The man...

The man, however, who fully realized the importance and immensity of the task, and whose deep insight into the inner meaning of the history of Muslim thought and life, combined with a broad vision engendered by his wide experience of men and manners, would have made him a living link between the past and the future, was Jam«luddân Afgh«nâ.

If his indefatigable but divided energy could have devoted itself entirely to Islam as a system of human belief and conduct, the world of Islam, intellectually speaking, would have been on a much more solid ground today. The only course open to us is to approach modern knowledge with a respectful but independent attitude and to appreciate the teachings of Islam in the light of that knowledge, even though we may be led to differ from those who have gone before us.

This I propose to do in regard to the subject of the present lecture. In the history of modern thought it is Bradley who furnishes the best evidence for the impossibility of denying reality to the ego. In his Ethical Studies 9 he assumes the reality of the self; in his Logic10 he takes it only as a working hypothesis.

It is in his Appearance and Reality that he subjects the ego to a searching examination.11 Indeed, his two chapters on the meaning and reality of the self may be regarded as a kind of modern Upanishad on the unreality of the Jâv«tm«. 12 According to him, the test of reality is freedom from contradiction and since his criticism discovers the finite centre of experience to be infected with irreconcilable oppositions of change and permanence, unity and diversity, the ego is a mere illusion.

Whatever may be our view of the self - feeling, self-identity, soul, will - it can be examined only by the canons of thought which in its nature is relational, and all ‘relations involve contradictions’. Yet, in spite of the fact that his ruthless logic has shown the ego to be a mass of confusion, Bradley has to admit that the self must be ‘in some sense real’, ‘in some sense an indubitable fact’.13 We may easily grant that the ego, in its finitude, is imperfect as a unity of life.

Indeed, its nature is wholly aspiration after a unity more inclusive, more effective, more balanced, and unique. Who knows how many different kinds of environment it needs for its organization as a perfect unity? At the present stage of its organization it is unable to maintain the continuity of its tension without constant relaxation of sleep.