René Guénon - The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

The same author puts forward yet another reason: ‘Besides,’ says he, ‘it is the same for the Vedānta as for the other truths of science; there are no longer today any scientific secrets; science does not hesitate to publish the most recent discoveries.’ True enough, profane science is only made for ‘the public at large’, and since it came into being such has been the only justification for its existence; all too obviously it is really nothing more than it appears to be, for it keeps itself entirely on the surface of things, and it can be said to do so, not on principle, but rather through a lack of principle; certainly there is nothing in it worth the trouble of keeping secret, or more accurately, worth reserving to the use of an elite, and anyhow an elite would have no use for anything of that sort. In any case, what kind of assimilation can anyone hope to establish between the so-called ‘truths’ and ‘most recent discoveries’ of profane science and the teachings of a doctrine such as the Vedānta or any other traditional doctrine, even one that is more or less exterior? It is a case of the same confusion all the time, and it is permissible to ask to what extent anyone who perpetrates it with such insistence can have any understanding of the doctrine he wants to teach; there can really be no accommodation between the traditional spirit and the modern spirit, any concession made to the latter being necessarily at the expense of the former, since the modern spirit consists fundamentally in the direct negation of everything that constitutes the traditional spirit.

The truth is that the modern spirit implies in all who are affected by it in any degree a real hatred of what is secret, and of whatever seems to come more or less near to being secret, in any and every domain; and this affords an opportunity for a more precise explanation of the point. Strictly speaking it cannot even be said that ‘popularization’ of the doctrines is dangerous, at least so long as it is only a question of their theoretical side; for it would be merely useless, even if it were possible. But in fact truths of a certain order by their very nature resist all ‘popularization’: however clearly they are set out (it being understood that they are set out such as they are in their true significance and without subjecting them to any distortion) only those who are qualified to understand them will understand them, and for all others they will be as if they did not exist. This has nothing to do with ‘realization’ and the means appropriate to it, for in that field there is absolutely nothing that can have any effective value otherwise than from within a regular initiatic organization; from a theoretical point of view reserve can only be justified by considerations of mere opportunity, and so by purely contingent reasons, which does not mean that such reasons need be negligible. In the end, the real secret, the only secret than can never be betrayed in any way, resides uniquely in the inexpressible, which is by the same token incommunicable, every truth of a transcendent order necessarily partaking of the inexpressible; and it is essentially in this fact that the profound significance of the initiatic secret really lies, for no kind of exterior secret can ever have any value except as an image or symbol of the initiatic secret, though it may occasionally also be not unprofitable as a ‘discipline’. But it must be understood that these are things of which the meaning and the range are completely lost to the modern mentality, and incomprehension of them quite naturally engenders hostility; besides, the ordinary man always has an instinctive fear of what he does not understand, and fear engenders hatred only too easily, even when a mere direct denial of the uncomprehended truth is adopted as a means of escape from fear; indeed, some such denials are more like real screams of rage, for instance those of the self-styled ‘free-thinkers’ with regard to everything connected with religion.

Thus the modern mentality is made up in such a way that it cannot bear any secret or even any reserve; since it does not know the reason for them, such things appear only as ‘privileges’ established for somebody’s profit; neither can it bear any kind of superiority. Anyone who undertook to explain that these so-called ‘privileges’ really have their foundation in the very nature of beings would be wasting his time, for that is just what ‘egalitarianism’ so obstinately denies. Not only does the modern mentality boast, without any justification, of the suppression of all ‘mystery’ by its science and philosophy — exclusively rational as it is, and brought ‘within the reach of all’ — but the horror of ‘mystery’ goes so far in all domains as to extend also even into what is commonly called ‘ordinary life’. Nonetheless, a world in which everything had become ‘public’ would have a character nothing short of monstrous. The notion is still hypothetical, because we have not in spite of everything quite reached that point yet, and perhaps it never will be fully attained because it represents a ‘limit’; but it is beyond dispute that a result of that kind is being aimed at on all sides, and in that connection it may be observed that many who appear to be the adversaries of democracy are really doing nothing that does not serve further to emphasize its effects, if that be possible, simply because they are just as much penetrated by the modern spirit as are those whom they seek to oppose. In order to induce people to live as much as possible ‘in public’, it is not enough that they should be assembled in the ‘mass’ on every occasion and on any and every pretext, but they must in addition be lodged, not only in ‘hives’ as was suggested earlier, but literally in ‘glass hives’, and these must be arranged in such a way that they can only take their meals ‘in common’. People who are capable of submitting themselves to such an existence have really fallen to a ‘infra-human’ level, to the level, say, of insects like bees or ants; and in addition every device is brought into play for ‘organizing’ them so that they may become no more different among themselves than are the individuals of those same species of animals, and perhaps even less so.

As it is not the purpose of this book to enter into the details of certain ‘anticipations’, which would be only too easy to formulate and too quickly overtaken by events, this subject will now be left. It must suffice to have indicated summarily both the state at which things have now arrived and the tendency they must inevitably continue to follow, at least for a certain time yet. The hatred of secrecy is basically nothing but one of the forms of the hatred for anything that surpasses the level of the ‘average’, as well as for everything that holds aloof from the uniformity which it is sought to impose on everyone. Nevertheless, there is, within the modern world itself, a secret that is better kept than any other: it is that of the formidable enterprise of suggestion that has produced and that maintains the existing mentality, that has constituted it and as it were ‘manufactured’ it in such a way that it can only deny the existence and even the possibility of any such enterprise; and this is doubtless the best conceivable means, and a means of truly ‘diabolical’ cleverness, for ensuring that the secret shall never be discovered.

It has just been said that the moderns claim to exclude all ‘mystery’ from the world as they see it, in the name of a science and a philosophy characterized as ‘rational’, and it might well be said in addition that the more narrowly limited a conception becomes the more it is looked upon as strictly ‘rational’; moreover it is well enough known that, since the time of encyclopaedists of the eighteenth century, the most fanatical deniers of all supra-sensible reality have been particularly fond of invoking ‘reason’ on all occasions, and of proclaiming themselves to be ‘rationalists’. Whatever difference there may be between this popular ‘rationalism’ and a real philosophic ‘rationalism’, it is at any rate only a difference of degree, both the one and the other corresponding fully to the same tendencies, which have become more and more exaggerated and at the same time more ‘popular’ throughout the course of modern times. ‘Rationalism’ has so frequently been spoken of in the author’s earlier works, and its main characteristics have been so fully defined, that it might well suffice to refer the reader to those works; [42] In particular to East and West and to The Crisis of the Modern World . nevertheless, it is so closely bound up with the very conception of a quantitative science that a few more words here and now cannot well be dispensed with.