will chooses and activates the useful motives, his will arises from a healthy, sound human nature.

3- Emotions and Feelings: If man's emotional behavior is rational in response to the stimuli that arouse his feelings and emotions, and do not fall for imaginations, flashbacks or scattered thoughts, his feelings will have a healthy human nature; the slightest distortion in the normal flow of feelings and emotions will harm them.

4- Selfishness: If acting on the path of self-preservation and aiming for human development, selfishness is compatible with the true, original human nature. Yet, when it falls into hedonistic pleasures, it deviates from the real course of human nature, and becomes self-conceit.

5- Conscience: Conscience is one of man's greatest internal powers. If it acts legitimately, it will have a healthy human nature. For instance, if the human conscience proves

him right and wrong, or makes righteous judgments and scorns and tortures man when he sins, it has moved on its rational path.

6- The Supreme Feeling of Responsibility: It can behave in two ways:

a) The Supreme Feeling of Responsibility toward People: In this case, man sympathizes for the joys and sorrows others feel, and considers love toward his fellow human beings superior to all other aspects of social life.

b) The Supreme Feeling of Responsibility for Man's Own Self-development: Man does not feel his existence in the universe is aimless; he is always in attempt to lead his existence to perfection.

Both forms of the supreme feeling of responsibility mentioned above can be in accordance with the human nature if man acts rationally.

All human beings generally have an original human nature, which is pure and has the potential to seek greatness and perfection. If man succeeds in protecting his pure nature from deviations, inculcations, and the pre-defined grounds of an unhealthy society, he can keep it pure and original. These verses from the Holy Qur’an imply the existence of the human nature:

فاقم وجهک للدین حنیفا فطرﺓ الله التی فطر الناس علیها لا تبدیل لخلق الله ذلک الدین القیم و لکن اکثر الناس لایعلمون

“So set thy face to the religion, a man of pure faith – God's original upon which He originated mankind. There is no changing in God's creation. That is the right religion—but most people know it not. ” (30: 30)

صبغة الله و

من احسن من الله صبغة

“Having faith in God, and submitting to God's will on the way to development and perfection is in fact being colored by God – and who can color [human lives] better than God? ” (2: 138)

Man's Internal Potentials

There are potentials inside man that can be activated by external factors. Some intellectuals have claimed that there is no reality apart from what external factors create in man.

We disapprove this theory, for the external factors that influence man internally produce results different from themselves. Some behaviorists ignore man's potentials, although they do not clearly deny their existence.

Now we will present several reasons for the necessity of human potentials:

1- Denying Man's Internal Potentials Casts Doubt on All Identities Man Discovers about Realities: Every phenomenon has an identity which is definite and clear. For instance, we see something in the distance, and we are not sure whether it is a person or a rock; the object itself, however, has its own, definite identity, anyway. If man had no potentials inside him, his behaviors and actions should be indefinite – and this is impossible, for indefinite identity in the world outside is not observable.

Therefore, we either have to consider those potentials arising from general concepts inside human beings – which is wrong, for general concept are fictitious products of the human mind – or we have to consider them as part of man's inside: there are realities inside man that create certain behaviors and reaction when in contact with external factors.

2- The

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Phenomenon of Inventions, Discoveries and Innovations: If discoveries and inventions do not originate from man's internal potentials, they must arise from external factors; however, there is not similarity or association between external factors and the discoveries and inventions made by man.

The inventions and discoveries do not arise from the great deal of information man has about a subject. If external factors could lead to discoveries and inventions by themselves, anybody who had them would become an inventor or a discoverer.

3- Different Behaviors – Political, Judicious, and Artistic: Some people have specific behaviors. Some seem to have a political kind of style, others a military, judicious, artistic or managerial behavior. The fact that people have different behaviors proves that they must have the potential needed for it. For example, if one has an artistic kind of behavior, he must have artistic potential, too.

4- The Activation of the “Self” that Manages Man's Life: As we have already mentioned, man's soul is abstract, and has been interpreted in various ways, like the “self” and the “ego. ” The external factors that enter man's life cannot be regarded as parts of the existence of the “self,” for they are by no means comparable. The “self” is not a result of external factors; however, the accumulation of these factors inside human life can bring about the activation of the “self. ”

In brief, if the 'self' potential did not exist inside the phenomenon of life, external factors – that cannot consciously save their own existence against any

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creature – could never create the 'self. '

5- Mental Activities: We arrange the pictures we get from the world outside in our mind. The mind regards some phenomenon as true and some others false. The mind's potentials help it carry out various tasks. If man did not possess the potential of wisdom, for instance, it could not use its wisdom in any task at all. Without the potential of moral conscience, man would never accept a series of “shoulds” and deny others. Likewise, if man did not have the potential to seek beauty, he would never enjoy watching beautiful things.

Interpreting Opposite Potentials

Man is a being capable of showing himself to have both the highest and greatest of moral ethics and the most vile and vulgar qualities. Now that he possesses two opposite kinds of qualities, can he be said to have internal opposite potentials and talents? Will the fact of having opposite potentials and talents contradict man's unity of personality and the inseparability of his soul?

There is no doubt that man has internal opposites. Man can be more degraded and filthier than animals, or higher than angels; no one doubts that. The point that calls for consideration is how to interpret these conflicting qualities. Man has a variety of potentials. He can become a judge, or maybe an artist. He has both the potential to be righteous, and to be selfish and victimize the right for his own desires.

Our interpretation for such opposite potentials is that man cannot activate conflicting potentials in the

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same circumstances – he cannot simultaneously be righteousness and selfishly cruel. He may be righteous at times, but under certain conditions become cruel. We may consider man's conflicting potentials from two points of view:

1- Positive, Opposite Potentials: An example is the potentials for crude emotions and purely intelligent ones. The former are not any principle or law other than their causes, whereas the latter cannot do anything without obeying the law.

2- Potentials Implying Possibility and Power: Many qualities can arise in man, although he does not innately have them. In fact, the appearance of atrocious, vulgar qualities is the result of the disappearing or destruction of man's innate potentials; man has no innate negative quality of his own.

The former group mentioned above can be harmonized and organized in order to result in man's mental and spiritual development. For instance, if man's powers of thought and intelligence are enhanced, his crude emotions will become highly elevated ones.

The latter group, which are potential, cannot even flourish at the same time, let alone be harmonized. If man's potential for justice is activated, for example, at that moment he cannot be cruel and unfair. Thus, when a certain

potential is activated, its opposite cannot possibly arise alongside it; if the conditions and circumstances change, however, the opposite may arise. Man must always beware of the opposites of good qualities arising within him.

In a word what God has blessed man with is purely positive, constructive potentials. Even the nature of the filthiest of man's

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instincts is useful and good. It is man who neutralizes his positive, constructive potentials, and abuses his instincts. The fact that man possesses various potentials does not conflict with the fact that his nature is abstract, either. The human nature has to be non-physical, and supernaturally united to be able to have different potentials. If man's nature were not supernatural, it would be impossible to interpret and justify the interference, overlapping and observable inseparability of his potentials.

The Identity of the “Self” (the “ Ego”)

All living beings have a “self. ” That is how they can resist harmful factors. In plants, the “self” is limited, and they cannot defend it against everything. The resistance against harmful factors in plants is not vast.

