Dr. V.K. Maheshwari, Ph.D

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

If we study Greek philosophy from its mythological beginnings down to its decline into theosophical speculations and fantastic cultus. We found it turning, at the end, to the problem of man’s origin and destiny, his relation to God and the world, his fall and his deliverance from sin. The interest in such questions grew intense during the days of the Roman Empire,  among philosophers, and among the educated classes in general, as the great popularity of the Oriental religions and of the systems of thought influenced  them enormously. The Greek mind had lost its originality and vigour, and it was impossible to revive the corpse of philosophy by breathing into it the spirit of” Orientalism.”

During the last period of Hellenic speculation, a new religion which possessed many elements to recommend, was making converts in the Roman world. This religion, which had sprung from the soil of Judaism, preached the gospel of a father-God who is merciful and just and loves all his children alike, and promised the redemption of mankind through Jesus Christ, his Son. , Christianity struck a popular chord and satisfied a longing of the age. The conditions of deliverance were not made dependent on external and accidental goods, but on change of heart, repentance, and love of God and man.

It taught that no man was too low to be saved, that there was hope for all, that Christ would come again to establish his kingdom, first on earth and then in heaven, but, whether on earth or in heaven, it would be a kingdom of righteousness and love. It taught that, on the judgment day, the wicked, rich and powerful though they might be, would be confounded, and the pure in heart, however poor and lowly, would enter into glory. In offering deliverance from the sinful world and a future life of blessedness.

The Pharisaic conception of the righteousness of the letter is transformed by the founder of Christianity into the doctrine of the righteousness of the spirit. What is done should be done from love and worship of God and not from fear; purity of heart is of more avail, in his sight, than external observance of  rules and practices, the inner spirit of greater worth than outward forms. There is but one way of reaching salvation and that is to rid oneself of evil passions, of envy, anger, hatred, and revenge ; to forgive even those that hate us, for it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. Love and forgiveness take the place of hate and revenge; man shall love his neighbour as himself, and every human being is his neighbour.

With its spiritual monotheism, its doctrine of a life to come, its gospel of love, and the example of the suffering Christ, the new religion appealed to the Roman world. And as the number of its converts increased among the cultured classes, it could not ignore the philosophical conceptions rooted in the civilization in which it had to make its way. Indeed, Christianity, as it appeared in Palestine, owed its origin, in part at least, to this civilization; Judaism had not been able to resist the influences, ethical, political, social, religious, and intellectual, which pervaded the great Roman Empire ; and the Christian revolt was one of the results. The new world-religion was based on the growing spirit of cosmopolitanism and brotherhood, which Stoicism had done so much to inculcate; the conception of a spiritual deity taught by the philosophers; the doctrines of immortality contained in the popular Greek mysteries and Oriental religions; and the Jewish ideal of a personal God which succeeded in awakening the religious spirit where the abstract notions of the metaphysicians had failed.

Christianity was, in a measure, a child of its age, a child of Judaism and Hellenic-Roman civilization. But the influence of the age did not cease with its emergence into the world ; in addressing itself to the Greeks and Romans of the times, it gradually assimilated the culture of the world to which it brought its tidings. Had the Jewish-Christian section of the new religion, which interpreted it as a phase of Judaism, triumphed, it is not un- likely that Christianity would have been buried beneath the walls of Jerusalem.

In order to deliver its message effectively, Christianity had to solve a number of important problems. It had to justify its ‘ faith to reason, to defend itself against the attacks of the publicists and philosophers who in time came to take notice of it, and to show the reasonableness of its teachings. It was necessary for its leaders to meet their opponents on their own ground, to make use of the philosophical conceptions familiar to their minds, to fight them with their own intellectual weapons, their own philosophy. Such defenders of the faith, or Apologists, came when they were needed. But it also became necessary to define the creed, to formulate articles of faith, to establish a body of doctrine or dogmas. Here, again, minds trained in philosophy were of service in giving rational expression to the traditional beliefs of the Christian communities; and in this work, also, Greek thought exercised a significant influence on Christianity. The dogmas were officially defined by the great councils of the Church, but before agreement could be reached, much work had to be done: many solutions were offered and rejected, and many interpretations of the faith struggled for the victory. The victorious creed became the orthodox creed, and the thinkers who played important parts in defining it were called Fathers of the Church.

After the establishment of the fundamental doctrines and the triumph of Christianity as an organized State Church, came the period of philosophical construction, the elaboration of a philosophy the subject-matter and guiding principles of which were determined by the dogma. This philosophy, which constitutes the largest part of the philosophy of the Middle Ages, or Christian Philosophy,  had for its aim the exposition, systematization, and demonstration of the Christian dogmas, the construction of a theory of the world and of life on a Christian basis. The thinkers who performed this service were called Schoolmen and their systems Scholastic Philosophy.

In all the cases we have mentioned, Greek philosophy was drawn upon for help in the solution of the problems. But the attitude of mind was not that of the ancient thinkers: their object had been, in the main, to give a rational explanation of the universe independently of the popular religion; they approached the task in a more or less scientific spirit, often even in a spirit antagonistic to the prevailing creed. The School- men, on the other hand, accepted the truths of Christianity as beyond dispute; these formed the starting-point and regulative principles of their speculation ; and these they sought to render intelligible and reasonable, or to prove. In order to succeed, they had recourse to such systems of Greek thought as best suited the end in view; with them, therefore, philosophy was placed in the service of religion; it became the handmaiden of theology.

“Within the limits set by Christian dogma, the mind was left free to exercise its skill ; so long as it did not conflict with established truths, human reason could interpret the world as it pleased. In the course of time, however, the intellect began to free itself from its theological tether and to seek satisfaction outside of the circumscribed territory ; the scholastic attitude and method proved unsatisfactory, and attempts were made to construct systems on a more independent basis. From another side objections were also urged against the entire rationalistic movement : the dogmas and the whole ecclesiastical system were criticised and the effort made to transform the inner religious life of the people, with the Bible and the conscience as the guide and standard. These tendencies towards reforming the theoretical and practical phases of organized Christianity culminated in the two great preludes to the modern era.

This new religion was soon compelled to define its doctrines, to defend them, and to construct a Christian theology declaring its attitude toward the prevailing Jewish and Hellenistic modes of thought. The system best adapted to the immediate purpose at hand, in the beginning of the Christian era, was the Jewish-Greek philosophy which we have already outlined. ” The allegorical explanation of the Old Testament became an indispensable means of combining the new faith with the old revelations,” says Zeller, ” and the logos-doctrine of Philo, which was fused with the Jewish-Christian Messianic belief, formed the centre of the dogmatic movement in Christian theology for centuries to come.”

We find the beginnings of Christian dogmatic theology in the writings of the Apostle Paul and his school. He was the first to offer a Christian theology or a philosophy of history on a Christian basis. The Epistles ascribed to him betray the influence of conceptions similar to those made use of in the so-called Wisdom of Solomon (doubtless known to him) and developed in the philosophy of Philo ; Christ is identified with God ‘s Power and Wisdom, the Logos ; he pre-existed as the archetypal man, but was created by God. The same notion is brought out in the Fourth Gospel, and in the writings of Ignatius .

In these ideas we have a fairly well-defined theology. The historical elements of Christianity are interpreted in the light of the Greek logos-doctrine; religious and philosophical elements are welded together in a way to emphasize the religious aspect: the Logos is a personality, the son of a living Father, not a cold philosophical abstraction. It was quite natural, however, that other thinkers, with a stronger bent for speculation, should have sought to interpret the new religion according to their philosophical preconceptions, to rationalize it, to transform faith into knowledge. This work was done in the second century by the Gnostics, as they have been called. Philo the Jew had inter-preted Judaism in the light of Greek philosophy, and had tried to reconcile the thoughts of the Greek metaphysicians with those of the Jewish teachers. The Gnostics endeavour to do the same for Christianity; they speculate upon their faith, and offer a philosophy of Christianity and a Christian philosophy, a harmony of faith and knowledge, religion and science.

We have here an embryonic scholasticism, crude and fantastic though it may be. It was asserted by these Christian Philonists, as we might call them, that their doctrines had been transmitted by Jesus to such of his followers as were able to receive them, that is, as secret or esoteric teachings for the educated. They taught that Christianity was an entirely new and divine doctrine, Judaism a corrupt form of religion, the revelation of an inferior being, and heathenism the work of evil spirits. The Jewish God, or Demiurge, they regarded as a false God, opposed to the kingdom of light, or the abode of the highest spirits, and to the true God. Christ, one of the highest spirits, entered a human body in order to free the spirits of light imprisoned in matter by the Demiurge. Those able to comprehend the genuine teachings of Christ become gnostics, or pneumatic beings, and are eventually delivered from their material bondage, asceticism being one of the means of escape.

Such as fail to free themselves from sensuous matter perish with it, while the literalists (psychic beings) go to the heaven of the Demiurge. The world is the result of a fall; matter is the principle of evil; the exoteric doctrine is contained in the creed, the esoteric doctrine is a secret tradition.

Chief among the Gnostics are: Cerinthus , Saturninus , and Valentine . The system of Marcion, who formed a church at Rome,  and accepted as canonical the Gospel of St. Luke and ten Pauline Epistles, contains teachings resembling Gnosticism, but emphasizes faith instead of knowledge and cannot, therefore, be assigned to this sect.

It is evident, however, that the Gnostics were not equal to their task: instead of a philosophical system, they offered a ” semi-Christian mythology.” Besides, their doctrines were in conflict with the prevailing conceptions of the teaching of Jesus ; their repudiation of the Old Testament, their distinction between an esoteric and exoteric Christianity, their conception of Jesus as a man whose body is used by a heavenly Christ, a creature far beneath God and even beneath the angels, their belief in specially endowed natures or pneumatic beings, and their allegorical interpretations, were all antagonized by the Apologists and other conservative leaders of Christianity and denounced as heresies. At the same time, the Gnostic movement exercised a great influence on the new religion and its theology. It gave an impetus to the philosophical study of the faith or theology. Some of its fundamental ideas, which came from Greek philosophy, found their way into the works of the early writers of the Church, and so became a factor in the evolution of the dogma.

The Apologists did not differ from the Gnostics in their general aim to render the new religion intelligible; they, too, has appealed to philosophy in their efforts to defend the faith against the heathen as well as against the fantastic interpretations of Gnosticism. Christianity was, for them, both philosophy and revelation; its truths were of supernatural origin and absolutely certain, but they were rational truths, even though they could be comprehended only by a divinely inspired mind. In the words of Harnack: ” The conviction common to them all may be summed up as follows:

Christianity is philosophy, because it has a rational content, because it gives a satisfactory and universally intelligible answer to the questions which all true philosophers have endeavoured to answer ; but it is not philosophy, indeed it is the direct opposite of philosophy … in so far as it is revealed truth and, hence, has a supernatural, divine origin, upon which alone the truth and certainty of its teaching ultimately rests. ‘ ‘( Dogmengeschichte, p. 89 ; Outlines of History of Dogma, transl. by Mitchell, p. 121.)

The Apologists were acquainted with the literature and philosophy of their times and addressed themselves to the educated classes. Indeed, nearly all the early leaders of the churches were men who, after their conversion, took up the cudgels for the new religion and sought to win favour for it among their own people. This is why the philosophical element generally predominates in their writings, and why the purely religious phase is so often placed in the background.

The movement culminated in the catechetical schools, perhaps the first of which was established in Alexandria by Pantsenus, formerly a Stoic philosopher. The object of these schools was not only to defend the new religion and demonstrate its reasonableness, but to reduce the teaching to systematic form for the benefit of the clergy, whose duty it became to instruct the pagan and Jewish proselytes in the principles of the Christian religion. Origen, the greatest leader of the Alexandrian school, worked out a comprehensive Christian theology in which the influence of Neoplatonism, which had its home at Alexandria, is strongly marked.

The fundamental thought in the writings of the Apologists is this: The world, though perishable, exhibits traces of reason and order, and points to one eternal, unchangeable, good and just First Cause, the source of all life Teachings and being. This principle transcends all life and Apologists being : the sublimit, power, wisdom, goodness, and grace of God are beyond all human notions, beyond all description. Yet the First Cause of all creation must be rational; reason must always have been potential in him as a part of his inner nature ; and to the presence of Reason, or the Logos, in God, are due the order and purpose in the universe. In other words, and goodness lie at the root of the world, and God is the eternal and abiding principle in all change.

By an act of free will God emits the Logos: the Logos proceeds from him as the light proceeds from the sun. And as the light emitted from the sun does not separate from the sun, so the divine Reason does not separate from God in the procession ; by giving birth to the reason in him, God does not lose his reason; the Logos remains with the Creator, subsists with the source whence it sprang. At the same time, the Logos is conceived as an independent personality, identical with God in essence, but not numerically, a second God who has been eternally with God. The Logos became man in Jesus Christ, Christ being the incarnate Logos, ” the word made flesh/’ The Holy Ghost is another emanation from God ; i.e., the prophetic spirit, which springs from God, is conceived as an entity.

We have in these conceptions the personification of divine reason with which we have become familiar in the Greek philosophy of religion: reason is the organ by which the world is fashioned and through which God indirectly acts on the world. The transcendency of God is emphasized, and the attempt is also made to save the independence of the Logos: the Logos is conceived as eternally with God, as co-eternal with him, as the phrase goes, as potential in him, as identical with him in his very nature ; and yet the Father is said to be the source of his being and activity (Irenseus), hence he would seem to be subordinated to the Father, a creature. Moreover, he becomes a person by God’s will, which would imply that there was a time when he was not, which, again, would make him a creature. Origen undertakes to solve this difficulty by combining both ideas and teaching that the Logos is eternally created. The act of creation is not an act in time, but an eternally present one,  the Son is eternally and continuously created.

The creation of the world is explained after the Greek models God is the ground and purpose of all things: from him they come and to him they return. The Logos, however, is the pattern, or archetype, or prototype, of all created beings; which means, everything is created in the image of reason and by the power of reason or divine  intelligence. We may put it this way: the Creator fashioned the world from formless matter, which he created out of nothing, after a pattern or rational plan which he carried in his mind. This system of thoughts is conceived by the Apologists as a personal entity, which, as an active cause, forms, preserves, and controls everything.

Creation is the result of God’s love and goodness and for the benefit of man. According to the majority of the Apologists, creation is an act in time; according to Origen, God creates eternally, and creatures have always existed. The universe is for him, as it was for Aristotle, eternal, but the world now existing has had a beginning and will pass away, to be replaced by other and different worlds.

The world was made for the sake of man. The goal of man, however, is not this world, but the hereafter. Other-worldliness, world-flight, the withdrawal of the soul from the world of sense to God, is the highest good. The resurrection of the body and soul (or spirit) in some form or other, is taught by all the Apologists; sometimes soul and body are both regarded as mortal, immortality being bestowed on them as an act of divine grace, according to the works of the soul (Justin) ; sometimes man is held to possess, in addition to body and soul, a higher spirit which is immortal and through which body and soul share in immortality (Tatian) ; sometimes this spirit is said to be conferred from above upon those who control their passions.

Another teaching common to the Apologists is that of free will and the fall of man. God created spirits with the capacity to distinguish between good and evil and the power of freedom to choose between them. Some chose to disobey God, to turn flesh- ward and away from God, for which sin they fell to a lower level of life in carnal bodies. Man may regain his lost estate by leading a Christian life and through divine grace, through the revealed truth of the Logos. On the day of judgment, after a sojourn in Hades or Purgatory, the just will enter eternal life, and the unjust be forever rejected. Origen, how- ever, believed in the final redemption of all. The thought running through this teaching is that, in sinning, the first man or a heavenly spirit, as the case may be, brought sin into the world, for which mankind is suffering, but that there is hope for our ultimate redemption if we will only turn away from the things of sense and seek to be reunited with God.

The fundamental article of faith declares that the human race is redeemed by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, that the Son of God came to deliver man from sin. This simple proposition gave rise to a number of problems over which the Christian theologians debated for centuries to come, and which received official settlement only after long and bitter controversies. The proposition contained three important notions: God, Jesus Christ, and man. How shall we conceive God the Father, the Son of God, and human nature in the scheme of salvation ? How are these beings related to one another: the Father and the Son, or Logos ; the Son and the man Jesus ; and God and man ?