In animals, the “self” is more apparent, for they tend to reach pleasure and avoid pain. Animals are able to fight natural, fatalistic laws much more than plants.

In the case of human beings, however, we see a “self” consisting of many units – cognition, intelligence, imagination, affirmation, hallucination, discovery, decision, free will, interest in beauty …

Man possesses several “selves”:

1- A “self” the same as other living beings.

2- Wider selves like cognition, intelligence, imagination, thought and many others.

If psychological terminology does not allow us to call these phenomena 'selves,' we can express it in another way: the 'self' together with dozens of other highly significant means that have arisen in various fields, and can reinforce and supervise human endeavor and activity units. ”

3- Deep “selves: ” Using

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his “self,” man can supervise and dominate his actions much better.

Considering the vastness of the human “self” and its tendency toward progress and perfection, we may categorize it via “width and length” categorization:

a) Wider selves: Having gone through the preliminary stages of development, man possesses a natural self. This natural self is the non-self-conscious aspect of the self, and develops as time goes by.

In fact, man acquires a “moral” self, possesses a 'scientific' self, gets a 'social' self, and has an exclusive 'divine' self.

b) “Length” selves: Since birth, man develops both from a physical, natural point of view, and the development and perfection of his “self. ” As Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi (Rumi) says:

از جمادی مُردم و نامی شدم وز نما مُردم ز حیوان سر زدم

مُردم از حیوانی و آدم شدم پس چه ترسم؟ کی ز مردنکم شدم

حملة دیگر بمیرم از بشر تا بر آرم از ملایک بال و پر

وز ملک هم بایدم جستن ز جو کلّ شی هالک الّا وجهه

بار دیگر از ملک پرّان شوم آنچه آن در وهم ناید، آن شوم

پس عدم گردم، عدم چون ارغنون گویدم

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کانّا الیه راجعون

(Apparently, I stopped being like an animal; it seemed that sort of life died in me. But that death elevated me to higher states of human perfection. So why should I fear these successive deaths, for they are lifting me up toward development? These deaths made me even more alive. I was not losing anything; I was merely heading for a higher stage of life. After that, I was at the stage of humanity for a while. Now if I lose my human body and give myself to human death, angelic spirit will fill my soul, and fly me toward divinity. Soon, I will even surpass angels, and head for a hugely greater world. No point or state living beings move on the path of has stability or eternity, for everything is mortal, except His Divine Essence. Then, I will even climb beyond being like angels, and reach a state reason and wisdom can never fathom; I will head for oblivion, which is the general rhythm of the universe conducted by God's Mighty Will, telling us that 'we will all return to God'. )

We can also present another classification for the self:

1- The Natural Self: This kind of self is common between man and animals. The natural self cannot step out of fatalistic circles, or supervise and dominate various affairs. At the level of the natural self, man acts in accordance with fatalistic factors and principles.

2- The Human Self: Having stepped out of the natural self, man

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finds his human self. Justice, love for other human beings and paying attention to other morals and virtues become significant. With this kind of “self,” man can bring the natural self and its various activities under control. He is not totally free of fatalistic issues, however, for the natural self is combined with the human self, and plays a role in man's deeds.

3- The Human-divine Self: If man's soul and spirit are elevated, he can go beyond his normal human self, and reach a “human-divine” self. The spirit is released from all the chains trapping it, and finds divine freedom.

We may divide the identity of the self into two kinds:

a) The self with the identity of the natural self-conveys the management of purely natural life, which exists in all living beings, from animals to even just, spiritually elevated humans. Its only purpose is to inflate the self and dominate anything other than the self, considering everything else at the service of enhancing the inflation and dominance of the self. All good or evil are evaluated by selfish criteria.

This kind of self will trod on all moral virtues to get what it wants, burn down the whole world for a meager desire. It is totally “self-oriented. ” This is the self that has caused the natural and animal-like aspect of the history of mankind to continue, hindering the history of humanity. The qualities of the purely natural self are:

● It considers itself the leader, and obeys itself.

● It is morbidly selfish

and arrogant.

● The natural self-fights anything that does not appeal to its desires.

● It worships itself.

● It has a tendency toward hedonism.

● It can mislead man from righteousness and justice.

● It denies all harmony and order in the universe.

● It considers wishes and favoritism prior to discipline and order.

● It regards itself as the end and others as the means.

b) The self with the identity of dynamic progress toward perfection: This form of self is always elevating; it never spins around itself. It does not lose its perfectionist, progressive identity, for it never falls into selfishness or arrogance. This kind of self never regards the purely natural self as the criterion for morals and virtues, for it knows too well that man's true rise to perfection is possible only outside the natural self, which merely aims to achieve pleasure and repel harm.

When man possesses a dynamic self, he will at least:

● always assess himself,

● take himself seriously, and

● care about himself.

Self-assessment

Self-assessment is higher than self-knowledge. Seldom do human beings attempt to assess themselves, and far fewer of them are able to do so. The reasons for its difficulty are:

1- Man should be aware of his own mental aspects and internal settings that affect his present and future.

2- He should know qualitatively and quantitatively about the power in him.

3- Know exactly what his relationship with the laws and principles that cause evolution and development is.

Self-assessment should not turn into absolute independence of character, for then it would become a sort of

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self-battle, leading to a war against others, too. By independence of character we mean that man may consider his own existence as being far superior to all values and morals. The only kind of independence that means is the independence of selfishness. Cultures can have great influence on how people assess themselves; some cultures totally ignore the issue of educating people how to assess themselves, which is absolutely essential – for even a short time.

Taking Oneself Seriously

When man takes himself seriously, he will neither deceive himself nor others. The following steps are necessary if man is to take himself seriously:

1- He should know himself thoroughly, correctly assessing his internal potentials.

2- Having done that, he will feel the desire for the highest aim of life.

3- Serious attention to the highest aim of life makes man understand that he cannot achieve it without activating his potentials and powers.

4- Once man realizes that he cannot take his existence as a joke, he cannot submit to the laws of nature or even other people. He is dependent upon God's will, and that should be taken seriously.

No force can penetrate into the human ego, for God has built it like a forbidden area into which only man himself can find way. If he does not break the sacred security of his territory and tries not to deceive himself, no other being can enter it.

Good Intentions for the Self

Man cannot be well-intentioned about himself unless a) realities of good intentions and perfections are

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presented to him, and b) the self itself becomes important to man, too.

If the self is not important to man, he will never attempt to discover what is useful or harmful to him. The two factors mentioned above account for why many human beings are not well-intentioned about their own selves.

There are many factors that lead to the self being considered as worthless, the most important of which is the activation of the self without any free endeavor. As we know, man feels his ego arise in him after childhood, without having done any attempt to acquire it. It is the lack of attempt to acquire the self that makes man feel no importance in it, and do no study on its characteristics.

Education is of great significance in self-discovery. Unfortunately, societies that neglect the role of religion and moral ethics in various aspects of human life, do not feel enough respect and value for the life of human beings so as to acknowledge its existence, and consider its education as important. If the “self” were of importance to man today, millions of human lives would not be at the peril of tyrants' whimsical desires and wishes.