The logos-doctrine, which appears so prominently in early Christian theology, did not penetrate into the rank and file of the early Church. The simple-minded Christian of the first centuries, living in a polytheistic com- Doctrine munity, believed in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost without interpreting his faith metaphysically; for him Jesus the man was somehow the Son of God, and the Holy Ghost another supernatural being: the metaphysical nature and relation of these beings to one another and to God, he did not attempt to fathom. The intellectual leaders of the Church in their endeavors to defend the faith against Gnostics and pagan philosophers, were carried farther and farther into the speculations of the Greek schools, until they finally hellenized the Gospel. It was quite natural that the logos-doctrine should have met with serious opposition in many quarters and their efforts should have been made to reach a less metaphysical interpretation of the fundamentals of the faith. The doctrine which had the largest following among Christiar bodies from 130 to 300 was Modalism, which was called Patri passianism in the Western Roman world and Sabellianism ir the East. According to the former, God assumed flesh, became man and suffered in the flesh; according to the latter, God manifests himself in three successive ways or powers, as Father Son, and Holy Ghost. In either case, the three persons are one and the same God in different forms or modes.

But these views did not prevail against the logos-theology ; by the end of the third century the philosophical theology had triumphed; Harnack says, ” it even read its articles into the creed.” The thinkers all succumbed to the influence of Origen His successors made the faith so philosophical that it became unintelligible to laymen; the purely cosmological and philosophical elements were emphasized at the expense of the idea of salvation, formula were established in which the name of Christ was not even mentioned. The Neoplatonism of Origen ‘s system threatened to swamp Christianity.

The question of the relation of the Logos to God, or of the Son to the Father, formed the subject of a great controversy at the Council of Nicaaa, , between the Arians, the followers of Arius, and the Anti-Arians, of whom Athanasius afterward became the leader. According to Arius, Christ is a creature of God, endowed with free will, which God foresaw he would use for good, and, therefore, conferred on him the dignity of a God at his creation. According to Athanasius, the Son, as the principle of salvation, is begotten, not made, by the Father; co-eternal with the Father, of one substance with the Father  ; sharing fully in the nature of the Father, without loss to the Father and without ceasing to be another person. In the historical Jesus, the Logos-God, or the Son, was united, in essence, with a human body ; the incarnation was a complete incarnation. The Holy Ghost is a third being; the one Godhead is a trinity of the same substance, consisting of three persons identical in nature.

The Anti-Arians won the victory at the Council; the Arian doctrines were condemned and Arius and his followers excommunicated. The words ” begotten, not made, being of one sub- stance with the Father ” were inserted in the creed which has come to be called the Nicene creed. An unsuccessful attempt was later made to effect a compromise between Arianism and Athanasianism by declaring God and Christ to be, not of the same substance , but of like nature  , and failure to agree on this point led to a division between the Roman and Greek Churches.

Both parties to the controversy had sought support for their views in the Neoplatonic philosophy of Origen; and the orthodox interpretation, no less than the defeated theory, is based on the logos-doctrine.

Another question to stir up controversy was the problem of the relation of the man Jesus to the Logos- God, the Christological problem. Many answers were offered and many factions formed in support of the different theories. The interpretation that Christ had two natures,  each perfect in itself and each distinct from the other, yet perfectly united in one person, who was at once both God and man,” was accepted by the Synod of Chalcedon, and became the orthodox dogma.

After the establishment of the dogma at Nicaea, Christian philosophy was studied chiefly in the school of Origen, at Alexandria. The orthodox doctrines were adopted, in the main, and such teachings in Origen’s system as conflicted with them rejected. Among the representatives of the school who assisted in the work of reconstruction, were Gregory of Nyssa , Basil the Great , and Gregory of Nazianzen . Neoplatonism, as taught by Plotinus, also had a large following, among the leaders being: Bishop Synesius , Bishop Nemesius , JSncas of Gaza , Zacharias Scholasticus, Johannes Grammaticus, and Johannes Philoponus, all of the sixth century. The Neoplatonic work, falsely attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, appeared at the end of the fifth century.

A next question demanded an answer was about the place of man in the scheme of salvation ? According to one view, which was widespread, the whole human race had Free Will been corrupted by the sin of the first man or a Original Sin haven angel; and divine help, in some form or other, was needed to redeem mankind. The fundamental article of faith that Christ had come down from heaven for our salvation seemed to favour such an interpretation: if it was necessary to deliver man from sin, then evidently he could not save himself, he was a slave to sin and by nature a sinner (original sin) or had become a sinner in some way; at any rate he was not free. This conception received support from the Manichaeans, a numerous sect accepting the teachings of the Persian Mani , who read Persian dualism and Gnosticism into the Scriptures and combined Christianity with the doctrines of Zoroaster. They taught that the principle of light in man was under bondage to matter, the principle of darkness, and that the soul could be purified and enabled to return to the kingdom of light whence it came, only by asceticism, by abstention from meat, wine, marriage, property, and labour. But it was possible to read a different view into the article of faith : Christ came to save man from sin. Sin implies guilt, guilt implies responsibility on the part of the guilty per- son ; only a being who is free to choose between right and wrong can be a sinner. Hence, if man sinned, he must have been free. The same conclusions were reached in another way. God is all- powerful and man, therefore, weak and unfree, incapable of saving himself from sin; only a miracle can deliver him. Or: God is absolutely good and just, and cannot, therefore, be responsible for sin ; hence, man himself must be the author of sin, that is, free.

REFERANCE:

FRANK THILLY: HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, NEW YORK

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

John Dewey. The final philosopher, which is considered to be the greatest asset to pragmatism, has been described as the greatest  American philosopher. Dewey move from the idealist’s camp to the beginnings of a pragmatic philosophy which he was to characterize with the name of instrumentalism . John Dewey (born 1859) is no less radical than James in his opposition to the old philosophies. He does not tire of flouting the old methods, which he conceives as aiming at realities lying behind and beyond the process of nature and as carrying on the search for these realities by means of rational forms transcending ordinary modes of perception and inference. Such problems, he thinks, have no real meaning, and are solved very simply by evaporating.  In later years there were many “disciples” of John Dewey who in trying to elaborate some of his ideas went to extremes that appalled their mentor Dewey was a frequent critic of what came to be known in American educational circles as “progressivism” or the “progressive movement”.

Dewey begins with the observation that the world as we experience it both individually and collectively is an admixture of the precarious, the transitory and contingent aspect of things, and the stable, the patterned regularity of natural processes that allows for prediction and human intervention. Honest metaphysical description must take into account both of these elements of experience. Dewey endeavors to do this by an event ontology. The world, rather than being comprised of things or, in more traditional terms, substances, is comprised of happenings or occurrences that admit of both episodic uniqueness and general, structured order. Intrinsically events have an ineffable qualitative character by which they are immediately enjoyed or suffered, thus providing the basis for experienced value and aesthetic appreciation.

He protests against setting up a universe, in analogy with the cognitive side of human nature, as a system of fixed elements in fixed relations, be they mechanical, sensational, or conceptual, and making all the other phases of man’s nature beliefs, aversions, affections mere epiphenomena, appearances, subjective impressions or facts in consciousness; against relegating concrete selves, specific feeling and willing beings with the beliefs in which they declare themselves, to the phenomenal; and against a world   man’s strivings are already eternally fulfilled, his errors already eternally transcended, his partial beliefs already eternally comprehended, in which need, uncertainty, choice, novelty, s have no place.

The world is in the making and will always be in the making, we shape it to our ends; and in this process the thinking and belief of conscious personal beings play an active part. It is to be remembered that knowing is not the sole and genuine mode of experiencing for Dewey. Things, anything, everything, are what they are experienced as being, and every experience is some thing. Things are experienced as known, but they are also experienced aesthetically, morally, economically, and technologically; hence to give a just account of anything is to tell what that thing is experienced as. This is the fundamental postulate of immediate empiricism. If you want to find out what any philosophical term, subjective, objective, physical, mental, cosmic, cause, substance, purpose, activity, evil, being, quantity, means, go to experience and see what it is experienced as. The individual is not merely a knower, but an emotional, impulsive, willing being ; the reflective attitude is evoked by the will, the basal or primal side of self.

Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.Dewey  state that truth can be known only through its practical consequences and is thus and individual or a social matter rather than an absolute..Knowledge is rooted in experience, but experience may be immediate or mediated. Immediate experience is simply “undergoing.” Mediated experience is the interaction of man and his mind with his environment. It requires the use of intelligence. It is intelligence which determines direction. As John Dewey pointed out:It seemed almost axiomatic that for true knowledge we must have recourse to concepts coming from a reason above experience. But the introduction of the experimental method signified precisely that such operations, carried on under conditions of control, are just the ways in which fruitful ideas about nature are obtained and tested.

Truth in the pragmatic epistemology can be viewed as the production of desired consequences through the five-step process described above. But this does not give truth any special existential status, it simply means that in a particular case something is true.Truth may, therefore, exist in varying degrees. Truth is contingent on, or relative to, set or circumstances. Knowing is an open-ended, on going, human activity. As such it is constantly subject to error.

There are three major points of significance. First, it is an open-ended, activity, open, to the public and in fact, dependent upon the public test rather than some private metaphysical test. Second, it is subject to error and is continuously being revised in terms of new conditions and new consequences. And, third, it places the ultimate responsibility for truth and knowledge directly upon the shoulders of man. This is a tremendous responsibility and there are many who would rather shirk this responsibility and retreat to the security of a more authoritarian system.

Reality is for him, is evolution based, not a completely given, ready-made, fixed system, not a system at all, b changing, growing, developing things. A real philosophy is abandon inquiry after absolute origins and absolute final order to explore specific values and specific conditions that create them. The sole verifiable and fruitful object of know edge is the particular set of changes that generate the object of study, together with the consequences that flow from them.Philosophy must become a method of moral and political diagnosis and prognosis; their world is in the making, and we must help to make it.

We only think when we are confronted with problems.Thinking serves human purposes, is useful, removes collision, satisfies desire; and its utility, its teleology, is its truth. The human will, in other words, instigates thinking, which is an instrument for realizing human aims. The fixities atoms, God have existence and import only in the problems, needs, struggles, and instrumentalities of conscious agents and patients. We have , universe in which uncertainty, doubtfulness, really in here, and in which personal attitudes are real.

Such a new philosophy calls for a revision of the theory of] thinking, for a new evolutionary logic which frankly starts out! from the fact of thinking as inquiring and purely external existences as terms in inquiries. The revised theory of thinking will construe validity, objectivity, truth, and the test and system of truth, on the basis of what they actually mean and do within the inquiry-activity. Dewey sees in thinking an instrument for the removal of collisions between what is given and what is wanted, a means of realizing human desire, of securing an arrangement of things which means satisfaction, fulfillment, happiness. Such a harmony is the end and test of thinking : success in this sense is the end and test.

When the ideas, views, conceptions, hypotheses, beliefs, which we frame succeed, secure harmony, adjustment, we call them true. Successful ideas are true. We keep on transforming, changing our ideas until they work, that is, we make them true, verify them. The effective working of an idea, its success, is its truth. When I say the idea works, it is the same as saying it is true. Successful working is the essential characteristic of a true idea. The success of the idea is not the cause nor the evidence of its truth, but is its truth : the successful idea is a true idea. The test or criterion of truth lies in the harmonized reality effected by the idea, Wherever there is an improved or tested idea, an idea which has made good, there is a concrete existence in the way of a completed or harmonized situation. Scientific ideas, however, like the law of gravitation, operate in many other inquiries no longer as mere ideas, but as proved ideas.

The revision of the theory of thinking also brings the principle of belief into its own. Belief, sheer direct unmitigated personal belief, reappears in science as working-hypothesis. Beliefs are the most natural and most metaphysical of all things ; knowledge is the human and practical outgrowth of belief; knowledge is an organized technique for working out the implications and interrelations of beliefs, and for directing their ‘formation and employment. Beliefs, therefore, modify and shape reality; and empirical conscious beings genuinely deter- nine existences. If this is so, there is no need of fear that natural sciences are going to encroach upon and destroy our spiritual values, because we can always translate our values (social and political) into existences (institutions). The world in which Dewey is interested is the practical social world of living, working individuals.

Finally, and most important, the pragmatist does not view reality as an abstract “thing”. Rather, it is a process of transaction which involves both doing and undergoing, the two characteristics of experience. For experience is a two way street: first is the doing and second is the process of deriving meaning from the act and its results. Experience demands both dimensions, for the second cannot exist without the first. And the first has no meaning without the second. Without exploration of the meaning and consequences of activity, man would indeed be on what the late radio comedian Fred Allen referred to as a “treadmill to oblivion.”

Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart’s desire.The pragmatist’s standards of art and beauty do not exist in some separate realm. What is beautiful is simply what we find beautiful in our own experience, what has the power to move us and to make us feel deeply. Art is a form in which an artist describes his own personal experience to the viewer. But the description need not be detailed or an exact reproduction of what the artist has seen.

The roots of aesthetic experience lie, Dewey argues, in commonplace experience, in the consummation experiences that are ubiquitous in the course of human life. There is no legitimacy to the conceit cherished by some art enthusiasts that aesthetic enjoyment is the privileged endowment of the few. The process of intelligent use of materials and the imaginative development of possible solutions to problems issuing in a reconstruction of experience that affords immediate satisfaction, the process found in the creative work of artists, is also to be found in all intelligent and creative human activity.

The senses play a key role in artistic creation and aesthetic appreciationThe unifying element in this process is emotion–not the emotion of raw passion and outburst, but emotion that is reflected upon and used as a guide to the overall character of the artwork. Although Dewey insisted that emotion is not the significant content of the work of art, he clearly understands it to be the crucial tool of the artist’s creative activity.Form is better understood in a dynamic sense as the coordination and adjustment of the qualities and associated meanings that are integrated within the artwork.

Art is a product of culture, and it is through art that the people of a given culture express the significance of their lives, as well as their hopes and ideals. Because art has its roots in the consummation values experienced in the course of human life, its values have an affinity to commonplace values, an affinity that accords to art a critical office in relation to prevailing social conditions.

In every work of art, however, these meanings are actually embodied in a material which thereby becomes the medium for their expression. This fact constitutes the peculiarity of all experience that is definitely esthetic. Its imaginative quality dominates, because meanings and values that are wider and deeper than the particular here and now in which they are anchored are realized by way of an object that is physically efficacious in relation to other objects. A more current way of saying this would be, “the medium is the message.”

The test of a work of art is whether or not it can stir the viewer and communicate to him the experience with all (or at least many) of the complex feelings and ramifications the artist is attempting to convey. Thus, the public test of a work of art is whether or not the artist has communicated his experience to us and whether others share the sense of pleasure and aesthetic satisfaction we receive from a work of art.

Dewey believes that the good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.Dewey finds growth the basis of all ethics. That which contributes to growth is good. That which would stunt, deflect, or retard it is bad. But, since man is not completely independent unto himself, what may appear good in the private sense must also be explored in the public sense. We must ask two questions then about an act or decision. First, what are the individual consequences? And second, what are the public consequences? We must also consider whether these consequences will contribute to or retard, growth.

The major concern, then, of pragmatic ethical theory is the public test, the test that is open to the public and which can be reiterated or verified by others. This is not to suggest that our morality need be determined by others, but as Dewey and Tufts pointed out, there is a distinct relationship .Dewey’s mature thought in ethics and social theory is not only intimately linked to the theory of knowledge in its founding conceptual framework and naturalistic standpoint, but also complementary to it in its emphasis on the social dimension of inquiry both in its processes and its consequences. In fact, it would be reasonable to claim that Dewey’s theory of inquiry cannot be fully understood either in the meaning of its central tenets or the significance of its originality without considering how it applies to social aims and values, the central concern of his ethical and social theory.

Dewey, throughout his ethical writings, stressed the need for an open-ended, flexible, and experimental approach to problems of practice aimed at the determination of the conditions for the attainment of human goods and a critical examination of the consequences of means adopted to promote them, an approach that he called the “method of intelligence.”

The central focus of Dewey’s criticism of the tradition of ethical thought is its tendency to seek solutions to moral and social problems in dogmatic principles and simplistic criteria which in his view were incapable of dealing effectively with the changing requirements of human events. Ideals and values must be evaluated with respect to their social consequences, either as inhibitors or as valuable instruments for social progress.

In large part, then, Dewey’s ideas in ethics were programmatic rather than substantive, defining the direction that he believed human thought and action must take in order to identify the conditions that promote the human good in its fullest sense, rather than specifying particular formulae or principles for individual and social action. He studiously avoided participating in what he regarded as the unfortunate practice of previous moral philosophers of offering general rules that legislate universal standards of conduct.