Self-alienation

Self-alienation involves the lack of the self, the absence of some of the elements of the ego which may be caused by several factors. Considering the evolutions of the self and its definite or indefinite state, we can list eight meanings for self-alienation. They can be categorized into two main groups:

1. Negative Self-alienation

Negative self-alienation includes the lack

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of the self or the absence of some of its elements that make man fail in his life. This form of self-alienation can be of six kinds:

1- Ignorance about the self: This kind of self-alienation has engulfed most of humanity today. Although prophets of God and great men of wisdom have preached man to discover themselves ever since the history of mankind began, their preaching has seldom been entirely fruitful. Self-knowledge is so important that an ideology is useless if it cannot make man discover himself and what is proper and appropriate to his life.

The point here is that with all the unknown and unsolved mysteries in man, how can the self-alienation caused by lack of knowledge of the domains of human life be eradicated? Considering the quality of “self-familiarity,” the answer should be quite obvious, for it is one of the characteristics of human life that when it gains some extent of knowledge of its self, it can save itself from self-alienation only to that extent. Of course, if man has the capability to discover himself but does not do so, he will suffer from one of the most degraded forms of self-alienation.

2- Losing the self: In this kind of self-alienation, one sees one's self in another person. It is caused by two basic factors:

a) Extreme extroversion, where man thinks too highly of “other than himself,” and is drowned in its attraction. Such an inadvertent tendency toward others can alienate man from himself. The only way to escape this

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kind of self-alienation is by paying attention to the fact that no advantage possessed by the “other than oneself” should make one lose one's “own self. ”

b) Sometimes it is the weakness and incapability of the “self” that cannot safeguard its independence. The feeling of humiliation may lead to such weakness and incompetence.

These two factors can make man feel that he exists actually outside himself – feel that his life exists in others.

3- Self-defiance: If one knows that cruelty to others actually means cruelty toward oneself, and that escaping duties is in fact escaping one's own self, and that lying can distort reality, but still does cruel deeds and tells lies, has in fact defied his own self. When man feels his internal tendency toward the philosophy and aim of life, but destroys it with his own desires and wishes, is he not defying himself? Denying the beginning and the end of creation is a sign of self-alienation.

4- Bargain-like self-alienation: This kind of self-alienation is based upon greed for benefit and advantage. Those who suffer from it consider themselves as merchandise that can be traded with others. They are ready to lose even themselves in return for a profit.

5- Living with an unreal self: This kind of self-alienation involves ignoring one's own elements of life. Man neglects his own potentials and lives with his unreal self. There are two kinds of unreal self:

a) The self that is full of desires, hopes and aims that pertain to selfishness. This is the unreal

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self that normal people deal with. Their self, in other words, is a mere set of baseless tendencies and wishes.

b) The self that copies and imitates the life of others. Many human beings live with the self of others, not their own. They imitate the behavior and thoughts of other people; their life is no more than a photograph of others' life.

6- Ignoring the power and advantages of the self: Man has a great many potentials, which are what make him superior to other living beings. Outstanding figures of history have been those who have succeeded in activating these potentials. This is the kind of self-alienation man will suffer from if he cannot manage his potentials and advantages. In fact, several factors make him escape his potentials, and become self-alienated. As Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi says:

جمله عالم ز اختیار و هست خود می‌گریزند در سر سرمست خود

تا دمی از هوشیاری وارهند ننگ خمر و بنگ بر خود می‌نهند

می گریزند از خودی در بیخودی یا به مستی یا به شغل ای مهتدی

(People are running away from their own existence, their own free will… but where to? To stupefying infatuations that will take them far away from consciousness and awareness – if, even, momentarily. They turn to drugs and alcohol and submit to being dehumanized. With the

occupation or infatuation they acquire, they are fleeing from self-consciousness toward unconsciousness, but they do not know that they will be pulled back into their natural, physical self by the chains of their desires and whims, for their escape was not upon God's command. )

If man loses supreme self-awareness, then conflicting and contradicting forms of awareness and destructive forms of freedom can bring about his intoxication and self-alienation.

2. Positive Self-alienation

Here, we refer to intelligible developments of the self. According to the end it may have, this kind of development may be of two forms:

a) Positive self-alienation with natural, normal orientation and destination: Man's life undergoes developments as time and his life pass. His advance in age also brings about evolutions in his relationship with the universe. Another factor is more knowledge, which can change man's self. The new-formed self can in turn alienate man from his previous selves. By gaining knowledge, man acquires more new “selves. ” In many cases, the new self is caused by the natural, fatalistic flow of life; that self should be discarded, for developments in the self that are not caused by the freedom of human character have no value.

b) Self-alienation on the path to evolution: This form of self-alienation is caused by evolutions in man's internal existence. It differs from the former kind of self-alienation, however, in the fact that it happens at the individual's free will. The individual attempts to find a new self on the path to evolution. In fact, this form of self-alienation involves abandoning

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previous selves in order to achieve a developed, evolved self. Such a new self is impossible without making use of freedom.

When discussing this form of self, we must keep a few points in mind:

1- The factor of endeavor and adjusting the self on the path to evolution is far beyond passive, mortal selves. This basic factor may be considered as man's higher knowledge of supreme ideals.

This theory is quite useful in finding the grounds needed and the correct explanations about the means to pass on to evolutional 'selves,' but it cannot provide the management factor that is able to correctly give the 'selves' and their means (the knowledge, experiences and gradual familiarity with ideals) evolutional adjustment.

2- The origin of man's endeavor toward an evolved self lies in his spiritual aspect. In other words, we must admit that man has a spiritual aspect and that it is capable of guiding his selves on the path to evolution and perfection.

3- When the selves are guided onto the path to evolution, the previous ones are not eliminated, for not all of the previous elements and aspects are negative or imperfect enough to be deleted; they do contain elements necessary for the new selves, like correct ideals. Furthermore, some elements of the previous selves can provide the preliminary development and growth for the new ones.

4- A more evolved self means changes inside the self in order to achieve more independence and eliminate fatalistic states surrounded by the changes in nature and other human beings.

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Evolution in the self makes man's potentials and talents become activated, changes his internal conflicts into constructive ones, and increases the capacity of his existence.

5- The evolutions in the new self, along with use of freedom, eliminate the chains that trap man, granting him greater internal freedom.

6- The human self must take eternal prosperity into consideration if it intends to evolve, for as the eternal capital, the self cannot be exchanged for anything except eternal prosperity.

7- By achieving eternity, the self becomes immortal due to divine immortality. This does not mean, however, that it moves to another world in which it becomes immortal; it does mean, either, that the self is totally demolished. We are referring to the elevating evolution of the self in this world – the expansion and development of the various aspects of human existence.

8- Along with any change or development the self undergoes, it finds new characteristics, too. If it achieves divine immortality, it will never think about gaining advantages or personal benefit, or competing against “other than the self. ”

The Qualities of Existence Dependent upon the Self

If man's existence becomes dependent upon his self, he can save himself from negative self-alienation. In other words, the human self must be independent in selecting goals and means and what is proper for man's life. There are three points that should be kept in mind about existence dependent upon the self:

1- When man's existence is dependent upon the human self, it does not mean that it is abstractly isolated from natural and human factors; it should

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not be dependent upon what others do, like a musical instrument that needs to be played by others.

2- Dependency upon the self implies obeying the logical principles of life.

3- Self-dependent existence does not mean exploiting other human beings as one's tools. If man is free of negative self-alienation, he will never claim “I am the end, and the others are the means,” for that would take him to the inflation of his natural self, not the independence of his human self.

The steps needed to be taken in order to return to the self are:

a) First, man must become aware of the issue of life and its value and significance. Humans cannot regain their lost existence without proving the independence value of life.

b) Human laws must have origins far superior to the desires of natural life; likewise, the executors of the law must also have supernatural tendencies so that they can guide people toward an existence dependent on the self.

c) Education is quite significant in making the existence dependent upon the self-embrace reality. Education must devote all of its efforts and use all of its skills and appropriate expertise ever since man is born into trying to make him understand that he is for now merely a meager stream of existence originating from the foothills of history, genetics and the environment; quite soon, however, the immense power hidden in him will change him into an 

ocean so great that all the other streams, rivers and lakes will turn to him for

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help. In order to demonstrate to man this amazing development, it is necessary to introduce him to thousands of outstanding figures in history who have taken great steps toward changing man's goals and way of life.

d) Man must gain a clear understanding of independence and dependence; he should realize that total independence is impossible, and total dependence also leads to man's alienation.

Finding the Roots of Man's Weaknesses

In our analysis of human shortcomings, the following factors can be mentioned:

1- The dependence of human life upon realities outside it: Man's physical aspect depends on a series of internal and external factors that follow specific rules; these factors sometimes bring about shortcomings in man. In the spiritual aspect – concerning man's potentials and instincts – there are extremely delicate and sensitive relationships that may be distorted and disabled by other powerful factors. Thus, man possesses a series of physical and spiritual abilities and limitations he cannot escape. These limitations do not however, a) inhibit the order and harmony in his life, and b) man has no responsibility concerning his involuntary inabilities.

2- The shortcomings caused by emergent ignorance: Man never knows what kind of spiritual or mental state he will be in the next moment.

ای برادر عقل یک دم با خود آر دم به دم در تو خزان است و بهار

(Do thought and intuition inside Yourself, and you will find that various states and moods Keep arising in you. Indeed, springs and autumns rise and fall in us. )

Thus, as Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi (Rumi) sees it,

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the human spiritual states – if not derogatory and vulgar – can be related to God.

Man may guess what his future spiritual state may be by means of comparisons and metaphors, but he can never have definite knowledge of it. This kind of shortcoming makes man moderate in his feelings of innate greed and ambition, and prevents him from rebellion. By reinforcing human thought and intelligence in the knowledge of facts, this can be overcome.

3- Voluntary shortcomings that originate from man himself: The two weaknesses mentioned above are not considered as imperfections in the creation of man, for they are involuntary and cannot be eliminated entirely; however, man suffers from a series of shortcomings that are brought about by actions he does at his own free will, and is responsible himself for overcoming them. Wars, atrocities, lies, and addictions are examples of shameful weaknesses that are caused by man himself, and only he is responsible for eliminating them.

There are three situations in which the powers and weaknesses of human beings reveal themselves:

1- Differences in potentials and talents and involuntary situations make people differ. A genius is quite different from someone who has fairly little intelligence. The former can be regarded as powerful, and the latter as weak. When a person has literary talent and taste, he can be considered as stronger than the one who does not have it. Various talents for learning, intelligence, the

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power of guessing, and talent for economics, law and politics can categorize people into strong or weak. The variety and diversity in talents and characteristics is so great that some people may be strong in certain potentials and weak in other ones. In such cases, since each person has advantages that others do not possess, the members of the society must harmonize their different potentials and talents to serve everyone's development and perfection.

2- Sometimes the difference between the strong and the weak is used for progress toward intelligible life, and both the strong and the weak aim for the pinnacles of intelligible life. The diversity in the potentials, talents, emotions, desires, thoughts, cultures, physical situations and social environments is so great among people that the difference between the strong and the weak can never be totally eliminated; social life, instead, should be adjusted in a way that each individual, with all of his/her characteristics, can head toward intelligible life.

3- Sometimes the strong and the weak compete against each other. Their competitions can be divided into three groups:

a) Competition without conflict: The strong and the weak continue their lives without intersecting each other. They each go their own way, none taking action against the other.

b) Disturbing competition: This kind of rivalry may lead to the opponent's doom. We must say that all rivalries and competitions in the domain of purely natural life that are dominated by the self are of this second kind; the 'other than the self' is considered as

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worthless, and man tries to dominate anything to his advantage if he has the power to do so, and if he does not, he will take any measures needed to get it, burning in desire all the time. Like animals, their 'natural self' knows no boundaries, ever-inflating; even worse, they always believe that the whole universe owes them everything, and whenever they fail to achieve their desires, they think that the world has been cruelly atrocious to them, and they should seek their revenge.

c) Constructive competition: This kind of rivalry guides both sides toward perfection. Such rivalry is quite approvable, even reiterated. Many verses of the Qur’an emphasize the importance of competing with others in good deeds:

و لکل وجهة هو مولیها فاستبقوا الخیرات

“And for every nation there is an end, a goal in life; so, what matters is to be ahead of others in good deeds. ” (2: 147)

Those who do not take part in the competition of doing good, make themselves weak and incapable at their own will.

In brief, in this kind of rivalry between humans, which is of the constructive kind, the two persons do not confront front each other aiming to destroy one another; it is a serious attempt to do more good, to become more talented than the struggling men were before.

Conscience

Conscience is one of man's most significant aspects. There are two approaches to study the conscience: an internal study of oneself and others, and by means of anthropological studies.

The Definition of Conscience

There are two types of definitions for conscience:

1-

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Some are general definitions, which take an overall look at it, without presenting any specific cases; for example, conscience means awareness about the self or one's character.

2- Others are specific definitions, concerning the effects of conscience, for instance, facts like bring a compass of the character or supervisory role conscience.

A Scientific and Philosophical Study of Conscience

The conscience can be studied from two points of view. One viewpoint is based on the scientifically observable effects of the conscience, and the other explores its roots philosophically. Due to the following three factors, we are obliged to select the philosophical study:

a) The conscience has no physical entity. No dimension of time or place can be specified for it.

b) It has opposite aspects that can never be collected in any physical form. For instance, the conscience can both torture and be tortured.

c) Internal freedom, one of the most original aspects of conscience, cannot be interpreted with any scientific principle.

The Criticism on the Originality of the Conscience

Several reasons have been posed against the existence of conscience. Let us criticize them:

1- The function of the conscience is not general: Some believe that if the conscience were universally original – in other words, if all human beings possessed it – why does it not show in all of them? Could anyone imagine someone like Genghis Khan having a conscience?

We must respond by saying that there are many instincts in humans about which people are highly diverse in possessing, using and fulfilling, such as the sexual instinct, emotions, curiosity and lots of others. Even the absence of some non-instinctive mental

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activities or a spiritual phenomenon cannot imply that an individual is basically devoid of it.

2- Differences in the functions of the conscience in human beings: Some say that if the conscience is to be original, why is there so much diversity among people in its functions? Various functions for the conscience cannot defy its existence, as the existence of brutally savage human beings cannot prove that there is no conscience; the furthest we can go is to say that conscience is a relative phenomenon, prone to variation in its intensity, which varies from one person to another. If people use their conscience in various intensities, it should lead to the conclusion that they do not have a conscience at all, as diversities people have in their usage of their mental powers cannot imply that they have no intelligence.