For the pragmatist, society is a process in which individuals participate. Society is the source from which people derive all that makes them individual while at the same time society is a product of the complex series of interactions among the individuals whose lives and activities impinge upon each other.

Man derives his values from the society and since these values help determine much of what his life will be, society and its relationship to the individual may be one of the most important concerns for contemporary pragmatists. Society is a basic concept in contemporary pragmatism since all actions must be considered in the light of their social designed to pass along the cultural heritage from one generation to the next, must be concerned with society and with its students as members of society.

Pragmatism sees the school as vitally concerned with and interested in social change since it needs to prepare the adults of the future to deal with the planning necessarily involved in the process called society.

With the move from the rural agrarian social structure which existed before the turn of the century, and with the increase in urbanization, transportation, communication and industrialization, over the last 50 years, the need for social planning has increased at an unbelievable rate. With the growth of new problems such the uses of atomic energy, pollution, conservation of natural resources, other space, drugs, increasing crime rates, education of disadvantaged children, others too numerous to list , the school has become the seed-bed for society. Never before argue the pragmatists, has there been such a need for social concern and social planning. Simply let society run rampant down an unplanned path. To do this is court destruction not just for society but for the world.

Since Dewey’s pragmatic position strongly advocates wholehearted involvement in society by all citizens, and because it views group decision in the light of consequence as important, and because it places responsibility on the individual as a member of society, it has been called the philosophy of Democracy.

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Under the Mughals, there was no uniform law of succession. As such, the death of a king resulted in a war of succession. Such fratricidal struggles for the throne had a very demoralizing effect on the stability of the government. The royal palace and court became the centres of intrigues and plots. Confusion reigned everywhere. Many Provinces became independent. Thus, with the loss of money and manpower, every new ruler who ascended the throne had to make a fresh beginning.Jehan had begun his reign by killing his brothers; but he had neglected to kill his sons, one of whom was destined to overthrow him. In 1657 the ablest of these, Aurangzeb, led an insurrection from the Deccan. The Shah, like David, gave instructions to his generals to defeat the rebel army, but to spare, if possible, the life of his son. Aurangzeb overcame all the forces sent against him, captured his father, and imprisoned him in the Fort of Agra. For nine bitter years the deposed king lingered there, never visited by his son, attended only by his faithful daughter Jahanara, and spending his days looking from the Jasmine Tower of his prison across the Jumna.

Abul Muzaffar Muhy-ud-Din Muhammad Aurangzeb Alamgir, more commonly known as Aurangzeb (Persian: اورنگزیب) (full official title Al-Sultan al-Azam wal Khaqan al-Mukarram Hazrat Abul Muzaffar Muhy-ud-Din Muhammad Aurangzeb Bahadur Alamgir I, Badshah Ghazi, Shahanshah-e-Sultanat-ul-Hindiya Wal Mughaliya) (4 November 1618 [O.S. 25 October 1618] – 3 March 1707 [O.S. 20 February 1707]), also known by his chosen imperial title Alamgir (“Conquerer of the World”) (Persian: عالمگیر), was the 6th Mughal Emperor of India whose reign lasted from 1658 until his death in 1707.

The four sons of Shah Jahan all held posts as governors during the lifetime of their father. The emperor favoured the eldest, Dara Shikoh, and this had caused resentment among the younger three, who sought at various times to strengthen alliances between themselves and against Dara. The contest for power was primarily between Dara Shikoh and Auragnzeb because, although all four sons had demonstrated competence in their official roles, it was around these two that the supporting cast of officials and other influential people mostly circulated. There were ideological having made clear that he wanted Dara to succeed him, differences — Dara was an intellectual and a religious liberal in the mould of Akbar, while Aurangzeb was much more conservative

Shah Jahan became ill with stranguary in 1657. Rumours of the death of Shah Jahan abounded and the younger sons took action: Shah Shuja prepared to contest the throne from Bengal, where he had been governor since 1637, while Murad did the same in his governorship of Gujarat and Aurangzeb did so in the Deccan. After regaining some of his health, Shah Jahan moved to Agra and Dara urged him to send forces to challenge Shah Shuja and Murad, who had declared themselves rulers in their respective territories. While Shah Shuja was defeated at Banares in February 1658, the army sent to deal with Murad discovered to their surprise that he and Aurangzeb had combined their forces,the two brothers having agreed to partition the empire once they had gained control of it.  Aurangzeb then broke his arrangement with Murad Baksh, which probably had been his intention all along. Instead of looking to partition the empire between himself and Murad, he had his brother arrested and imprisoned at Gwalior Fort. Murad was executed on 4 December 1661, Shah Shuja then fled to Arakan (in present-day Burma), where he was executed by the local rulers. After a series of battles, defeats and retreats, Dara was betrayed by one of his generals, who arrested and bound him. In 1658, Aurangzeb arranged his formal coronation in Delhi. He had Dara Shikoh openly marched in chains back to Delhi where he had him executed on arrival on 30 August 1659.

Aurangzeb who so ruthlessly deposed his father was one of the greatest saints in the history of Islam, and perhaps the most nearly unique of the Mogul emperors. The wullahs who had educated him had so imbued him with religion that at one time the young prince had thought of renouncing the empire and the world, and becoming a religious recluse. Throughout his life, despite his despotism, his subtle diplomacy, and a conception of morals as applying only to his own sect, he remained a pious Moslem, reading prayers at great length, memorizing the entire Koran, and warring against infidelity. He spent hours in devotion, and days in fasts. For the most part he practised his religion as earnestly as he professed it. It is true that in politics he was cold and calculating, capable of lying cleverly for his country and his god. But he was the least cruel of the Moguls, and the mildest; slaughter abated in his reign, and he made hardly any use of punishment in dealing with crime. He was consistently humble in deportment, patient under provocation, and resigned in misfortune. He abstained scrupulously from all food, drink or luxury forbidden by his faith; though skilled in music, he abandoned it as a sensual pleasure; and apparently he carried out his resolve to spend nothing upon himself save what he had been able to earn by the labor of his hands.  He was a St. Augustine on the throne.

Shah Jehan had given half his revenues to the promotion of architecture and the other arts; Aurangzeb cared nothing for art, destroyed its “heathen” monuments with coarse bigotry, and fought, through a reign of half a century, to eradicate from India almost all religions but his own. He issued orders to the provincial governors, and to his other subordinates, ‘to raze to the ground all the temples of either Hindus or Christians, to smash every idol, and to close every Hindu school. A contemporary historian, Saki Mustai’dd Khan in his Ma’asir-i Alamgiri writes: (The History of  India as told by its own historians, vol. VII, pp. 183)

“On the 17th Zi-l kada 1079 (18th April 1669), it reached the ear of His majesty, the protector of the faith, that in the provinces of Thatta, Multan and Benaras, but specially in the latter, foolish Brahmins were in the habit of expounding frivolous books in their schools, and the students and learners, Mussulmans as well as Hindus, went there, even from long distances, led by desire to become acquainted with the wicked sciences they taught.

“The “Director of the faith” consequently issued orders to all the governors of provinces to destroy with a willing hand the schools and temples of the infidels; and they were strictly enjoined to put an entire stop to the teaching and practicing of idolatrous forms of worship. On the 15th Rabi-ul Akhir it was reported to his religious Majesty, the leader of the unitarians, that, in obedience to the order, the Government officers had destroyed the temple of Bishnath at Benaras.”

Aurangzeb did not just build an isolated mosque on a destroyed temple, he ordered all temples destroyed, among them the Kashi Vishwanath temple, one of the most sacred places of Hinduism, and had mosques built on a number of cleared temple sites. Other Hindu sacred places within his reach equally suffered destruction, with mosques built on them. A few examples: Krishna’s birth temple in Mathura; the rebuilt Somnath temple on the coast of Gujarat; the Vishnu temple replaced with the Alamgir mosque now overlooking Benares; and the Treta-ka-Thakur temple in Ayodhya. The number of temples destroyed by Aurangzeb is counted in four, if not five figures. Aurangzeb did not stop at destroying temples, their users were also wiped out; even his own brother Dara Shikoh was executed for taking an interest in Hindu religion; Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur was beheaded because he objected to Aurangzeb’s forced conversions.

In one year (1679-80) sixty-six temples were broken to pieces in Amber alone, sixtythree at Chitor, one hundred and twenty-three at Udaipur;  and over the site of a Benares temple especially sacred to the Hindus he built, in deliberate insult, a Mohammedan mosque.  He forbade all public worship of the Hindu faiths, and laid upon every unconverted Hindu a heavy capitation tax.  ” As a result of his fanaticism, thousands of the temples which had represented or housed the art of India through a millennium were laid in ruins. We can never know, from looking at India today, what grandeur and beauty she once possessed.

Aurangzeb converted a handful of timid Hindus to Islam, but he wrecked his dynasty and his country. A few Moslems worshiped him as a saint, but the mute and terrorized millions of India looked upon him as a monster, fled from his tax-gatherers, and prayed for his death. During his reign the Mogul empire in India reached its height, extending into the Deccan; but it was a power that had no foundation in the affection of the people, and was doomed to fall at the first hostile and vigorous touch. His hard headed attitude towards the Marathas, Rajputs and the Jats and the refusal to grant them regional autonomy broke the former loyalty that existed between them and the Mughal Empire.

Aurangzeb’s religious policy was largely responsible for the downfall of the Mughal Empire. His policy of religious persecution of the Hindus, who formed the bulk of the population of the country, hastened the fall of his dynasty. Akbar won over the Hindus by a policy of religious toleration. He had enlisted Hindu warrior tribes, chiefly the Rajputs, as reliable defenders of his throne. He re-imposed the hated jiziya on the Hindus. As a consequence, the Rajputs, the Sikhs, the Jats and the Marathas were roused against the Mughal rule. He distrusted the Rajputs and thus deprived himself of the services of these people whose valour and loyalty had been a boon to the empire earlier. Moreover, Aurangzeb turned against the Shias with as much bitterness as the Hindus. He not only discriminated against the Shias in the matter of state employment, but even tried to put down their teachings, their schools and religious practices. The Persian Shias were gifted scholars and administrators of outstanding quality from among whom the ancestors of Aurangzeb recruited some of their ablest administrators. Sadly, Aurangzeb lost the support of a very efficient professional class. This is one of the potent causes of the downfall of the Mughal empire. The Sikhs under Guru Govind Singh vowed vengeance against the Mughals. It was because Emperor Aurangzeb brutally put their ninth Guru, Guru Teg Bahadur to death. He converted his followers into a militant sect by establishing the Khalsa which became a potent factor in the downfall of Aurangzeb’s dynasty.

Aurangzeb’s Deccan policy gave a death blow to the Mughal empire. His Deccan policy caused the destruction of some of their best soldiers and undermined the power and prestige of the empire. Aurangzeb destroyed the Shia kingdom of Bijapur and Golkunda and waged a long war against the Marathas. His long drawn -out campaign against the Marathas ruined the finances of the state and undermined his prestige. Moreover, his prolonged absence from the capital weakened the foundation of his government which rested mainly on close personal supervision.

The Mughal court consisted of four groups of nobles, the Turanis, the Iranis, the Afghans and the Indian born Muslims. The accession of weak rulers at the center made them strong contenders for power. They fought amongst themselves for more jagirs and high offices which were limited in number. They weakened the military by amassing income from the jagirs for themselves and cutting down the number of troops.

Further he made the mistake of imposing the central­ized system of governance in far-flung areas which were beyond his control. Aurangzeb mainly failed to make good alliances to safeguard his empire and went on making more and more enemies. The Emperor himself, in his last years, began to realize that by the very narrowness of his piety he had destroyed the heritage of his fathers. His deathbed letters arc pitiful documents.

“I know not who I am, where I shall go, or what will happen to this sinner full of sins. . . . My years have gone by profitless. God has been in my heart, yet my darkened eyes have not recognized his light. . . . There is no hope for me in the future. The fever is gone, but only the skin is left. … I have greatly sinned, and know not what torments await me. . . . May the peace of God be upon you.”

Within seventeen years of his death his empire was broken into fragments. The support of the people, so wisely won by Akbar, had been forfeited by the cruelty of Jehangir, the wastefulness of Jehan, and the intolerance of Aurangzcb. The Moslem minority, already enervated by India’s heat, had lost the military ardour and physical vigor of their prime, and no fresh recruits were coming from the north to buttress their declining power.

One of the most important causes of the downfall of the Mughal empire was the degeneration of the army which by its origin and composition was defective. The Mughal army consisted chiefly of contingents recruited by the high officers and the nobles. They were assigned revenues of large tracts of land for their maintenance. There was no bond of closeness between the emperor and the individual soldiers. As the later Mughal emperors were weak, the powerful nobles began to convert the assignments which they held for maintaining troops into hereditary possessions. The same inefficiency was also revealed in Aurangzeb’s war with the Marathas. This degeneration of the army contributed to its fall.

One of the cause of the fall of the Mughal empire can be ascribed to its economic bankruptcy. Under Akbar’s leadership the country had prospered economically. Akbar had established an excellent financial system under which the government had become rich and the people had led fairly comfortable lives. But after his death, his revenue system which dealt directly with the tillers of the soil began to fall into disuse. Later Mughal rulers spent large sums of money in unproductive works. To meet the increasing expenditure, he raised the state demand to one-half of the produce of the soil. Due to such heavy burden of taxation, thousands of cultivators began deserting their fields. Those who remained were compelled by force to carry on their age-old cultivation. Under Aurangzeb the royal treasury became more depleted. His long drawn-out campaign in the Deccan ruined the economy of the country.

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

You see by this what I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator and reconciler……. She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence. It follows that in the religious field she is at a great advantage over both positivistic empiricism, with its anti-theological bias, and over religious rationalism, with its exclusive interest in the remote, the noble, the simple, and the abstract in the way of conception.— William James

William James is considered to be the most insightful and stimulating American philosopher, and the great pragmatist. As a professor of psychology and of philosophy at Harvard University, he became the most famous living American philosopher of his time.

James’s philosophy is so individualistic that it does not allow for a robust theory of community.  Still, he offers us some interesting insights and views one’s society as not only a context in which great individuals emerge, but even as playing a selective role in allowing their greatness to develop. In turn, that social environment is affected by them.  Whether or not an individual will be able to have an impact is, to some extent, determined by society.  Thus socially significant individuals and their communities have a dynamic, correlative relationship.

William James arrived on the scene at a critical time in America thought. As Americans reacted to the increasing technological and scientific changes in this country they turned philosophically to “science”. As Morton White has pointed out, “He came upon the scene when philosophy was being bullied by a tough and militant scientism, but he only organized alternative seemed to be the absolute idealism of the neo-Hegelians [sic] which he could not stomach. James entered the arena in which a battle between religion and science was being waged. Or, in more philosophical terms, he entered the conflict between what he aptly characterized as the “tender-minded” and the “tough-minded”. On the side of the “tender-minded” were found the religious, idealistic, optimistic, and rationalistic; while on the side of the “tough-minded” were found the irreligious, materialistic, pessimistic, and empirical.

James is the most significant American philosopher of religion in intellectual history, and many of his writings offer provocative insights into that area.Perhaps the most controversial aspects of James’ philosophy relate to his application of the pragmatic principle to religion. James, said, “The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable.” His potion, simply state, was that ideas were of value to the degree that they were useful and functional and were not in conflict will other truths that could be empirically substantiated. Using this as his intellectual touchstone, James was able to support much of religion, including the hypothesis of God. The last several paragraphs of James’ essay, “What Pragmatism Means,” are the best available statement of the view of pragmatism as the great mediator between empiricism and rationalism; the “tough-minded” and the “tender-minded.”

Religious faith is not to be reduced to arbitrary whimsy (the “will to make believe”), it must rest on some sort of personal experience.  James deliberately defines “religion” broadly as the experiences of human individuals insofar as they see themselves related to whatever they regard as divine.  This definition indicates that religion does not require faith in a transcendent, monotheistic God, and that it does not mandate the social dimension of religious community.  James distinguishes between “healthy-mindedness” and the “sick soul” as two extreme types of religious consciousness, the former being characterized by optimistic joy and the latter by a morbid pessimism.  In between these extremes are “the divided self” and the stable, well-integrated believer.  James develops lengthy analyses of religious conversion, saintliness, and mysticism. He draws conclusions regarding three beliefs that experience finds in religions in general:

(1) that our sensible world is part of and derives its significance from a greater spiritual order;

(2) that our purpose is fulfilled by achieving harmonious union with it; and

(3) that prayer and spiritual communion are efficacious.