3- If the conscience is original, why is there so much debate and dispute over it among thinkers? We must counter argue by pointing out that thinkers are in debate and dispute over a great many things, and conscience is merely one of them. Do philosophers not disagree over matter and its identity? Is there absolute agreement over motion and time? If thinkers are in debate over issues like matter, motion and time, it does not defy them, as is the case about conscience.

4- The function of the conscience is not compatible with that of intelligence and reason: Some claim that the conscience does not function compatibly with intelligence and reason; the former

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is highly concerned about the good and evil of actions, whereas the latter is not at all. Moral conscience can identify gratitude and thankfulness, and intelligence can study it. There is no conflict between reason and conscience, despite the occasional differences seen between some principles of moral conscience and some schools of thought. For instance, moral conscience decrees that be fair and just, but hedonism believes that a person should enjoy himself, going after his desires. This is definitely not a conflict between the methods of moral conscience and those of intelligence and reason; it is a difference between the principles of moral conscience and the views in various schools of thought.

5- Is conscience created by the society? Some sociologists believe that conscience is an outcome of man's social life, and has no identity of its own. We must say that human societies are not capable of creating new phenomena in man; the most they can do is to give them a touch of color. Can the society make its members discover the unknown without thinking? Can a society make all of its members mathematicians? Can we have a society in which people's desires are controlled in such a way that everyone follows a moderate, balanced way of life?

Man is a being possessing a great many potentials, and high flexibility. Human societies can merely determine how the potentials are put to use. In brief, if this means that social and environmental laws and factors are generally influential in coloring the

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conscience, it is a highly proper point, confirmed by our scientific and sensory observations. It does not mean, however, that the conscience is totally a consequence of the society and environmental factors. We also admit that social and environmental factors may affect the conscience, but it does not mean that the conscience is made by the society, even if it is done by an internal flexibility.

6- The conscience starts functioning from childhood: Freud believes that the conscience is based and founded by the dos and don'ts engraved in the human mind in childhood. Since a child obeys his/her parents, he believes, and the parents continually order him to do or not do certain things to protect him, a phenomenon called moral conscience is gradually formed in the child.

If commands and preventions can lead to moral conscience, the same thing should happen in animals, which is not true. Freud may argue that it is only man who can develop a conscience through intrigue and forbiddance, whereas we must accept that man has an internal characteristic that allows him to develop conscience when encountering certain motives.

7- There are no fixed principles concerning conscience: Some believe that it is impossible to set fixed principles for the conscience, for it is a personal, variable phenomenon. Our response is that each mental or spiritual phenomenon arising in man is accompanied with certain personal factors. Yet, all phenomena follow their own

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set of laws. When phenomena like recall, will, or decision-making arise in man, they are accompanied with the individual's certain characteristics – thus, it is characterized, and does not defy its orderly nature.

8- Moral conscience cannot be fixed, for man's moods and mental states vary: Since human mental states are always changing, moral conscience also undergoes continual change, and no fixed phenomenon can be associated with it. Some people are extremely conscientious in some cases, and at other times totally put their conscience aside. Thus, how could we ever consider moral conscience as being a fixed phenomenon? We must say that we should consider the difference between conscience – or any phenomenon – and an activity done under certain circumstances. Conscience itself is a fixed phenomenon, but its activities depend on a variety of factors. Do we use our intelligence and reason equally at all times? If we do not, does that defy its existence?

9- Conscience and man's tendency toward machinery: Some say that despite all the value and significance moral conscience has, there is no need to continue discussing it now that technology has begun to dominate man. Nowadays, man does not need an internal factor, or a built-in judge to distinguish good from bad. Our response is that having accepted the necessity of conscience for man's emancipation, we must take its advice in the technology-infatuated world we are living in. If people realize its significance, they will take fundamental steps toward its revival. Even now, people are still

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deeply moved when they learn about sacrificial actions made by other human beings.

The Importance of Conscience

As Bertrand Russell says, “Man has never needed his conscience as crucially as he does today. ” That is how necessary conscience is. Let us also quote from Tolstoy: “Whoever claims that human life can be managed merely by means of intelligence and reason has in fact defied the very possibility of life. ”

Using the conscience can remove the diversities and differences between humans. The most important factor in harmonizing and uniting the people and classes of a society is the conscience. It is the strongest builder of justice. Conscience can prevent atrocities, oppression, and harness man's desire for fame. It can present man with ideals, which are vital if man is to bring his desires and wishes under control.

The Characteristics and Consequences of Conscience

The most important characteristics and consequences of conscience are:

1- Conscience is where memories are kept. If so memories about pleasant, shameful, embarrassing, good and bad events cannot be insignificant to man's character.

2- There are various levels for conscience.

3- Conscience and reason can be harmonious.

4- Conscience understands the basic principles that reason follows, such as: The whole is larger than its parts, reality exists, and man should act reasonably.

5- The functions of the conscience are also reflected on other human beings.

6- Man's character develops along with the development of his conscience.

7- Conscience is man's safest guide.

8- The conscience can become ugly and vulgar, a burden on man's existence.

9- The conscience can be tortured.

10- The conscience can suffer from great anxiety and

worry.

11- The conscience can be held responsible.

12- The conscience can differentiate good from evil.

13- The conscience can supervise.

14- The conscience can suffer from upsets and fits.

15- The conscience can decree.

16- The conscience can find serenity.

17- The certainty of the conscience is much greater than that of reason and intelligence.

18- The conscience can set up trials.

19- The conscience can scold and reprimand.

20- The conscience is capable of judgment.

21- The conscience can be entrapped or freed.

22- The conscience executes the law.

23- The moderate conscience shows facts without manipulation.

24- The conscience reminds human beings about the necessity of sympathy.

25- The conscience is where man can privately confer with himself.

26- The conscience can speak with man's reason and intelligence.

27- The conscience can be deceived.

28- The conscience can be disabled.

29- The conscience can be put to the test.

30- The conscience can weaken and strengthen.

31- Man's internal freedom arises from his conscience.

32- The conscience reflects God's words.

33- The conscience feels that man's “self” is immortal.

34- The conscience has conflicting waves.

35- The conscience reminds man about the objectiveness of creation.

The Relationship between Recognizing Oneself and Recognizing God

The Holy Prophet of Islam has said,

من عرف نفسه فقد عرفه ربه

“Know yourself, and you will know your God. ”

Let us study 20 significant points on the above hadith:

1- The human nature is abstract – it is not a physical entity. God is also far beyond materiality and all of its attributes.

2- God possesses true unity, and so does the human nature, which is in charge of man's internal and external components.

3- Although the human nature is related

with the human body, it manages all of the body organs, natural instincts, forces and potentials.

4- The Almighty God, though connected to the universe, is far superior to space or time; the human nature is also superior to the human body organs in regard to time.

5- God is virtually united, but also has many innate characteristics that do not conflict with the divine unity.

6- God has created the universe out of complete nothingness; there was no sign or history of it before whatsoever – without any matter previously. The human nature does the same with its imaginations, analyses and discoveries.

7- God is aware of both the unchangeable and the variable; however, his awareness about the variable does not cause his knowledge to multiply. Likewise, knowledge created by pertinence to the variable does not lead to change.

8- God and the human nature are both doers equipped with free will. There are some differences, however, between divine and human free will.

9- God knows all generalities and details, and this knowledge of the details does not affect God's divine nature. The human nature, also capable of awareness about details, does not change by intuitive knowledge, either.