Furthermore, religions typically involve two psychological qualities in their believers:

(1) an energetic zest for living; and

(2) a sense of security, love, and peace.  Given that thought and feeling both determine conduct, James thinks that different religions are similar in feeling and conduct, their doctrines being more variable, but less essential.

The sword with which James hoped to slay the dragons of “tough-mindedness” and “tender-mindedness” was the system of pragmatism. For James, pragmatism became more than a method It became his central philosophical principle. As White has so aptly said of James, “He wanted facts but he also wanted a religion.” And it was through pragmatism that he hoped to achieve both. James was brilliant, concise, and perhaps most important, an independent thinking is highly original. He has been described as “original, exciting, and cosmopolitan.

William James  was influenced in his thinking by his biological studies, by English empiricism, and by the teaching of Charles Renouvier. It was Renouvier’s masterly advocacy of pluralism, he himself tells us, that freed him from the monistic superstition under which he had grown up. The ” block-universe,” the rigoristic, deterministic systems of both materialistic and spiritualistic monism did not satisfy him: ” if everything, man included, is the mere effect of the primitive nebula or the infinite substance, what becomes of moral responsibility, freedom of action, individual effort, and aspiration ; what, indeed, of need, uncertainty, choice, love, and strife? ” Does not the individual become a mere puppet in the hands of the absolute substance, whether conceived as universal matter or as universal mind? Such a system cannot satisfy all the demands of our nature, and hence cannot be true. The test, then, of a theory, of a belief, of a doctrine, must be its effect on us, its practical consequences. This is the pragmatic test. Always ask yourself what difference it will make in your experience whether you accept materialism or spiritualism, determinism or free will, monism or pluralism, atheism or theism. One is a doctrine of despair, the other a doctrine of hope.

For James anything knowable must be true. .  He begins with a standard dictionary analysis of truth as agreement with reality.  It seems that the “reality” with which truths must agree has three dimensions:

(1) matters of fact,

(2) relations of ideas , and

(3) the entire set of other truths to which we are committed.

To say that our truths must “agree” with such realities pragmatically means that they must lead us to useful consequences.  As the facts, and  experience , change one must beware of regarding such truths as absolute, as rationalists tend to do .  This relativistic theory generated a firestorm of criticism among mainstream philosophers of that time. James believes in multiple worlds, specifying seven realms of reality we can experience:

(1) the touchstone of reality is the world of physical objects of sense experience;

(2) the world of science, things understood in terms of physical forces and laws of nature,

(3) philosophy and mathematics expose us to a world of abstract truth and ideal relations;

(4) as humans, we are all subject to the distortions of commonplace illusion and prejudices;

(5) the realms of mythology and fiction;

(6) each of us has his or her own subjective opinions, which may or may not be expressed to others; and

(7) the world of madness can disconnect us from the reality in which others can readily believe.  Normally we can inhabit more than one of these and be able to discriminate among them.

The only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted. The test of truth, then, is its practical consequences , the possession of truth is not an end in itself, but only a preliminary means to other vital satisfactions. Knowledge is an instrument ;  is for the sake of life, life not for the sake of knowledge.

William James, made pragmatism a wider public view. He believed that an idea must be tried before it can be considered good.Ethical values are a product of the transactional functioning of man and society. The good is that which resolves indeterminate situations in the best way possible. Thus, the use of the intellect in the solving of problems is considered good by the pragmatists while total avoidance of human problems or unthinking reliance on some “higher” authority would be considered bad. Values emerge from the process of reflective deliberation and the accepted only after reflective deliberation. In each generation must create new values and new solutions to deal with new problems. The values of the crossbow, the pragmatists would say, are no longer necessarily applicable or relevant to the day of the hydrogen bomb.

James enlarges this pragmatic or instrumental conception so as to include in the idea of practical utility: logical consistency and verification. True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. Ideas that tell us which of the realities to expect count as the true ideas. You can, therefore, say of truth that it is useful because it is true, or that it is me because it is useful. ” Truth in science is what gives us, the maximum possible sum of satisfactions, taste included, but consistency both with previous truth and novel fact is always the most imperious claimant.”

Even with these important additions to the pragmatic formula, it is anti-intellectualistic in the sense that, in order to be true, a philosophy must satisfy other than logical demands. And the practical moral and religious demands favour pluralism, freedom and individualism, spiritualism, and theism, according to James. These are the conceptions in which he will believes and to save which our pragmatist repudiates the intellect as the absolute judge of truth. Still, consistency is always the most imperious claimant.

Although the absolutistic hypothesis that perfection is eternal, aboriginal, and most real, has a perfectly definite meaning and works religiously, the pluralistic way agrees with the pragmatic temper best. For it sets definite activities at work ; a pluralist world can only be saved piecemeal and de facto as the result  the behavior have a lot of caches. We may believe, also, that there is a higher form of experience extant in the universe than our human experience ; on the proofs that religious experience affords, we may well believe that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own.

James reaches the same results from another side, from the side of radical or pure empiricism, which opposes both the] classical rationalism and the classical English empiricism. It is not true that whatever is rational is real ; whatever is experienced is real. Only, we must take experience as it exists before it has been manipulated by conceptual thinking, experience in its purity and primitive innocence, if we would reach reality. We must go behind the conceptual function altogether and look to the more primitive flux of the sensational life for reality’s true shape. Philosophy should seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality, not follow science in vainly patching together fragments of its dead results. Philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than of logic, logic only finding reasons for the vision afterwards.

Even if philosophically interesting matters cannot be scientifically resolved, some sort of epistemological methodology is needed if we are to avoid arbitrary conclusions.  Whatever approach is chosen, it is clear that James repudiates rationalism, with its notions of a priori existential truths.  The “tender-minded” approach tends to be rationalistic, intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, committed to freedom, monistic, and dogmatic; by contrast, the “tough-minded” approach tends to be empirical, grounded in sensations, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralistic, and skeptical.  He thinks that most of us want a philosophical method that is firmly anchored in empirical facts, while being open to, rather than dismissive of, moral and religious values.  He offers pragmatism as a philosophy that coherently meets both demands.  Before we invest much time or effort in seeking the meaning of anything, we should consider what practical difference it would make if we could find out.  From that pragmatic perspective, James rejects the Hegelian notion.  Undoubtedly, philosophy provides us with only one legitimate approach to belief, as he observes in his fifth lecture, others being common sense (with its basic concepts derived from experience) and science.

With German idealism James agrees that the scientific understanding mutilates reality, and he agrees with it, also, in the view that our ordinary sense-experience does not reveal it in its true colors. But, not unlike Bradley, he puts his faith in a living unsophisticated human experience. Reality is pure experience independent of human thinking; it is something very hard to find; it is what is just entering into experience and yet to be named, or else it is some imagined aboriginal presence in experience, before any belief about the presence has arisen, before any human conception has been applied. It is what is absolutely dumb and evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our minds. We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some substitute for it which previous human thinking has peptonised and cooked for our consumption. Yet, this immediate experience is a unity in diversity; the unity is as original as the diversity. Empiricism is, therefore, wrong in saying that our psychic life consists of a multiplicity of independent sensations, and rationalism is wrong in saying that these are combined by categories in the unity of a soul. The lotion of a combining medium called soul is superfluous because there are no independent elements to combine. Both conceptions are abstractions. Reality is, in part, the flux of our sensations, coming we know not whence; partly, the relations that obtain between our sensations or between their copies in our mind ; and, partly, previous truths. Some of these relations are mutable and accidental, others are fixed and essential, but both are matters if immediate perception. Relations, categories, are matters of direct experience, not different from the things or phenomena: ideas and things are ” consubstantial, ” made of the same stuff.

James seems to vacillate between two views: reality is pure experience, experience independent of all thought, to which the life of the infant or semi-comatose person approximates; and reality is the entire field of the adult consciousness, experience permeated with thought. Perhaps his meaning is that the latter form of it grows out of the former. There is a sensible flux, he tells us, but what is true of it seems from first to last largely a matter of our own creation. The world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands. Reality is not ready-made and complete from all eternity, but still in the making, unfinished, growing in all sort of places where thinking beings are at work. Truth grows up inside of all the finite experiences; they lean on each other, but the whole of them, if such there be, leans on nothing. Nothing outside of the flux secures the issue of it ; it can hope salvation only from its own intrinsic promises and potencies. Behind the bare phenomenal facts there is nothing, no thing-in-itself, no Absolute, no Un- knowable ; it is absurd to attempt to explain the given concrete reality by an assumed reality of which we can form no idea except through symbols drawn from our experience itself. This sounds like subjective idealism, but is not intended as such by James, who never doubted the existence of an extra-mental world; the pure original experience is not subjective, but objective; it is the primordial stuff which grows conscious.

James defines  the issue of the one and the many, which is arguably the oldest problem of Western philosophy.  Monism, pursued to its logical extreme, is deterministic, setting up a sharp dichotomy between what is necessary and what is impossible, while pluralism allows for possibilities that may, but need not, be realized.  The former must be either optimistic or pessimistic in its outlook, depending on whether the future that is determined is seen as attractive or unattractive.  In contrast, pluralism’s possibilities allow for a “melioristic” view of the future as possibly better, depending on choices we freely make.  Pluralism need not specify how much unnecessary possibility there is in the world; by contrast, monism must say that everything about the future is locked in from all eternity—to which pluralism says, “Ever not quite.”  James is advocating what he calls the possibility of “novelty” in the world.  Pluralism, being melioristic, calls for our trusting in and cooperating with one another in order to realize desirable possibilities that are not assured . James claims that the “philosophy of pure experience” is more consonant with the theory of novelty, indeterminism, moralism, and humanism that he advocates, though it is less than clear why.  Radical empiricism makes for pluralism : experience shows us multiplicity, diversity, opposition, and not a block-universe, not the completely organized harmonious system of the Absolotists or Monists, in which all differences and oppositions are reconciled. Besides, the pluralistic universe satisfies the demands of our moral nature, which the absolutistic universe does not : it is justified by the pragmatic method. Indeed, monism, too, it is not a mere doctrine of the intellect ; its acceptance depends j on its consequences: it satisfies the aesthetic and mystical impulses of some natures. But it does not account for our finite consciousness; it creates a problem of evil; it does not account for change; and it is fatalistic. Pluralism takes perceptual experience at its face value, and the concrete perceptual flux, taken just as it comes, offers in our own activity-situations perfectly comprehensible instances of causal agency or free will.

There is room for change, for novelty, for the unconditioned in the world (tychism or fortuitism). And pluralism is melioristic : the world may be saved on condition that its parts shall do their best. The melioristic universe is conceived after a social analogy, as a pluralism of independent powers. It will succeed just in proportion as more of these work for its success. If none work, it will fail ; if each does his best, it will not fail. And in such a world man is free to risk realizing his ideal.

As we do not naturally experience the supernatural, James, the radical empiricist, thinks of faith in God as falling short of knowledge.  For James, the logical philosopher trained in science, both logic and science have limits beyond which we can legitimately seek the sentiment of rationality.  His “Will to Believe” essay is designed to be a defense of religious faith in the absence of conclusive logical argumentation or scientific evidence.  It focuses on what he calls a “genuine option,” which is a choice between two hypotheses, which the believer can regard as “living” (personally meaningful), “forced” (mutually exclusive), and “momentous” (involving potentially important consequences).  Whether an option is “genuine” is thus relative to the perspective of a particular believer.  James acknowledges that in our scientific age, there is something dubious about the voluntaristic view that, in some circumstances, we can legitimately choose to believe in the absence of any objective justification.

James believes that if we call the supreme being “God,” then we have reason to think the interpersonal relationship between God and humans is dynamic and that God provides us with a guarantee that the moral values we strive to realize will somehow survive us.  James describes himself as a supernaturalist (rather than a materialist) of a sort less refined than idealists and as unable to subscribe to popular Christianity.  He is unwilling to assume that God is one or infinite, even contemplating the polytheistic notion that the divine is a collection of godlike selves  In “Reflex Action and Theism,” James subscribes to a theistic belief in a personal God with whom we can maintain interpersonal relations, who possesses the deepest power in reality  and a mind .  We can love and respect God to the extent that we are committed to the pursuit of common values.  In “Is Life Worth Living?” James even suggests that God may derive strength and energy from our collaboration .  Elsewhere, rejecting the Hegelian notion of God as an all-encompassing Absolute, he subscribes to a God that is finite in knowledge or in power or in both, one that acts in time and has a history and an environment, like us .

Theism is the only conception of God that will satisfy our emotional and volitional nature. God is a part of the universe, a sympathetic and powerful helper, the great Companion, a conscious, personal, and moral being of the same nature as ourselves, with whom we can come into communion, as certain experiences (sudden conversions, faith-cure) show. To be sure, this theistic hypothesis cannot be completely proved, but neither can any system of philosophy be proved; every one of them is rooted in the will to believe. The essence of faith is not feeling or intelligence, but will, the will to believe what cannot be scientifically demonstrated or refuted.

Avoiding the logically tight systems typical of European rationalists, James cobbled together a psychology rich in philosophical implications and a philosophy enriched by his psychological expertise. .  He explored the implications of this theory in areas of religious belief, metaphysics, human freedom and moral values, and social philosophy  His theory of the self and his view of human belief as oriented towards conscious action raised issues that required him to turn to philosophy.  He developed his pragmatic epistemology, which considers the meaning of ideas and the truth of beliefs not abstractly, but in terms of the practical difference they can make in people’s lives. His contributions in these areas included critiques of long-standing philosophical positions on such issues as freedom vs. determinism, correspondence vs. coherence, and dualism vs. materialism, as well as a thorough analysis of a phenomenological understanding of the self and consciousness, a “forward-looking” conception of truth (based on validation and revisable experience), a thorough-going metaphysical pluralism, and a commitment to a full view of agency in connection with communal and social concerns. Thus he created one of the last great philosophical systems in Western thought.

Works of James:

The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols., 1890;

The Will to Believe, 1897;

Talks to Teachers, 1899;

Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902;

Pragmatism, 1907;

The Meaning of Truth, 1909;

A Pluralistic Universe, 1909;

Some Problems of Philosophy, 1910;

Memories and Studies, 1911 ;

Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912.

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal, A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

Karma brings us ever back to rebirth, binds us to the wheel of births and deaths. Good Karma drags us back as relentlessly as bad, and the chain which is wrought out of our virtues holds as firmly and as closely as that forged from our vices.

Annie Besant

The metaphysics of the Brahman schools being beyond the comprehension of the general people, Vyasa and others, over a period of a thousand years (500 B.C. 500 A.D.), composed eighteen Puranas “old stories” in 400,000 couplets, expounding to the laity the exact truth about the creation of the world, its periodical evolution and dissolution, the genealogy of the gods, and the history of the heroic age. These books made no pretence to literary form, logical order, or numerical moderation; they insisted that the lovers Urvashi and Pururavas spent 61,000 years in pleasure and delight.  But through the intelligibility of their language, the attractiveness of their parables, and the orthodoxy of their doctrine they became the second Bible of Hinduism, the grand repository of its superstitions, its myths, even of its philosophy. Here, for example, in the Vishnupurana, is the oldest and ever-recurrent theme of Hindu thought that individual separateness is an illusion, and that all life is one.

In these Puranas, and kindred writings of medieval India, we find a very modern theory of the universe. There is no creation in the sense of Genesis; the world is perpetually evolving and dissolving, growing and decaying, through cycle after cycle, like every plant in it, and every organism. Brahma or, as the Creator is more often called in this literature, Pra japan-is the spiritual force that upholds this endless process. Each cycle or Kalpa in the history of the universe is divided into a thousand mahayugas, or great ages, of 4,320,000 years each; and each mahayuga contains four yugas or ages, in which the human race undergoes a gradual deterioration. In the present mahayuga three ages have now passed, totaling 3,888,888 years; we live in the fourth age, the Kali-yuga, or Age of Misery; 5035 years of this bitter era have elapsed, but 426,965 remain. Then the world will suffer one of its periodical deaths, and Brahma will begin another “day of Brahma,” i.e., a Kalpa of 4,320,000,000 years. In each Kalpa cycle the universe develops by natural means and processes, and by natural means and processes decays; the destruction of the whole world is as certain as the death of a mouse, and, to the philosopher, not more important. There is no final purpose towards which the whole creation moves; there is no “progress”; there is only end- less repetition.”