10- God is dominant over all components and events in the universe, and He dominates all components of the universe equally.

11- We can recognize the principle that God exists and has glory and beauty; however, we are unable to comprehend God's divine nature, for our tools of recognition do not have the capability to dominate the nature of

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divinity. In the same way, the sacred nature of man is not identifiable either; we can only identify man's principles of existence and his characteristics.

12- God has affection for all of His creations, especially mankind. This affection does not rise out of instinctive factors or seeking benefit. The human nature is also capable of being affectionate to man's inventions and creations, and can develop his affection to be free of any motives of advantage-seeking or instinctive factors.

13- God loves beauty and perfection, and although He infinitely possesses beauty and greatness, He wants His creations to possess them too. Regardless of all social and cultural factors, the human nature also has a tendency for beauty and perfection; seeking beauty and perfection can be considered as some of the most important of man's nature.

14- Whatever God creates, God's divine nature remains unchanged; in other words, God's creations are not parts of a whole, which break away from it when created. Likewise, the human nature can create billions of ideas, imaginations, decisions and deeds, but none of them affect it.

15- The Almighty God is constantly active, and all of the changes and developments in the universe eventually refer to God's continual activity.

16- God created the universe without intending to gain any advantages. The human nature can also fulfill its duties without expecting any benefit in return. By purifying his soul, man can learn to do things for their own sake, not for a reward or escaping punishment.

17- We can never interpret the universe

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reasonably unless we accept God and the fact that the universe depends on God.

18- Since God has absolute knowledge and control over the universe, His patience is endless. The human nature has some of that patience, too.

19- By means of intuitive knowledge, God is aware of His nature and characteristics. The human nature is also capable of gaining such knowledge.

20- The universe cannot limit God – in other words, the creatures in the universe cannot occupy space or locations where God is absent. The human nature is also so dominant over the human body that nobody organ can never be limited or denied.

Man's Four Relationships

Four relationships can be associated with man:

1- Man-Himself: Man has self-consciousness, and is able to change and evolve himself. It is this self- consciousness that has led to various branches in psychology. If man were not aware about himself, he could never know about the psychological effects of others. There a few laws that govern man's relationship with himself:

High awareness of the fact that man is a part of the objective universe: Man must increase his knowledge of all of his physical and spiritual aspects, and remove any dark points about his existence. He should make the most of what he knows about himself. The fact that man's life is a part of the harmony of the universe is highly significant. If man reaches a level of awareness where he considers himself a part of the universe, he will find these qualities:

● He will not stupefy himself.

●

He will avoid deceits that are destructive to his soul.

● Greed, boastfulness and arrogance will leave him.

● He will be able to use and enjoy beauties.

● Destructive rivalries and conflicts will be replaced by constructive competition.

● Man will achieve spiritual expansion.

● He will be able to assess means and ends correctly.

● He will interpret power accurately.

● Human societies will become a united family.

● Man will endeavor to spiritually develop and increase the knowledge of his fellow beings.

The necessity of accepting self-possession: Man must put sincerity into his relationship with his own self, and accept the truth.

Self-deceit is the worst way man can betray himself. If man does not accept reality, he will be betraying himself.

Maximum use of man's positive, constructive potentials: With self-awareness, man will never destroy his own positive potentials. He will not use his potentials in order to destroy other human beings; he will use them for his own spiritual development and serving others.

Affection toward others that arises out of human nature: Self-awareness makes people be kind to one another. By kindness here we mean affection rising out of sublimated emotions, not purely natural tendencies. By spiritual elevation, man sees himself in harmony with others in the universe, and thus begins to feel affection for them.

2- Man-The Society: Emile Durkheim has presented a rather extremist approach to man's relationship with the society. He believes that the human self is built by the society, and man has no independent

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identity regarding his social surroundings. In response, we must say that man possesses many potentials, and the society can merely develop or inhibit them.

Though the society is able to take charge of radical identities, it cannot determine the identities. Preparing the grounds for man's physical and spiritual development – or hindrance – is the farthest the society can go. In other words, Man is born with a series of potentials, and many factors can influence them, one of which is the society and its various components. It can, however, trap man into fatalistic, unconscious factors guided by social management, which may prevent human beings from becoming self-alienated.

3- Man-The Universe: If man thinks he has been created as a worthless being for a certain period of time and thus has no relationship whatsoever with the universe, he has in fact begun to destroy himself. With regard to man's relationship with the universe, he has several responsibilities:

a) Man must discover the universe and the orderly harmony governing it: Man's approach to the universe must be both general and detailed. From the detailed point of view, man studies and discovers the universe by means of his senses and technical devices, whereas through his general point of view he can understand concepts and meanings.

b) Taking the rules of gravity in the universe seriously and making use of them: The universe includes many physical and spiritual laws that cannot be ignored. Cause and effect, and also actions and reactions are examples of such rules,

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which man should use.

c) The universe has a supernatural, divine aspect: The supernatural, divine aspect of the universe consists of its relationship with its creator. Understanding this aspect makes man's sense of duty and responsibility be aroused, and find a new, profound concept for life.

4- Man-God: Man can achieve perfection by means of his relationship with God. This is when man understands that God created him perfectly, so he should develop divine attributes in himself. If man realizes that divine perfection and greatness awaits him, he would never keep himself busy indulging with worldly affairs.

In his relationship with God, man must take God's dominance and control on him seriously, for if man feels that his whole existence is overwhelmed by God, he will never deviate from the path of righteousness.

Spiritual Moderation

Spiritual moderation involves a harmony among man's internal potentials and the factors that activate them. The better man's potentials do their orderly duties, the more moderate man will be. Since human potentials are interrelated, the balance of man's spiritual system is a sign of the moderation of each potential. Likewise, if each and every potential is well-balanced, the whole system is moderate, too.

Spiritual moderation can also be regarded as “mental well-being. ” The higher man's mental well-being is, the better his spiritual moderation, too. By “mental,” however, we do not refer to only formal thoughts, but man's overall mental activities, including incoming feelings, imagination, associating meanings, selecting the means and balancing the means and the end.

Spiritual moderation does not exist, or cannot

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be scientifically discovered. The reasons for this are:

1- The infinity of man's greed for gaining advantages, whether selfish or seeking perfection: Since man knows no boundaries in expanding his “self-love” or “supreme self,” there can be no true moderation for the free psyche. The endless quality of the self is due to man's supernatural aspect. The human character has two sides. On one hand he deals with what his senses reveal to him, and on the other hand he is concerned with the supernatural and moral values. The human self can infinitely advance on both sides, so we cannot imagine a real moderation between them; neither on the positive side, which pertains to the “supreme self,” nor the negative one, which involves the natural self.

2- Man's endless flexibility: Man can vary fatalistic factors and make optional selections due to his infinite flexibility. Proper education and training, for example, can bring about such a spiritual revolution in man that a criminal becomes a fair person, or vice versa. This proves that true moderation is not verifiable.

The Relativity of Spiritual Moderation

Man's spiritual moderation is a relative truth, for each human being has his/her own spiritual balance depending on his/her specific social, moral, legal, cultural and historical circumstances. The impurities in the spirit make it have relative balance. If the human self succeeds in harmonizing the flow of his internal potentials, there will be spiritual moderation in the domain of “how it is. ”

The management of the “self” in this domain involves preserving the desired self – this

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is the main goal of the self in managing man's existence.