Through all these ages and great ages billions of souls have passed from species to species, from body to body, from life to life, in weary transmigration. An individual is not really an individual, he is a link in the chain of life, a page in the chronicle of a soul; a species is not really a separate species, for the souls in these flowers or fleas may yesterday have been, or tomorrow may be, the spirits of men; all life is one. A man is only partly a man, he is also an animal; shreds and echoes of past lower existences linger in him, and make him more akin to the brute than to the sage. Man is only a part of nature, not actually its centre or master;  a life is only a part of a soul’s career, not the entirety; every form is transitory, but every reality is continuous and one. The many reincarnations of a soul are like years or days in a single life, and may bring the soul now to growth, now to decay. How can the individual life, so brief in the tropic torrent of generations, contain all the history of a soul, or give it due punishment and reward for its evil and its good? And if the soul is immortal, how could one short life determine its fate forever?

Life can be understood, says the Hindu, only on the assumption that each existence is bearing the penalty or enjoying the fruits of vice or virtue in some antecedent life. No deed small or great, good or bad, can be without effect; everything will out. This is the Law of Karma the Law of the Deed the law of causality in the spiritual world; and it is the highest and most terrible law of all. Karma is the executed “deed”, “work”, “action”, or “act”, and it is also the “object”, the “intent. karma is complex and difficult to define.Different schools of Indologists derive different definitions for the karma concept from ancient Indian texts; their definition is some combination of

(1) causality that may be ethical or non-ethical;

(2) ethicization, that is good or bad actions have consequences; and

(3) rebirth. The law of karma operates independent of any deity or any process of divine judgment.

It is a concept whose meaning, importance and scope varies between Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and other traditions that originated in India, The difficulty in arriving at a definition for karma arises because of the diversity of views among the various schools of Hinduism that co-exist and thrive; some schools, for example, consider karma and rebirth linked and simultaneously essential, some consider karma essential but not rebirth, and a few schools of Hinduism discuss and conclude karma and rebirth flawed fiction. There is an ongoing debate regarding whether karma is a theory, a model, a paradigm, a metaphor, or a metaphysical stance.

A common theme to theories of karma is its principle of causality. One of the earliest association of karma to causality occurs in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad of Hinduism.

The theory of karma as causality holds that

(1) executed actions of an individual affects the individual and the life he  lives, and

(2) the intentions of an individual affects the individual and the life he  lives.

Disinterested actions, or unintentional actions do not have the same positive or negative karmic effect, as interested and intentional actions. Another causality characteristic, shared by Karmic theories, is that like deeds lead to like effects. Thus good karma produces good effect on the actor, while bad karma produces bad effect. This effect may be material, moral or emotional. The effect of karma need not be immediate; the effect of karma can be later in one’s current life, and in some schools it extends to future lives.

The second theme common to karma theories is ethicization. This begins with the premise that every action has a consequence, which will come to fruition in either this or a future life; thus morally good acts will have positive consequences, whereas bad acts will produce negative results.

Another  theme of karma theories is the concept of reincarnation or  rebirth. Rebirth is a fundamental concept of Hinduism.  Rebirth is the concept that all life forms go through a cycle of reincarnation, that is a series of births and rebirths. The rebirths and consequent life may be in different realm, condition or form. The karma theories suggest that the realm, condition and form depend on the quality and quantity of karma. In schools that believe in rebirth, every living being’s soul transmigrates (recycles) after death, carrying the seeds of Karmic impulses from life just completed, into another life and lifetime of karmas. This cycle continues indefinitely, except for those who consciously break this cycle by reaching moksa.

In short if a man does justice and kindness without sin his reward cannot come in one mortal span; it is stretched over other lives in which, if his virtue persists, he will be reborn into loftier place and larger good fortune; but if he lives evilly he will be reborn as an Out caste, or a weasel, or a dog. This law of Karma, like the Greek Moira or Fate, is above both gods and men; even the gods do not change its absolute operation; or, as the theologians put it, Karma and the will or action of the gods are one.  But Karma is not Fate; Fate implies the helplessness of man to determine his own lot; Karma makes him (taking all his lives as a whole) the creator of his own destiny. Nor do heaven and hell end the work of Karma, or the chain of births and deaths; the soul, after the death of the body, may go to hell for special punishment, or to heaven for quick and special reward; but no soul stays in hell, and few souls stay in heaven, forever; nearly every soul that enters them must.

When the Hindu is asked why we have no memory of our past incarnations, heanswers that likewise we have no memory of our infancy; and as we presume our infancyto explain our maturity, so he presumes past existences to explain our place and fate inour present life.

Biologically there was much truth in this doctrine. We are the reincarnations of our ancestors, and will be reincarnated in our children; and the defects of the fathers are to some extent (though perhaps not as much as good conservatives suppose) visited upon the children, even through many generations. Karma was an excellent myth for dissuading the human beast from murder, theft, procrastination, or  parsimony; furthermore, it extended the sense of moral unity and obligations to all life, and gave the moral code an extent of application far greater, and more logical, than in any other civilization. Good Hindus do not kill insects if they can possibly avoid it; “even those whose aspirations to virtue are modest treat animals as humble brethren rather than as lower creatures over whom they have dominion by divine command.”  Philosophically, Karma explained for India many facts otherwise obscure in meaning or bitterly unjust. All those eternal inequalities among men which so frustrate the eternal demands for equality and justice; all the diverse forms of evil that blacken the earth and redden the stream of history; all the suffering that enters into human life with birth and accompanies it unto death, seemed intelligible to the Hindu who accepted Karma; these evils and injustices, these variations between idiocy and genius, poverty and wealth, were the results of past existences, the inevitable working out of a law unjust for a life or a moment, but perfectly just in the end. Karma is one of those many inventions by which men have sought to bear

To explain evil, and to find for men some scheme in which they may accept it, if not with good cheer, then with peace of mind-this is the task that most religions have attempted to fulfil. Since the real problem of life is not suffering but undeserved suffering, the religion of India mitigates the human tragedy by giving meaning and value to grief and pain. The soul, in Hindu theology, has at least this consolation, which it must bear the consequences only of its own acts; unless it questions all existence it can accept evil as a passing punishment, and look forward to tangible rewards for virtue borne.

But in truth the Hindus do question all existence. Oppressed with an enervating environment, national subjection and economic exploitation, they have tended to look upon life as more a bitter punishment than an opportunity or a reward. The Vedas, written by a hardy race coming in from the north, were almost as optimistic as Whitman; Buddha, representing the same stock five hundred years later, already denied the value of life; the Puranas, five centuries later still, represented a view more profoundly pessimistic than anything known in the West except in stray moments of philosophic doubt.( Schopenhaucr, like Buddha, reduced all suffering to the will to live and beget, and advocated race suicide by voluntary sterility. Heine could hardly pen a stanza without speaking of death, and could write, in Hindu strain,

Sweet is sleep, but death is better;

Best of all is never to be born.

Kant, scorning the optimism of Leibnitz, asked: “Would any man of sound understandingwho has lived long enough, and has meditated on the worth of human existence, care togo again through life’s poor play, I do not say on the same conditions, but on any condi-tions whatever? “)

The East, until reached by the Industrial Revolution, could not understand the zest with which the Occident has taken life; it saw only superficiality and childishness in our merciless busyness, our discontented ambition, our nerve-racking labour-saving devices, our progress and speed; it could no more comprehend this profound immersion in the surface of things, this clever refusal to look ultimate in the face, than the West can fathom the quiet inertia, the “stagnation” and “hopelessness” of the traditional East. Heat cannot understand cold.

“What is the most wonderful thing m the world?” asks Yama of Yudishthira; and Yudishthira replies: “Man after man dies; seeing this, men still move about as if they were immortal.”  ”By death the world is afflicted,” say the Mahabharata, “by age it is held Li bar, and the nights are the Unfailing Ones that are ever coming and going. When I know that death cannot halt, what can I expect from walking in a cover of lore?” And in the Ramayana Sita asks, as her reward for fidelity through every temptation and trial, only death:

If in truth unto my husband I have proved a faithful wife, Mother Earth, relieve thy Sita from the burden of this life!

So the last word of Hindu religious thought is moksha, release first from desire, then from life. Nirvana may be one release or the other; but it is fullest in both. The sage Bhartri-hari expresses the first:

Everything on earth gives cause for fear, and the only freedom from fear is to be found in the renunciation of all desire. . . . Once upon a time the days seemed long to me when my heart was sorely wounded through asking favours from the rich; and yet again the days seemed all too short for me when I sought to carry out all my worldly desires and ends. But now as a philosopher I sit on a hard stone in a cave on the mountainside, and time and again I laugh when I think of my former life.

The highest and final aspiration of the Hindu is to escape reincarnation, to lose that fever of ego which revives with each individual body and birth. Salvation does not come by faith, nor yet by works; it comes by such uninterrupted self-denial, by such selfless intuition of the part-engulfing Whole, that at last the self is dead, and there is nothing to be reborn. The hell of individuality passes into the haven and heaven of unity, of complete and impersonal absorption into Brahman, the soul or Force of the World.

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.

Former Principal, A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

“God and the individual are one. To realize this is the essence of Shaivism.”—- Swami Lakshmanjoo.

The “Hinduism” that  replaced Buddhism was not one religion, nor was it only religion; it was a medley of faiths and ceremonies. Religion in India limited itself by no one creed or dogma; it not only admitted a vast number of different formulations, it contained successfully within itself all the elements that have grown up in the course of the evolution of the elements that have grown up in the course of the evolution of religion and refused to ban or excise any: it developed occultism to its utmost limits, accepted spiritual experience, spiritual self-discipline. They accepted the law of Karma and the transmigration of souls, and they replaced with new gods the deities of the Vedas. These faiths had in part antedated and survived Vedic nature worship; in part they had grown from the connivance of the Brahmans at rites, divinities and beliefs unknown to the Scriptures and largely contrary to the Vedic spirit; they had boiled in the cauldron of Hindu religious thought even while Buddhism maintained a passing intellectual ascendancy.

The gods of Hinduism were characterized by a kind of anatomical superabundance vaguely symbolizing extraordinary knowledge, activity or power.

To the Hindu there are three chief processes in life and the universe: creation, preservation and destruction. Hence divinity takes for him three main forms: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer; these are the Trimurti, or “Three Shapes,” which all Hindus but the Jains adore. Popular devotion is divided between Vaishnavism, the religion of Vishnu, and Shivaism, the religion of Shiva. The two cults are peaceful neighbors, and sometimes hold sacrifices in the same temple;” and the wise Brahmans, followed by a majority of the people, pay equal honor to both these gods.

Shaivism is one of the largest religious community in contemporary India. It is commonly associated with asceticism. Lord Shiva himself is often depicted as a yogi sitting in meditation in the Himalayas. Shaivism includes the principle of avatar. Shiva has important forms as Rudra (in a fierce and angry mood), Nataraja (the King of Dance), and the Linga. Shiva’s followers often consider him the Supreme deity, above all others.

The worship of Shiva is one of the oldest, most profound and most terrible elements in Hinduism. There was nothing, not even Nirvana, that the Hindu desired so intensely as children. Hence, in part, his longing for sexual power, and his ritual adoration of the symbols of reproduction and fertility. Phallic worship, which has prevailed in most countries at one time or another, has persisted in India from ancient times to the twentieth century. Shiva was its deity, the phallus was its ikon, the Tantras were its Talmud. The Shaktiy or energizing power, of Shiva was conceived sometimes as his consort Kali, sometimes as a female element in Shiva’s nature, which included both male and female powers; and these two powers were represented by idols called linga or yoni, representing respectively the male or the female organs of generation.  Everywhere in India one sees signs of this worship of sex: in the phallic figures on the Nepalese and other temples in Benares; in the gigantic lingas that adorn or surround the Shivaite temples of the south; in phallic processions and ceremonies, and in the phallic images worn on the arm or about the neck. Linga stones may be seen on the highways; Hindus break upon them the cocoanuts which they are about to offer in sacrifice.”

Usually the phallic ritual is simple and becoming; it consists in anointing the stone with consecrated water or oil, and decorating it with leaves.”

Doubtless the lower orders in India derive some profane amusement from phallic processions;  but for the most part the people appear to find no more obscene stimulus in the linga or the yoni than a Christian does in the contemplation of the Madonna nursing her child; custom lends propriety, and time lends sanctity, to anything. The sexual symbolism of the objects seems long since to have been forgotten by the people; the images are now merely the traditional and sacred ways of representing the power of Shiva.  Perhaps the difference between the European and the Hindu conception of this matter arose from divergence in the age of marriage; early marriage releases those impulses which, when long frustrated, turn in upon themselves and beget prurience as well as romantic love. The sexual morals and manners of India are in general higher than those of Europe and America, and far more decorous and restrained.

The worship of Shiva is one of the most austere and ascetic of all the Hindu cults; and the devoutest worshipers of the linga are the Lingayats the most Puritanic sect in India.

The use of the linga and the yoni was but one of the myriad rituals that seemed, to the passing and alien eye, not merely the form but half the essence of Indian religion. Nearly every act of life, even to washing and dressing, had its religious rite. In every pious home there were private and special gods to be worshiped, and ancestors to be honored, every day; indeed religion, to the Hindu, was a matter for domestic observances rather than for temple ceremonies, which were reserved for holydays.

The roots of Shaivism are anchored in pre-historic India Between 700 and 1000 CE there lived sixty-three Nayanmars (singer-saints) whose poems are still recited today. Thereafter, Shaivism became the prominent religion of India, particularly in the South India. Magnificent temples were built in Shiva’s honour and many impressive sculptures were inspired by him. Shiva is mentioned in the four Vedas, and particularly the Svetashvatara Upanishad, the Shaivite equivalent to the Vaishnava Bhagavad-gita. There are numerous references to Shiva in the epics and Puranas.

Sir John Marshall reports “unmistakable evidence” of the cult of Shiva at Mohenjo-daro, partly in the form of a three-headed Shiva, partly in the form of little stone columns which he presumes to be as phallic as their modern counterparts. “Shivaism,” he concludes, “is therefore the most ancient living faith in the world.” The practice of worshipping Shiva Lingam as the holy symbol of Lord Shiva exists since time immemorial . The worship of Shiva Lingam was not confined to India  only. Vietnam was the home to a vibrant Vedic civilization. Many spectacular temples and sculptures still remain to this day .Throughout Vietnam many ancient Shiva Lingas have been found, dating back thousands of years.  Lingam was referred to ‘Prayapas’ by the Romans who introduced the worship of Shiva Lingam to European countries. The statutes of Shiva Lingams were found in the archeological findings in Babylon, a city of ancient Mesopotamia. In County Meath, Ireland, on the Hill of Tara sits a mysterious stone known as the Lia Fáil (Stone of Destiny). According to The Annals of the Four Masters, an ancient document written by Franciscan Monks between 1632-1636 AD, this stone was brought to Ireland by the Tuatha Dé Danann .The Tuatha Dé Danann, meaning the children of the goddess Danu, are said to have ruled Ireland from 1897 B.C. to 1700 B.C. having arrived from the coast on ships. The Christian monks viewed the stone as a pagan stone idol symbolic of fertility. This stone was so important that it was used for the coronation of all Irish Kings up until 500 AD. The goddess Danu in European tradition was a river goddess. In some Irish texts her father is said to be Dagda (the good god), a father figure in Irish tradition. . Encyclopedia Britannica mentions under the headings “Etruria” and “Etruscan” that between the 2nd and 7th centuries BC, northern Italy was known as Etruria. During excavations many such “meteoric stones mounted on carved pedestals” are discovered in Italy. Obviously, therefore, this one was dug up from the Vatican itself. Many more must be lying buried in the Vatican’s massive walls and numerous cellars.

Shiva is viewed chiefly as a god of  destruction, the personification of that cosmic force which destroys, one after another, all the forms that reality takes all cells, all organisms, all species, all ideas, all works, all planets and all things. Never has another people dared to face the impermanence of forms, and the impartiality of nature, so frankly, or to recognize so clearly that evil balances good, that destruction goes step by step with creation, and that all birth is a capital crime, punishable with death. The Hindu, tortured with a thousand misfortunes and sufferings, sees in them the handiwork of a vivacious force that appears to find pleasure in breaking down everything that Brahma the creative power in nature has produced. Shiva dances to the tune of a perpetually forming, dissolving and re-forming world.

Just as death is the penalty of birth, so birth is the frustration of death; and the same god who symbolizes destruction represents also, for the Hindu mind, that passion and torrent of reproduction which overrides the death of the individual with the continuance of the race. In some parts of India, particularly Bengal, this creative or reproductive energy (Shakti) of Shiva or nature is personified in the figure of Shiva’s wife, Kali (Parvati, Uma, Durga), and is worshiped in one of the many Shakti cults. Until the last century this worship was a bloody ritual, often involving human sacrifice; latterly the goddess has been content with goats.” The deity is portrayed for the populace by a black figure with gaping mouth and protruding tongue, adorned with snakes and dancing upon a corpse; her earrings are dead men, her necklace is a string of skulls, her face and breasts are smeared with blood.  Two of her four hands carry a sword and a severed head; the other two are extended in blessing and protection. For Kali-Parvati is the goddess of motherhood as well as the bride of destruction and death; she can be tender as well as cruel, and can smile as well as kill; once, perhaps, she was a mother- goddess in Sumeria, and was imported into India before she became so terrible.  Doubtless she and her lord are made as horrible as possible in order that timid worshipers may be frightened into decency, and perhaps into generosity to the priests.

These are the greater gods of Hinduism; but they are merely five of thirty million deities in the Hindu pantheon; only to catalogue them would take a hundred volumes. Some of them are more properly angels, some arc what we should call devils, some are heavenly bodies like the sun, some are mascots like Lakshmi (goddess of good luck), many of them are beasts of the field or fowl of the air. Just as a good Christian may pray to the Madonna or one of a thousand saints, and yet be a monotheist in the sense that he recognizes one God assupreme, so the Hindu prays to Kali or Rama or Krishna or Ganesha without presuming for a moment that these are supreme deities. Some Hindus recognize Vishnu as supreme, and call Shiva merely a subordinate divinity; some call Shiva supreme, and make Vishnu an angel; if only a few worship Brahma it is because of its impersonality, its intangibility, its distance, and for the same reason that most churches in Christendom were erected to Mary or a saint, while Christianity waited for Voltaire to raise a chapel to God.

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

Napoleon Bonaparte

We see Egypt’s ancient pyramid as monumental structures that inspire our imagination with awe and wonder.

It seems that the earliest temples of Egypt, sometimes incorporated a mound of earth as a symbol of the original site of all life. The word pyramid is apparently derived from the Egyptian word pi-re-mus, altitude, rather than from the Greek pyr, fire Thus, from the outset, the pyramid shape represented the idea of new life, emerging from a mound of earth to be bathed in the light and warmth of the sun. However the Egyptians thought that it somehow incorporated the very power of life itself and even the force that made it possible for new life to emerge after a period of dormancy. The annual experience that the Egyptians linked to their concept of creation . One of their earliest creation myths envisioned the first place in the world as a mound of earth emerging from the waters of a universal ocean. Here the first life form was seen as a lily, growing on the peak of the primeval mound. To the Egyptians, the lily was connected with a god named Nefertum, whose name means “perfect and complete”. Nefertum was honored as a harbinger of the sun, which rose from the lily’s petals to bring life to the newly created world. Even the mound itself was deified as a god named Tatjenen, meaning “the emerging land”.

The earliest such mounds may have been a small hill of earth or sand, but the icon eventually took the form of a small pyramid carved from a single block of stone, known as a bnbn (benben). The benben also, because of the sun’s part in creation, came to be an icon of both the primeval mound as well as the sun which rose from it. In fact, the Egyptian word for the rising sun is wbn.

Thus, the benben was incorporated within the structure of the tomb and provided the power for the spiritual rebirth to take place. The tombs of early rulers, and later on, officials, were usually surmounted by a rectangular structure of mud brick known as a mastaba, but mounds of earth have also been found within these buildings above the burial chamber. However, the mastaba itself may have been seen as symbolizing the primeval mound.

In the ancient Egyptian belief, death was not an end of life but rather the beginning of a new form of existence, particularly for the king. Basically, to the ancient Egyptians, each human was made up of various elements. Among these were the body, the ba and the ka. The body was the physical form that the living being inhabited. The ba was similar to our modern notion of the soul. It was the unique essence of each individual, while the ka was the energy of life itself, a force that was transferred from the creator to each living person. In fact, death occurred when this force was separated from the ka and its body, but after death, the ba and the ka were thought to reunite. This union allowed the individual to continue living, but in a spiritual rather than physical form. This new form of life, called akh, was more or less eternal, though the Egyptians did believe in an end of time.

There were actually two different myths that coexisted to explain this process. In one, the sun reentered the womb of Nut, the goddess of the sky, in the evening and was born again in the morning. However, in the other myth the sun sank into a netherworld, know as the Duat, where in the middle of the night, it merged with the mummy of Osiris . From this union it received the ability to come once again to life. While two different myths, together they combined the role of mother and father in the production of new life. And both of these concepts are reflected in the standardized layout of the interior chambers.

The Egyptian pyramid is one of the most common symbols representing the ancient Egyptian civilization. The best known pyramids are the three pyramids of Giza; however, these are not the only pyramids in Egypt. Egyptian pyramids evolved over time demonstrating improvements in ancient architecture and culminating in the pyramid complex at Giza.

Beginning with the construction of step pyramids, the evolution of pyramid architecture then progressed to the bent-side pyramid of Dashur and finally to the true pyramid like those at Giza.

The earliest dated pyramid is the step pyramid built for the King Djoser in the 3rd dynasty in Saqqara. , began as a mastaba but was made into a pyramid of six steps by the construction of five successively smaller mastabas on top of one another. This seems to have been a progression in the visualization of the primeval mound The pyramid of Djoser consists of 6 steps, a revolution in the construction of royal tombs. But let’s give credit where credit is due: King Djoser did not design the pyramid – the royal architect Imhotep is credited with the architectural design of the earliest Egyptian pyramid. The pyramid stretched to a little over 200 feet high. The design is adapted from earlier tomb designs called mastabas. A mastaba is an underground tomb topped with a rectangular, flat roofed structure usually made of mud bricks. Imhotep created a series of mastabas laid on top of each other to create the step pyramid. The tomb of Djoser was located underground like earlier tombs marked only by the mastabas, with the only difference being the step pyramid marking the tomb.

The bent pyramid of Dashur shows the transition from step pyramids to the later true pyramid. the bent pyramid is the first Egyptian attempt at creating the true pyramid. Construction of the bent pyramid started with the sides ascending at about a 54-degree angle, but halfway up, the angle was changed for the remainder of the construction to the slightly less angular 43 degrees. This change in angle gives the pyramid the bent shape. Similar to the step pyramids, the tomb for the bent pyramid was also constructed underground. Learning from his mistake, Snofru built another pyramid on the same site called the Red Pyramid. Construction of the Red pyramid was a success and is considered the first true pyramid completed.

The typical interior plan of these laterOld kingdom pyramids  consisted of three main elements. These elements consisted of an antechamber beneath the apex of the pyramid, connected to the outside by an entrance corridor that opens into the pyramid’s north face; a burial chamber to the west of the antechamber; and a stone sarcophagus at the west end of the burial chamber.

The true  pyramids that began to be built in the  fourth dynesty wee derived from the original step shape by filling in the steps to create four smooth faces, thus being large scale representations of the more common pyramidal benben.

However, by the fifth dynasty the layout of the chambers within the royal pyramid became standardized in a form that reflects a vision of the afterlife that characterized Egyptian thought from then on.

The purpose of building pyramids was not architectural but religious; the pyramids were tombs, lineally descended from the most primitive of burial mounds. Apparently the Pharaoh believed, like any commoner among his people, that every living body was inhabited by a double, or ka, which need not die with the breath; and that the ka would survive all the more completely if the flesh were preserved against hunger, violence and decay. The pyramid, by its height, its form and its position, sought stability as a means to deathlessness; and except for its square corners it took the natural form that any homogeneous group of solids would take if allowed to fall unimpeded to the earth. Again, it was to have permanence and strength; therefore stones were piled up here with mad patience as if they had grown by the wayside and had not been carried from quarries hundreds of miles away. In Khufu’s pyramid there are two and a half million blocks, some of them weighing one hundred and fifty tons,  all of them averaging two and a half tons; they cover half a million squarefeet, and rise 481 feet into the air. And the mass is solid; only a few blocks were omitted, to leave a secret passage way for the carcass of the King. A guide leads the trembling visitor on all fours into the cavernous mausoleum, up a hundred crouching steps to the very heart of the pyramid; there in the damp, still center, buried in darkness and secrecy, once rested the bones of Khufu and his queen. The marble sarcophagus of the Pharaoh is still in place, but broken and empty. Even these stones could not deter human thievery, nor all the curses of the gods. Since the ka was conceived as the minute image of the body, it had to be fed, clothed and served after the death of the frame. Lavatories were provided in some royal tombs for the convenience of the departed soul; and a funerary text expresses some anxiety lest the ka, for want of food, should feed upon its own excreta” One suspects that Egyptian burial customs, if traced to their source, would lead to the primitive interment of a warrior’s weapons with his corpse, or to some institution like the Hindu suttee the burial of a man’s wives and slaves with him that they may attend to his needs. This having proved irksome to the wives and slaves, painters and sculptors were engaged to draw pictures, carve bas- reliefs, and make statuettes resembling these aides; by a magic formula, usually inscribed upon them, the carved or painted objects would be quite as effective as the real ones. A man’s descendants were inclined to be lazy and economical, and even if he had left an endowment to cover the costs they were apt to neglect the rule that religion originally put upon them of supplying the dead with provender. Hence pictorial substitutes were in any case a wise precaution: they could provide the ka of the deceased with fertile fields, plump oxen, innumerable servants and busy artisans, at an attractively reduced rate. Having discovered this principle, the artist accomplished marvels with it. One tomb picture shows a field being ploughed, the next shows the grain being reaped or threshed, another the bread being baked; one shows the bull copulating with the cow, another the calf being born, another the grown cattle being slaughtered, another the meat served hot on the dish.  A fine limestone bas-relief in the tomb of Prince Rahotep portrays the dead man enjoying the varied victuals on the table before him.  Never since has art done so much for men .

In the Pyramid Texts, a collection of funerary rituals and spells first inscribed on the walls of the interior chambers in the Pyramid of Unas .They were also inscribed on his sarcophagi. Unas was the last king of the fifth dynasty ,and these texts show that the king’s afterlife was thought to parallel the daily solar cycle. Each night, as the sun once again re-entered the body of  Nut and the netherworld, the king’s spirit would come back to the interior of his tomb. The stone sarcophagus in the west end of the burial chamber was an analogue of Nut’s womb. Within the sarcophagus, the king’s mummy was both a fetus and an analogue of the mummy of  Osiris lying in the Duat. The Pyramid Texts   refer to the burial chamber itself as the Duat, and the spells inscribed on the walls of this room refer to the king not only by his own name, but also as Osiris. As the sun united with the mummy of Osiris in the Duat, the king’s spirit was thought to join with his own mummy in the Duat of his tomb and, like the sun, receive through this union the power of new life.

Finally the ka was assured long life not only by burying the cadaver in a sarcophagus of the hardest stone, but by treating it to the most pains- taking mummification. So well was this done that to this day bits of hair and flesh cling to the royal skeletons. Herodotus vividly describes the Egyptian embalmer’s art:

First they draw out the brains through the nostrils with an iron hook, raking part of it out in this manner, the rest by the infusion of drugs. Then with a sharp stone they make an incision in the side,and take out all the bowels; and having cleansed the abdomen and rinsed it with palm wine, they next sprinkle it with pounded perfume. Then, having filled the belly with pure myrrh, cassia and other perfumes, they sew it up again; and when they have done this they steep it in natron, leaving it under for seventy days; for a longer time than this it is not lawful to steep it. At the expiration of seventy days they wash the corpse, and wrap the whole body in bandages of waxen cloth, smearing it with gum, which the Egyptians commonly use instead of glue. After this the relations, having taken the body back again, make a wooden case in the shape of a man, and having made it they enclose the body; and then, having fastened it up, they store it in a sepulchral chamber, setting it up- right against the wall. In this manner they prepare the bodies that are embalmed in the most expensive way.

In the burial chamber, the texts describe two funeral rituals. They begin with a ritual of offerings, always inscribed on the north wall of the burial chamber. The priests would repeat this spell each day in the mortuary temple attached to the pyramid, which would therefore continue to provide the king’s ba with the necessities of daily life. The second ritual was for resurrection, intended to release the king’s ba from its attachment to the body so that it could rejoin its ka and enjoy life once again. It begins by assuring the king that “you have not gone away dead: you have gone away alive,” and then encourages him to “go and follow your sun…and be beside the god, and leave your house to your son of your begetting”. It ends by reassuring the king that “you shall not perish, you shall not end: your identity will remain among the people even as it comes to be among the gods”.

Outside of their power to give new life to the deceased, not much is known about the role that the earliest pyramids were thought to play in the afterlife. Nevertheless, there were successive changes to these structures and new innovations in their architecture and plan that suggest an evolution in Egyptian funerary theology.

There are many mysteries yet to be solved about pyramids, it is clear that they were not simply monumental tombs, kings. They were also, and more fundamentally, resurrection machines, designed to produce and ensure eternal life.

“All the world fears Time,” says an Arab proverb, “but Time fears the Pyramids.”

REFERANCES:

BREASTED, JAS. H.: A History of Egypt. New York, 1912.

BREASTED, JAS. H.: The Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient

CAPART, JEAN: Lectures on Egyptian Art. Univ. of N. C. Press, 1928.

COTTERILL, H. B.: A History of Art. 2V. New Vork, 1922.

Egypt. New York, 1912.

HERODOTUs: Histories, tr. by Cary. London, 1901. References are to book

MASPERO, G.: Art in Egypt. New York, 1922.

MASPERO, G.: The Dawn of Civilization: Egypt and Chaldaea. London, 1897

SCHAFER, H. and ANDRAE, W.: Die Kunst des alten Orients. Berlin, 1925.

WILL DURANT: Our Oriental Heritage. Simon and Schuster. New York 1954

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are.

Jonathan Kozol

Curriculum is concerned with making general statements about language learning, learning purpose, experience, evaluation, and the role and relationships of teachers and learners. Syllabuses, on the other hand, are more localized and are based on accounts and records of what actually happens at the classroom level as teachers and learners apply a given curriculum to their own situation.

Syllabus basically  means a concise statement or table of the heads of a discourse, the contents of a treatise, the subjects of a series of lectures. In the form that many of us will have been familiar with it is connected with courses leading to examinations – teachers talk of the syllabus as, a series of headings with some additional notes which set out the areas that may be examined.

A syllabus will not generally indicate the relative importance of its topics or the order in which they are to be studied. In some cases  those who compile a syllabus tend to follow the traditional textbook approach of an ‘order of contents’, or a pattern prescribed by a ‘logical’ approach to the subject, or  – consciously or unconsciously – a the shape of a university course in which they may have participated. Thus, a  curriculum which focuses on syllabus is only  concerned with content. Curriculum is a body of knowledge-content and/or subjects. Education in this sense, is the process by which these are transmitted or ‘delivered’ to students by the most effective methods that can be devised .

Where people still equate curriculum with a syllabus they are likely to limit their planning to a consideration of the content or the body of knowledge that they wish to transmit. This view of curriculum has been adopted by  many teachers in  schools’, as issues of curriculum have no concern to them, since they have not regarded their task as being to transmit bodies of knowledge in this manner’.

The concept of curriculum is very wide and extensive. It includes all those experiences which a student gets in the aegis of the school. It includes all academic and co-curricular activities inside and outside the classroom. The curriculum can be understood in the form of activity and experience.

The term ‘syllabus’ is often used in the sense of the term ‘curriculum’. In fact, the subject  matter for an intellectual subject is called content. When this content is organized in view of teaching in the classroom, this is called syllabus.

Thus, the syllabus presents the definite knowledge regarding the amount of knowledge to be given to students during the course of teaching of different subjects; while the curriculum is totality of educational activities, the teacher would complete .

Teaching can be made more effective if a  teacher is fully satisfied with the curriculum which he has to teach. Also, he should know its utility. It can be possible only when he studies the prevalent syllabus critically. It should be fully clear to him that each subject has certain specific aims, which his  students have to achieve. A teacher should examine these aims and how they can be achieved on the basis of the present syllabus.

From this view, the prevalent syllabus following are the bases for its critical appraisal :

Syllabus in Relation to Objectives : An objective is an goal or end point of something towards which actions are directed. Objectives generally indicate the end points of a journey. They specify where you want to be or what you intend to achieve at the end of a process. An educational objective is that achievement which a specific educational instruction is  expected to  make  or accomplish.  It is the outcome of any educational instruction. It is the purpose for which any particular educational undertaking is carried out.