The self can aim for two kinds of self-preservation in the domain of the psyche:

a) Self-preservation based on fatalistic factors: Like animals, man lives only according to his natural instinct and tendencies in this state. In such people, spiritual moderation is merely the harmony between instincts and fatalistic factors. It is a pseudo-fatalistic product of the management of the self, and if the unconscious parts are put together as a machine, they would all function harmoniously.

b) Self-preservation based on the development of potentials: Some people to some extent put their potentials and powers to work. Influenced by geographical, cultural, legal, and political factors of their society, they cannot consider ideals any higher than their society offers for their “self,” so they make no attempt for its advance. They go after anything they consider useful – that is, what their social circumstances offers them.

If there are sophisticated figures in such social conditions that can make people realize that they can make better use of their potentials and forces, they will have a chance of being guided to the path of perfection and greatness.

By elevating himself from the “how it is” to the domain of “how it should be,” man can have better spiritual moderation. Man is a being that possesses the basic factor for such a promotion; he has a built-in tendency towards the proper virtues he deserves.

There are two reasons that prove that man possesses a strong internal force that

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moves him from “how it is” to “how it should be:

a) The fact that many human beings throughout history have achieved extreme greatness and perfection: History shows us many prophets of God, men of wisdom and moralists that have harnessed selfishness and achieved the ultimate level man can advance to. Without such internal purification, Abraham could never have attempted to slay his own son.

b) The necessity of education and guidance: If the potential to enter the domain of “how it should be” didn't exist in man, education would never have existed; we clearly see, however, that education has had a profound effect on human beings.

The essential factor that evolves man from “how it is” to “how it should be” is his perfection-seeking, intense eagerness to expand his existence all across the whole universe and totally dominate it.

Any human being who enjoys mental well-being will be interested in such spiritual development.

The moderation man achieves through development and perfection is true moderation, and he will see every event and moment of the universe as new. As Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi says:

تازه می‌گیر و کهن را می‌سپار که هر امسالت فزون است از سه پار

جان فشان ای آفتاب معنوی مر جهان کهنه را بنما نوی

ای جهان کهنه را تو جان نو از تن بی جان و

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دل افغان شنو

گرچه هر قرنی سخن نو آورد لیک گفت سالفان یاری کند

تا نزاید بخت تو فرزند نو خون نگردد شیر شیرین، خوش شنو

Don't let yourself get stuck in the past and the old; remember that your current year is worth more than your last three years altogether. Endeavor to elevate your character the best you can, for your efforts will refine your inside of all the old precipitated in you from nature, and refresh your soul. When your soul is refreshed, the universe before you will also be fresh and new. When man thinks about God's divine state from the very depth of his conscience and devotes his whole ego to perceiving divinity, he will completely realize that each moment of his life will be new, and his soul will be fresh is its contact with God.

Though each century brings with itself new speech and new speakers, the past also promotes it by establishing the fundamentals of human culture. Your spiritual prosperity should present the results of original truths like newborn babies, which open their mouths and feed upon previous knowledge, thus evolving your spiritual life.

In fact, Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi (Rumi) is inviting man to abandon this material world, and submit himself to divine changes.

Internal moderation in the domain of

“as it should be” is not possible without considering the supreme aim of life and obeying moral values. If the human self is to develop and establish a correct relationship with the universe, it must be attracted by the ultimate aim of life and acquire the highest of human virtues.

In brief, taking into consideration the philosophy of creation and obeying divine values is absolutely crucial if spiritual moderation is to be achieved. Only then will man's internal potentials be in harmony with various factors, and result in his mental well-being and spiritual moderation.

Spiritual Expansion and Contraction

When expanding, the human spirit finds amazing qualities so amazing that one would think it has undergone complete change. Spiritual expansion cannot be defined logically, and only experiencing it can really let us understand it.

Spiritual expansion is accompanied by the feeling of absolute freedom. In other words, in such a state man feels that nothing can hold him back; he is in an unbelievably exciting state that no material emotions pertaining to nature or its aspects can fathom. When man's emotions are in harmony with his intelligence and logic, psychological expansion appears in its supreme state.

The Relativity of Spiritual Expansion

point

Human spiritual expansion can be regarded as relative from three points of view:

a) The Factors that Make It Happen: like physiological, mental, spiritual, personal, and many other factors.

b) The Fundamental Elements of Character: Since these elements vary in people, the expansion caused by encountering events varies in each person.

c) The Perfection and Imperfection of People's Characters: This is also a significant factor. The

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spiritual expansion each person feels is proportionate with that person's system of character. For example, those who are drowning in their “natural self” find an expansion when they achieve a higher position or more wealth in which they regard the whole universe as their servant. One who seeks knowledge, on the other hand, considers unsolved scientific issues as crucially vital and cannot achieve spiritual expansion without figuring the unsolved out.

The Basic Origin of Spiritual Expansion and Contraction

Spiritual expansion and contraction pertains to the goal man aims for in his life. Those who have no real aim in life experience expansions and contractions equal to the normal joys and sorrows of everyday life.

When man sets for himself a goal in life and tries to achieve it, he experiences spiritual contraction if he encounters an obstacle hindering his progress, and expansion when he successfully passes it. When one has a great end like saving the people of a society, the expansion brought about by achieving it will be an incredibly immense spiritual promotion for him. In general, whenever the human spirit moves on the path to perfection, passing any obstacle on his way will result in expansion.

Conscious and Unconscious Expansions and Contractions

Expansions and contractions can be divided into two groups:

a) Conscious, and

b) Unconscious.

Sometimes man is qualitatively and quantitatively aware of the expansions and contractions, and sometimes he does not know anything about his spiritual state.

Spiritual expansions and contractions can also be regarded as conscious or unconscious by considering their causes. In other words, sometimes man knows what causes such spiritual states, and sometimes he

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does not.

When man encounters obstacles hindering his path to achieving his goal in life, and fails to pass it, he will experience one of the following spiritual states:

1- He may undergo mental contraction due to doubt and anxiety about achieving his goal. If such people have powerful thoughts, they will thus develop a pessimistic ideology.

2- He may abandon all efforts to reach his goal, and become totally indifferent. All values would then appear as worthless to him.

Those who have experienced progress toward perfection are able to withstand external setbacks, so they do not suffer from spiritual contractions when encountering obstacles.

The Expansion and Contraction of the Divine Conscience

Spiritual expansions and contractions can never penetrate into man's God-given conscience, for spiritual expansions and contractions are due to success and failure to achieve worldly advantages. The divine conscience is, however, far superior to these mediocre states. Many human beings, alas, are so drowned in material affairs that they disable their God-given conscience and waste their life on baseless expansions and contractions.

When the divine conscience is awaken in man, all normal expansions are replaced by supreme, divine expansions.

Having achieved divine expansion of conscience, man will undergo no more contractions, unless:

1- He feels a greater expansion which will make his current expansion seem meager.

2- Since man is in the natural world, he will always suffer from contractions in his worldly affairs until he reaches God. Divine expansions do make, however, man feel that these natural contractions are temporary and mortal.

The Consequences of Expansions and Contractions

Both expansions and contractions leave certain effects. Constant contractions depress the

soul, but frequent expansions result in spiritual joy and freedom.