Bloom’  Benjamin’s  has  put  forward  a  taxonomy  of  educational objectives,  which  provides  a  practical  framework  within  which educational  objectives  could  be  organized  and  measured.  In  this taxonomy Bloom  divided educational objectives into three domains.  These  are;

Cognitive domain (intellectual capability, ie., knowledge, or ’think’)

The  cognitive  domain  involves  those  objectives  that  deal  with  the development of intellectual abilities and skills. These have to do with the mental abilities of the brain.

AFFECTIVE DOMAIN (feelings, emotions and behaviour, ie., attitude, or ’feel’)

Krathwohl’s affective domain taxonomy is perhaps the best known of any of the affective taxonomies. “The taxonomy is ordered according to the principle of internalization. Internalization refers to the process whereby a person’s affect toward an object passes from a general awareness level to a point where the affect is ‘internalized’ and consistently guides or controls the person’s behavior .

Psychomotor domain (manual and physical skills, ie., skills, or ’do’)

Psychomotor objectives are those specific to discreet physical functions, reflex actions and interpretive movements. Traditionally, these types of objectives are concerned with the physically encoding of information, with movement and/or with activities where the gross and fine muscles are used for expressing or interpreting information or concepts. This area also refers to natural, autonomic responses or reflexes.

It means  that the  instructional  objectives make  performance  skills  more prominent. The psychomotor domain has to do with muscular activities.

The syllabus is a means to attain the objectives. If aims and means are not in consonance, then the desirable outcomes would only be a pipedream. The utility of the syllabus depends on the fact whether the topics included in it are helpful in the realization of the concerned teaching objectives. In this context, it would be necessary to evaluate the syllabus. The following table can be used

Selection of Organization of Syllabus : The selection of syllabus is the second most important test on the basis of which critical analysis should be conducted. The details of syllabus organisation  can be used in the following table beneficially:

Comprehensiveness of Syllabus : The selection of the syllabus should be as per the level of students. So, the subject matter included in the topics should be neither floating nor deep.

Comprehensiveness is a qualitative concept. So, it will have to be evaluated in a relative manner. For it, a rating scale will have to be used. If common analysis has to be conducted, then the three-point rating scale should be used, and if more intensive study has to be carried out, then five-point rating scale should be desirable.

Data in the above table can be given numerical value in order to calculate comprehensiveness of the syllabus, (for it, all tallies of most comprehensive should be multiplied by 5, very comprehensive by 4, comprehensive by 3, less comprehensive by 2 and not comprehensive by 1, and thus calculate relative comprehensiveness.

Theoretical, Practical or Both : Both theoretical and practical aspects of science are equally important. If the syllabus is only theoretical, it would make the syllabus bookish and abstract. Due to this, the content in different topics would have to be analysed to see how much theoretical aspect it contains and what practical possibilities exist in it. This can be analysed objectively as follows :

Examination-centered : For both students and teachers, the importance of a topic is determined on the basis of its importance in the examinations. The amount of emphasis of a topic varies with the value of the topic from examination viewpoint for both teachers and students. It has influenced to such extent that the number of marks allotted for each topic are given in the syllabus itself. The analysis of examination effect can be done by the following table :

Child-centered : The syllabus should not only be meant for common students, but it should have due provisions for talented and backward students also. The syllabus should be analyzed from this viewpoint also.

The focal point of the syllabus should be the student. The syllabus should be selected keeping in view the age, previous knowledge, interest, aptitude, needs etc. of students. It should be found out the importance given to these factors in the syllabus. It would only be possible to evaluate its utility for students.

Correlation: Because a student attains knowledge as a whole unit, so the importance of science being related with other subjects, its influence or other subjects and influence of other subjects on it cannot be ignored. Therefore, it should be known whether the form of syllabus is partial or not, which can be done on the basis of the following table:

For Future Education: The syllabuses for the secondary level and higher education should be inter-connected, so that continuity of knowledge can be maintained. The syllabus should be analyzed on this basis by which it can be ascertained which topics can form the basis for future higher education, so that the capability of the syllabus in view of can be evaluated.

Although no one, and no teacher, can predict the future with any certainty, people in leadership capacities such as teachers are required to make guesses about the probable future and plan appropriately. Teachers therefore need to plan their curriculum according to the more likely future their students face while at the same time acknowledging that the students have a future. The competent leader cannot plan according to past successes, as if doing so will force the past to remain with him. The most competent leader and manager, in fact, is not even satisfied with thoughts of the future, but is never satisfied, always sure that whatever is being done can be improved.

REFERANCES

Barrow, R. (1984) Giving Teaching back to Teachers. A critical introduction to curriculum theory, Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books.

Blenkin, G. M. et al (1992) Change and the Curriculu,, London: Paul Chapman.

Dewey, J. (1902) The Child and the Curriculum, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Heineman. Tyler, R. W. (1949) Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. Chicago:    University of Chicago Press.

Jeffs, T. J. and Smith, M. K. (1999) Informal Education. Conversation, democracy and learning, Ticknall: Education Now.

Kelly, A. V. (1983; 1999) The Curriculum. Theory and practice 4e, London: Paul Chapman.

Stenhouse, L. (1975) An introduction to Curriculum Research and Development, London: Heineman.

Tyler, R. W. (1949) Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Teachers play an import role in shaping the future of the country and hence it’s important that a lot of attention is paid on the quality of teachers churned out every year, . Teachers can greatly influence young minds and hence it’s important that competent teachers are recruited for the gullible and vulnerable young minds.The present goal of the Indian Government is to provide education for all. They are trying out with schemes that would enhance enrollment and are ensuring that every child gets access to school. A lot of planning and resource has been spent on education in India and at the same time for improving the quality of education. One simple way of uplifting the standard of educations is by improving the quality of teachers. A great teacher can make a huge difference to the life of children. A lot of stress is given on teacher training course in India; unfortunately there are several loopholes in the system and a lot of times incompetent teachers get recruited.

Teacher training course in India is designed for aspiring teachers to learn interactive and better ways of teaching to make a subject interesting.  There are several schools and colleges in India which cater to teacher training schools in India and these offer teaching courses for different levels. Teacher education in India is institution based, along with internship programs in real classroom settings. Teacher education is provided by several Universities, affiliated colleges, private and open Universities in India. Some of these institutions are more like an eye wash and provide certification just by paying the fee, and this leads to rise of unqualified teachers in India.

We can no longer depend upon the concept of born teachers. The college of education have to make all efforts to prepare the student-teachers, to perform teaching roles sincerely. The future quality of teachers turned out by the College of Education will largely depend upon the quality of the intake of the pre-service teacher education programme, selection procedure followed for the admission of trainees, instructional materials method of teaching and evaluation, supervision of teaching practice, inculcating social and moral values, individual guidance to student-teachers and the utilisation of available academic facilities.

Over the last few decades the teacher education has been severely criticised for being very theoretical and obsolete. Teacher education system is strongly evolving so that quality of teachers in India improved. The curriculum of teacher education is being severely revised  since 1998. In this internet age, the use of IT and computer should be used for training teachers and the curriculum now also advocates the use of internet to be used by teachers for teaching students.

Unfortunately teacher education has received scant attention from the state government and the universities. A number of factors affect the quality of teacher education.

Limitation of Teacher Training Programmes

Short Duration of B.Ed course

The major short comings of teacher education is its short duration compared with the duration of training for other professions – medical, engineering and law. Five, four and three years of training is required to become a doctor, engineer and lawyer respectively, But an academic year, generally of nine months, is thought to be enough to train a teacher.Under special circumstances the academic year may be reduced to even 4 to 5 months.

Most of the B.Ed students count their days in the College of Education. They are, in general, said to be neither serious nor sincere to acquire teaching learning skills required. With the formal completion of of the course, it is assumed that the trainees has acquired the required teaching skills.

Poorly  Equipped College of Education

Majority of College of Education have poor or inadequate physical facilities and infrastructure. Lack of teaching aids, and other aids like overhead projector, TV, Vedio-tapeing  facilities and inadequate libraries are commonly observed in colleges

Teaching Methods are of little practical value

Anybody who has undergone B.Ed. course will try to implement in the schools the methods he has learnt. He gets disappointed because the practical situation in the schools is not congenial for implementing any other method except lecture method .Besides there is a general lack of faith in the method learnt in the Colleges of Education. Neither the administrators nor the teachers of the secondary schools or Colleges of Education are fully convinced about the utility of the teaching methods. It can be said that the methods of teaching are, largely speaking, based more upon opinions than on tested experiences or experimentation. As these methods are of little practical value when translated into action, they are losing ground in the practical situation, namely,  in the schools. It is a fact that the attitude of the headmasters, the prevalent examination system and the system of evaluation of the work of the teacher would compel the trainees to forget the time consuming, strenuous and unproductive methods as soon as they leave the four walls of the College of Education.

Unfortunately the Colleges of Education are mostly following the traditional method of teaching. Of course, there is realisation among the members of staff of the College of Education to develop the  student-teacher’s maturity through contacts, study and discussion requiring student participation and independent study. Similarly a number of techniques— programmed instruction, language laboratories, microteaching, etc are being developed. But the teacher training colleges have yet to put them in practice. The student-teachers should be introduced to them first in their own learning programmes and later on in their teaching practice.

Practice teaching has become a formality

The objective of teaching practice is to provide the prospective teachers a command over the necessary tools of the profession, control of the technique of class instruction and management skill and proficiency in the art of teaching. The practice teaching provides an opportunity for the teachers to translate the theoretical instruction, the knowledge of subject matter and the principles of education into practice.

Practice teaching is an important aspect of teacher education programme and in some of the Teacher education programme it is becoming a farce, in some it is monotonous and stereotyped while in others it is a matter of purposeless activity requiring drastic change.

The general complaint is that in majority of colleges of Education and specially in Correspondence Courses the practice teaching is not followed honestly. The total number of prescribed practice teaching lessons is large and the time at the disposal of the college to carry out the practice teaching lessons is short. Usually the practice teaching should be over before the month of March. Some times it is not possible to organise more than one lesson on systematic lines.

Continuous teaching practice in majority colleges, is organised with a view to formally completing the practice teaching without systematic planning. The  B.Ed trainees and the staff go to some local schools and their classes are turned over to the trainees of the College of Education. The lecturer of the B.Ed  college goes from class to class from morning till evening supervising not less than 25 lesson every day. Discussion hardly takes place after the lesson. Offering suggestions to the trainee is rarely practised. The high school students are bored from morning till evening with ill-orgasised and badly taught lessons from B.Ed trainees. Thus supervision by teacher educators has become ceremonial.

Evaluation is Subjective

In the evaluation of B.Ed subjects, subjectivity is found increasing. Internal assessment of theory and practice teaching usually contributed to inflation of marks. The validity of division is questionable. External examination is  also not free from subjectivity.

Correspondence  courses –producing  sub-standard teachers

The B.Ed being a professional course, cannot be made a very  cheap degree available to everyone without an aptitude for that. It is not uncommon to come across institutes of correspondence courses of the universities each one admitting large number of students for the B.Ed course. Minting money may be the primary aim rather than the standard of teachers turned out by them. They have become almost factories, producing thousands of B.Ed degree holders every year. The cancerous disease of starting B.Ed correspondence courses has spread all over the country just for the sake of financial benefits of the universities.

Subjective Valuation of Records

In addition of teaching practice, the student teachers has to submit number of records on the basis of project work. How far the record work is original is a basic question? The time at the disposal of the student teacher is short and the load of record work is very heavy. Very few can actually study, observe and record. If we accept the truth frankly, it may be said that the student teacher would secure some records of the previous years and reproduce them in his own hand writing. Though all the concerned know about it, this practice is going on in many places .Hundreds of records are valued by the examiners in a day or two. Do the examiner find time to go through the records and evaluate them properly? The answer is ’IT IS NOT POSSIBLE’.

Shortage of Time to Study Theory

The student teachers has to write examination in six to seven theory papers. He is burdened with the practice teaching and project work, and has no time to spare for genuinely studying the theory papers. In a short period of six to seven months duration, the student teacher has to spend most of the time completing the formalities prescribed for the course. He finds little time to study, think and explore the fascinating subjects which are inter-disciplinary in nature.

Role of National Council of Teacher Education

The National Council for Teacher Education (N.C.T.E) is a regulatory body but because the country is so diverse with innumerable institutions it sometimes get difficult to monitor all the institutions. Since 1973, the National Council for Teacher Education was an advisory body for the Central and State Governments on all matters pertaining to teacher education, with its Secretariat in the Department of Teacher Education of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (N.C.E.R.T). Despite its commendable work in the academic fields, it could not perform essential regulatory functions, to ensure maintenance of standards in teacher education and preventing rise of substandard teacher education institutions. The National Policy on Education (NPE), 1986 and the Programme of Action there under, envisaged a National Council for Teacher Education with statutory status and necessary resources as a first step for overhauling the system of teacher education. The National Council for Teacher Education as a statutory body came into existence in pursuance of the National Council for Teacher Education Act, 1993 (No. 73 of 1993) on the 17th August,1995.

The main objective of the N.C.T.E. is to achieve planned and coordinated development of the teacher education system throughout the country ,and to ensure regulation and proper maintenance of Norms and Standards in the teacher education system and for matters connected therewith.

The mandate given to the N.C.T.E. is very broad and covers the whole gamut of teacher education programmes including, research and training of persons for equipping them to teach at pre-primary, primary, secondary and senior secondary stages in schools ,and in non-formal education, part-time education, adult education and distance (correspondence) education courses.

The N.C.T.E. performs functions that are regulatory and also concerned with academic development of teacher education. Its functions are wide ranging and include among others planning, programming, advising, and formulations of norms for different teacher education courses. In addition the NCTE is expected to undertake periodic surveys, studies, and researches for promotion of innovations in teacher education and for institutional development. The following list gives its functions in detail.

1.       To undertake surveys and studies relating to various aspects of teacher education and publish the results thereof,

2.       To make recommendations to the Central and State Governments, Universities, and recognised institutions in the matter of preparation of suitable plans and programs in the field of teacher education,

3.       To co-ordinate and monitor teacher education and its development in the country,

4.       To lay down guidelines in respect of minimum qualifications for a person to be employed as a teacher in schools or in recognised institutions,

5.       To lay down norms for any specified category of courses of training in teacher education, including the minimum eligibility criteria for admission thereof, and the method of selection of candidates, duration of the courses, course contents and mode of curriculum,

6.       To lay down guidelines for compliance by recognised institutions, for starting new courses or training and for providing physical and instructional facilities, staffing pattern and staff qualifications,

7.       To lay down standards in respect of examinations leading to teacher education qualifications, criteria for admission to such examinations and schemes of courses of training,

8.       To lay down guidelines regarding tuition fees and other fees chargeable by recognised institutions,

9.       To promote and conduct innovation and research in various areas of teacher education and disseminate the results thereof,

10.   To examine and review periodically the implementation of the norms, guidelines and standards laid down by the Council, and to suitably advise the recognised institutions,

11.   To evolve suitable performance appraisal systems, norms and mechanisms for enforcing accountability on recognised institutions,

12.   To formulate schemes for various levels of teacher education and identify recognized institutions and set up new institutions for teacher development programs,

13.    To take all necessary steps to prevent commercialization of teacher education,  and perform such other functions as may be entrusted to it by the Central Government.

By laying down norms for different teacher education courses the NCTE has tried to regulate standards of teacher education.

Revised N.C.T.E. Norms for B.Ed for 2015  :

Duration for B.Ed Course and Working Days

Duration: The B.Ed. programme shall be of a duration of two academic years, which can be completed in a maximum of three years from the date of admission to the programme.
Working Days
(a) There shall be at least two hundred working days each year exclusive of the period of examination and admission.
(b) The institution shall work for a minimum of thirty six hours in a week (five or six days), during which physical presence in the institution of all the teachers and student teachers is necessary to ensure their availability for advice, guidance, dialogue and consultation as and when needed.
(c) The minimum attendance of student-teachers shall have to be 80% for all course work and practicum, and 90% for school internship.

Intake, Eligibility, Admission Procedure:

Intake: There shall be a basic unit of 50 students, with a maximum of two units. There shall not be more than twenty five students per teacher for a school subject for methods courses and other practical activities of the programme to facilitate participatory teaching and learning.