The Reasons Why Anthropology Has Failed

Throughout history, a great many intellectuals have attempted to study and explore man from various points of view – scientific, mystical, philosophical, moral and religious. Although the amount of research done is so great that it cannot be totally discarded as unsuccessful, many scholars admit that the human nature is by no means discovered or revealed to them. The factors influential in its failure are:

1- As we already know, all facts are interrelated, and not knowing one of them will cast darkness on others, too. Man is an extremely complex being, full of countless, unsolved aspects and potentials. It is the unsolved aspects of man that has prevented the complete exploration of his nature. Incorrect interpretations of intuitive knowledge (where the recognized is the same as the recognizer) and free will (the dominance and supervision of the self over the positive and negative poles of an action) are examples that prove man's unsuccessful endeavor to generalize the laws and principles of nature to his own case.

2- On one hand, we have divine religions and men of wisdom and men of wisdom stating that man is a valuable being innately full of hidden potentials; on the other hand, the history of mankind shows that many human beings have not activated their potentials, and are thus devoid of a great deal of their deserved greatness. Such a contradiction has led these scientists to believe that there must some unknown X-factor in man that

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inhibits his development and progress.

This inability in man – that is, not all of his potentials being activated – cannot lead to the human nature remaining unsolved, for oppressing human potentials is not due to lack of knowledge about them, for man does not correctly put the little knowledge he already has about himself to use, either. Does man truly not know the fact that fighting righteousness is wrong, or does he know it and still does not stop doing it?!

3- Sometimes an incorrect point infiltrates the culture of a nation as a basic principle, which leads to incorrect interpretations of man. For instance, the culture of slavery so strongly penetrates into ancient India that even an intellectual like Aristotle accepts it and expresses ideas confirming its originality.

4- Analyzing and separating the human nature, which has become quite fashionable nowadays, has brought about great confusion in the humanities. Intellectuals who have studied one of man's aspects have become so obsessed with that one aspect that they have considered all of man's existence in it, thus imperfectly interpreting man. Despite its weaknesses, the analytical method does, however, have its advantages in studying and interpreting the nature of man it’s incredible accuracy, whereas combination methods sometimes show superficial tendencies that prevents correct knowledge.

Expertise is definitely an essential part of scientific advance, but experts of the humanities have to beware not to allow their expertise to cause disastrous damage to human harmony and unity.

The disadvantages of the analytical method are:

First, it cuts

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off all relationships existent between realities. The fact that man's various aspects are interrelated is totally ignored; all human facts are studied separately from each other.

Secondly, it neglects the harmony in the human character; therefore when one aspect of man's nature appears to be significant to an intellectual, he – consciously or unconsciously – interprets man solely from that point of view.

Ever since studying man by means of the purely analytical method became popular, one essentially important principle was forgotten: comparing man with at least one product of the interaction of chemical elements which has characteristics different from the separate, individual elements, in particular chemical compounds that cannot be changed back to their components. By comparing the unity and harmony existing in life and the human character with the product of a chemical compound, we see that it has both new qualities and is irreversible.

The third problem with the analytical method is that the thinker sometimes falls into the disastrous “There is nothing except this” state of mind. As some of them have claimed in interpretation of man:

● Man has a social aspect and nothing else.

● He is an absolutist, and nothing else.

● He is a hedonist, and nothing else.

● He is merely a sexual instinct and nothing else.

● Man is nothing but a wolf.

● He is an exploring animal, and nothing else.

● Man is no more than a selfish animal.

● He is an animal seeking freedom.

● Man is an ambitious animal greedy for power, and nothing else.

● Man is

a bargaining animal, and nothing else.

Anthropology can only make logical progress when the “There is nothing else except this” viewpoint does not exist.

Since only one aspect of man is considered in the analytical method, sometimes man becomes obsessed with it, and puts all of his other aspects at its service. Furthermore, obsession toward one aspect makes man fall astray from science and research, and become intensely infatuated merely with the fascinating fame and influence of 

outstanding figures of science.

The Problems with Contemporary Psychology

1- Some western psychologists tend to interpret psychological issues by means of biological, physiological or purely natural bases. This prevents them from discovering the human soul.

2- Some psychologists are quite sensitive about accepting advanced human psychic faculties, and ignore them. As Freud admits, “It upsets me to bring up mystic and supernatural issues. ”

3- One of the major faults with interpreting contemporary science is that it confines scientific thought to what experiments and observations provide. Some scientists have limited their analyses of the human psyche to what their observations provide them with. This is as devastatingly damaging as interpreting the world only by dividing it into the four elements. Taking into consideration the human soul and the endless aspects, potentials and changes it has in various circumstances, there will be no point in limiting ourselves to experimental sciences. When interpreting issues concerning the human psyche, different scientific fields should be employed, as is the case in accounting for physical phenomena.

4- Nowadays, psychology ignores the various activities, characteristics and aspects of the human soul,

or “heart. ” Persian literature cites 427 different words deriving from the “heart,” like “heart-disturbed,” “heart- given,” “heartless,” and many others. The human “heart” and conscience are so important that when intelligence, wisdom and logic fail in discovering the secret underlying an issue, man refers to his heart and nature to prove that he is right.

5- In contemporary psychology, a certain range has been abstracted and described for the psyche; going beyond these limits is considered as being psychologically unbalanced. In this kind of psychology, there is no difference between a rigid, stagnant soul and one that is dynamic and tries not to see an event the same at two different moments.

For instance, why do some people become fascinated in themselves, why do some others have a dynamically progressive psyche, and try to avoid self-obsession, and save themselves from nihilism? There is no distinction between a stagnant soul and a dynamic one in this psychology; both are treated as equal.

Life: The Hows and Whys

Asking about the Philosophy of Life

Asking about the philosophy of life has always existed. Many people around the world have posed the question. Basically, once any conscious human being succeeds in releasing his “self” from the ocean of anxieties, joys and tensions of his fatalistic, natural life and consider life itself, he will immediately reach the question of the philosophy of life. Without a correct interpretation of life, man will fall into nihilism; this became quite intense ever since machines dominated life increasingly in the 18th century, making people shout about the emptiness they feel in

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their lives.

In order to understand nihilistic feelings, we must first consider the mental characteristics of a nihilistic person:

1- A nihilist does not regard life as a necessary issue. He hates life rather than enjoying it.

2- For nihilists, the facts, principles and relationships of life undergo dramatic change. Beauty and ugliness are meaningless, orderliness becomes a mere hallucination.

3- A nihilist's soul is influenced quite quickly and easily, sometimes even taking his consciousness away. As Jalal-addin Muhammad Molawi (Rumi) says:

میگریزند از خودی در بیخودی یا به مستی یا به شغل ای مهتدی

With the occupation or infatuation they acquire, they are fleeing from self-consciousness toward unconsciousness, but they do not know that they will be pulled back into their natural, physical self by the chains of their desires and whims, for their escape was not upon God's command.

4- Values are worthless in the eyes of a nihilist; greatness and degradation are no different to him.

The first two groups basically do not ask about the philosophy of life at all. The first group, who cannot abstract life from themselves, are unable to consider the phenomenon of life. The second group, although developed people, regard life as a part of the whole universe, heading for the aim of creation. The second group are quite joyous people.

به جهان خرّم از آنم که جهان خرّم از اوست عاشقم بر همه عالم که همه عالم از اوست

I love this world because God has created it. The

beauty of the world comes from God.

Sa'adi