Eligibility:
(a) Candidates with at least fifty percent marks either in the Bachelor’s Degree and/or in the Master’s Degree in Sciences/Social Sciences/ Humanity, Bachelor’s in Engineering or Technology with specialization in Science and Mathematics with 55% marks or any other qualification equivalent thereto, are eligible for admission to the programme.
(b) The reservation and relaxation for SC/ST/OBC/PWD and other categories shall be as per the rules of the Central Government / State Government, whichever is applicable.

Curriculum, Programme Implementation and Assessment

Curriculum:
The B.Ed. curriculum shall be designed to integrate the study of subject knowledge, human development, pedagogical knowledge and communication skills. The programme shall comprise three broad curricular areas: Perspectives in Education, Curriculum and Pedagogic Studies, and Engagement with the Field.

The courses under each of these curricular areas will be based on a close reading of original writings, seminar/term paper presentations and continuous engagement with the field. Transaction of the courses shall be done using a variety of approaches, such as base studies, discussions on reflective journals, observations of children, and interactions with the community in multiple socio-cultural environments. Information and Communication Technology (ICT), gender, yoga education, and disability/inclusive education shall form an integral part of the B.Ed. curriculum.
(i) Theory Courses
(a) Perspectives in Education:
Perspectives in Education should include courses in the study of childhood, child development and adolescence, contemporary India and education, philosophical and sociological perspectives in education, theoretical foundations of knowledge and curriculum, teaching and learning, gender in the context of school and society, and inclusive education.

(b) Curriculum and Pedagogic Studies
Courses in Curriculum and Pedagogic Studies shall include aspects of language across the curriculum and communication, understanding of a discipline, social history of a school subject, and its pedagogical foundations, with a focus on the learner; and a course on the theoretical perspectives on assessment for learning.

Curriculum and Pedagogic Studies courses shall offer a study of the nature of a particular discipline, critical understanding of the school curriculum; pedagogy as the integration of knowledge about the learner, the discipline and the societal context of learning, and research relating to different aspects of young children’s learning. The design of the programme would enable students to specialize in one disciplinary area, viz. Social Science, Science, Mathematics, Languages, and a subject area from the same discipline, at one/ two levels of school.

(ii) Engagement with the Field/Practicum
The B.Ed. programme shall provide for sustained engagement with the Self, the Child, Community and School, at different levels and through establishing close connections between different curricular areas. This curricular area would serve as an important link between the above two broad curricular areas through its three components:
(a) Tasks and Assignments that run through all the courses.
(b) School Internship.
(c) Courses on Enhancing Professional Capacities.
Assessment
For Perspectives in Education and Curriculum and Pedagogic Studies, at least 20% to 30% marks may be assigned for continuous internal assessment and 70% to 80% marks for external examination. One-fourth of the total marks/weightage shall be allocated to assessment of practice teaching.

Suggestions for Improvement

• For rectifying the existing shortcomings and improving the quality of teacher education, a few suggestions are offered-
• The mushroom growth of institutions of teacher education is to be stopped .NCTE should look after the accreditation of Colleges of Education and standard of teacher education programme in the country.
• The present one year B.Ed course should be made two year course. Teacher training should be as rigorous as it is in the medical, engineering profession.
• The qualifications of lecturers in training colleges should be fixed as M.A/M.Sc.M.Ed    M.A In Education should not be treated eligible for lecturer ship In training colleges.
• There should be a state level entrance test for the admission of students into  B.Ed courses run by the College of Education.
• An interview board at the state level has to be setup to examine the candidate’s oral expression like speech, word fluency, confidence, poise, etc. It must be ensured that the selected candidates do not suffer from stammering, stuttering, etc. Candidate’s aptitude for teaching profession should also be ascertained
• Additional weight age at the rate of 2%, 3% and 5% of marks for 3^rd, 2^nd and 1^st Class post graduate degree holders be given for the admission into B.Ed course.
• The teacher taught ratio should be reduced to 1:8
• .Internal and external  assessment should be separately shown and divisions should be shown separately on the mark sheet.
• There should be a reasonable limit on the number of candidates to be evaluated by any examiner in one session.
• Correspondence education should not be allowed in teacher education for fresh graduates.

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

The past is a stepping stone, not a millstone-Robert Plant

All over the earth seekers are digging into the earth: some for gold, some for silver, some for iron, some for coal; many of them for knowledge. What strange busyness of men exhuming paleolithic tools from the banks of the Somme, studying with strained necks the vivid paintings on the ceilings of prehistoric caves, unearthing antique skulls at Chou Kou Tien,revealing the buried cities of Mohenjo-daro or Yucatan, carrying debris in basket-caravans out of curse-ridden Egyptian tombs, lifting out of the dust the palaces of Minos and Priam, uncovering the ruins of Persepolis, burrowing into the soil of Africa for some remnant of Carthage, recapturing from the jungle the majestic temples of Angkor! In 1839 JacquesBoucher de Perthes found the first Stone Age flints at Abbeville, in France;

The Stone Age  is named after the main technological tool developed at that time. It ended with the advent of the Bronze Age and Iron Age.The Stone Age is divided in three distinct periods: the Paleolithic Period or Old Stone Age (30,000 BC – 10,000 BC), the Mesolithic Period or Middle Stone Age (10,000 BC – 8,000 BC), and the Neolithic Period or New Stone Age (8,000 BC – 3,000 BC).

It is natural that a stone in the fist should be the first tool; many an animal could have taught that to man. So the coup-de-pomgz rock sharp at one end, round at the other to fit the palm of the hand became for primeval man hammer, axe, chisel, scraper, knife and saw; even to this day the word hammer means, etymologically, a stone.

Few examples of stone age tools are: Blade Core-This artifact was used to provide stone blades. Blade cores provided a portable source of stone or obsidian for manufacturing different kinds of tools by flaking off pieces from the core.End Scraper-This artifact was used for scraping fur from animal hides. Once the hide was removed from an animal, an end scraper could take the hair off the skin’s outer layer and remove the fatty tissue from its underside. End scrapers were sometimes hafted, or attached to a wooden handle, but could also be handheld.

Burin-This artifact was used for carving bone, antler, or wood. Burins exhibit a feature called a burin spall—a sharp, angled point formed when a small flake is struck obliquely from the edge of a larger stone flake. These tools could have been used with or without a wooden handle.

Awl-This artifact was used for shredding plant fibers. Stone Age peoples may also have sliced animal hides to make clothing using awls. These tools could be made from stone or bone and were highly sharpened for maximum efficiency.

Antler Harpoon-This artifact was used for hunting large marine animals. Experts believe antler harpoons were used in tandem with wooden launchers known as atlatls to help the harpoon penetrate prey with more force.

Clovis Point-This artifact was used for killing mammoths and other megafauna. Clovis points are leaf-shaped and have a wide groove, or flute, on both sides of the base for fitting into short wooden or bone spear shafts. The largest spear point ever found, measuring nine inches long, was a Clovis point made of chalcedony, a kind of quartz.

Bone Flute-This artifact was used for playing music.Made of bone, this wind instrument dates to around 14,000 years ago in France. Hunters may have carried such flute-like instruments in their mobile tool kits or been buried with them, perhaps for the afterlife.

Needle-This artifact was used for stitching hides.Stone Age technology included delicate sewing needles made of bone with punched eye holes. They were probably used in tandem with thread fashioned from plant fibers or animal sinew

Bone Point-This tool was used for launching at animals during hunting. Bone projectile points were flexible, light, general-purpose weapons for hunting large land animals. To be as lethal as possible, their tips were chiseled to exquisite sharpness.

13 Gradually these specific tools were differentiated out of the one homogeneous form: holes were bored to attach a handle; teeth were inserted to make a saw, branches were tipped with the coup-de-poing to make a pick, an arrow or a spear.

The scraper-stone that had the shape of a shell became a shovel or a hoe; the rough-surfaced stone became a file; the stone in a sling became a weapon of war that would survive even classical antiquity. Given bone, wood and ivory as well as stone, and paleolithic man made himself a varied assortment of weapons and tools: polishers, mortars, axes, planes, scrapers, drills, lamps, knives, chisels, choppers, lances, anvils, etchers, daggers, fish-hooks, harpoons, wedges, awls, pins, and doubtless many more.  Every day he stumbled upon new knowledge, and sometimes he had the wit to develop his chance discoveries into purposeful inventions.

But the great achievement was fire. Previously, the first use of heat treatment was thought to have been in Europe 25,000 years ago. The technique was not believed to have been invented until long after the ancestors of modern humans had left Africa and settled in Europe and Asia. Knowing how to use fire may have helped the early humans who left Africa 50,000 to 60,000 years ago to cope with colder conditions in Europe.

Darwin has pointed out how the hot lava of volcanoes might have taught men the art of fire;  Prometheus established it by igniting a narthex stalk in the burning crater of a volcano on the isle of Lcmnos.” The illumination of the heat treatment process shows that these early modern humans commanded fire in a nuanced and sophisticated manner.

Early modern humans at 72,000 years ago, and perhaps as early as 164,000 years ago in coastal South Africa, were using carefully controlled hearths in a complex process to heat stone and change its properties, the process known as heat treatment.’

Among Neanderthal remains we find bits of charcoal and charred bones; man-made fire, then, is at least 40,000 years old. ” Cro-Magnon man ground stone bowls to hold the grease that he burned to give him light: the lamp,. Presumably it was fire that enabled man to meet the threat of cold from the advancing ice; fire that left him free to sleep on the earth at night, since animals dreaded the marvel as much as primitive men worshiped it; fire that conquered the dark and began that lessening of fear which is one of the golden threads in the  golden web of history. Fire that created the old and honorable art of cooking, extending the diet of man to a thousand foods inedible before; fire that led at last to the fusing of metals, and the only real advance in technology from Cro-Magnon days to the Industrial Revolution.”

The art of the Stone Age represents the first accomplishments in human creativity, preceding the invention of writing .Art of this period illustrates and responds to the daily activities and evolution of early communities, from nomad hunters and gatherers to sedentary agrarian societies in need of permanent shelters.

Strange to relate and as if to illustrate Gautier’s lines on robust art outlasting emperors and states our clearest relics of paleolithic man are fragments of his art. Nearly hundred years ago Senor Marcelino de Sautuola came up- on a large cave on his estate at Altamira, in northern Spain. For thousands of years the entrance had been hermetically sealed by fallen rocks naturally cemented with stalagmite deposits. Blasts for new construction accidentally opened the entrance. Three years later Sautuola explored the cave, and noticed some curious markings on the walls. One day his little daughter accompanied him. Not compelled, like her father, to stoop as she walked through the cave, she could look up and observe the ceiling. There she saw, in vague outline, the painting of a great bison, magnificently colored and drawn. Many other drawings were found on closer examination of the ceiling and the walls. When, in 1880, Sautuola published his report on these observations, archaeologists greeted him with genial skepticism. Some did him the honor of going to inspect the drawings, only to pronounce them the forgery of a hoaxer. For thirty years this quite reasonable incredulity persisted. Then the discovery of other drawings in caves generally conceded to be prehistoric (from their contents of unpolished flint tools, and polished ivory and bone) confirmed Sautuola’s judgment; but Sautuola now was dead. Geologists came to Altamira and testified, with the unanimity of hindsight, that the stalagmite coating on many of the drawings was a paleolithic deposit.” General opinion now places these Altamira drawings and the greater portion of extant pre- historic art in the Magdalenian culture, some 1 6,000 B.C.” Paintings slightly later in time, but still of the Old Stone Age, have been found in many caves of France.

Most often the subjects of these drawings are animals reindeers, mammoths, horses, boars, bears, etc.; these, presumably, were dietetic luxuries, and therefore favourite objects of the chase. Sometimes the animals are transfixed with arrows; these, in the view of Frazer and Reinach, were intended as magic images that would bring the animal under the power, and into the stomach, of the artist or the hunter.” Conceivably they were just plain art, drawn with the pure joy of aesthetic creation; the crudest representation should have sufficed the purposes of magic, whereas these paintings are often of such delicacy, power and skill as to suggest the unhappy thought that art, in this field at least, has not advanced much in the long course of human history. Here is life, action, nobility, conveyed overwhelmingly with one brave line or two; here a single stroke creates a living, charging beast.

Painting is a sophisticated art, presuming many centuries of mental and technical development. If we may accept current theory (which it is always a perilous thing to do), painting developed from statuary, by a passage from carving in the round to bas-relief and thence to mere outline and coloring; painting is sculpture minus a dimension. The intermediate prehistoric art is well represented by an astonishingly vivid bas-relief of an archer (or a spear- man) on the Aurignacian cliffs at Laussel in France.  In a cave in Ariegc, France, Louis Begouen discovered, among other Magdalenian relics, several ornamental handles carved out of reindeer antlers; one of these is of mature and excellent workmanship, as if the art had already generations of tradition and development behind it. Throughout the prehistoric Mediterranean- Egypt, Crete, Italy, France and Spain countless figures of fat little women are found, which indicate either a worship of motherhood or an African conception of beauty. The Paleolithic or Old Stone Age existed from approximately 30,000 BCE until 10,000 BCE, and produced the first accomplishments in human creativity. Archaeological discoveries across Europe and Asia include over two hundred caves with spectacular paintings, drawings, and sculptures that are among the earliest undisputed examples of representational art-making. Sculptural work from the Paleolithic consists mainly of figurines, beads, and some decorative utilitarian objects constructed with stone, bone, ivory, clay, and wood. During prehistoric times, caves were places of dwelling as well as possible spaces for ritual and communal gathering. Unsurprisingly, caves were the locations of many archaeological discoveries owing to their secluded locations and protection from the elements.

Venus figurines is an umbrella term for a number of prehistoric statuettes of women that have been found mostly in Europe, but also in Asia and Siberia, dating from the Upper Paleolithic. These figures are all quite small, between 4 and 25 cm tall, and carved mainly in steatite, limestone, bone, or ivory. These sculptures are collectively described as “Venus” figurines in reference to the Roman goddess of beauty, as early historians assumed they represented an ideal of beauty from the time.

Venus figures are characterized by shared stylistic features, such as an oval , large belly, wide-set thighs, large breasts, and the typical absence of arms and feet. Hundreds of these sculptures have been found both in open-air settlements and caves.For example the Venus of Hohle Fels, a 6 cm figure of a woman carved from a mammoth’s tusk, was discovered in Germany’s Hohle Fels cave in 2008 and represents one of the earliest found sculptures of this type . Additionally, the Venus of Willendorf is a particularly famous example of the Venus figure . While initially thought to be symbols of fertility, or of a fertility goddess, the true significance of the Venus figure remains obscure, as does much of prehistoric art. The Venus of Willendorf is a particularly famous example of the Venus figure.The Venus of Hohle Fels, a 6 cm figure of a woman carved from a mammoth’s tusk, was discovered in Germany’s Hohle Fels cave in 2008 and represents one of the earliest found sculptures of this type.

Mask of La Roche-Cotard-Also known as the “Mousterian Protofigurine,” the Mask of La Roche-Cotard is an artifact from the Paleolithic period that was discovered in the entrance of a cave named La Roche-Cotard, on the banks of the Loire River in France. Constructed using flint and bone, the stone is believed to represent the upper part of a face, while the bone has been interpreted as eyes. While some archaeologists question whether this artifact does indeed represent a rendered face, it is typically regarded as an example of Paleolithic figurative artistic expression.

Blombos Cave-Discoveries of engraved stones and beads in the Blombos Caves of South Africa has led some archaeologists to believe that early Homo Sapiens were capable of abstraction and the production of symbolic art. Made from ochre, the stones are engraved withabstract patterns, while the beads are made from Nassarius shells . While they are simpler than prehistoric cave paintings found in Europe, some scholars believe these engraved stones represent the earliest known artworks, dating from c. 75,000 years ago.

Nassarius shell beads from the Blombos Cave-Discoveries of engraved stones and beads in the Blombos Caves of South Africa has led some archaeologists to believe that early Homo Sapiens were capable of abstraction and the production of symbolic art.

Stone statues of a wild horse, a reindeer and a mammoth have been unearthed in Czechoslovakia, among remains uncertainly ascribed to 30,000 B.C.

The whole interpretation of history as progress falters when we consider that these statues, bas-reliefs and paintings, numerous though they are, may be but an infinitesimal fraction of the art that expressed or adorned the life of primeval man. What remains is found in caves, where the elements were in some measure kept at bay; it does not follow that pre- historic men were artists only when they were in caves. They may have carved as sedulously and ubiquitously as the Japanese, and may have fashioned statuary as abundantly as the Greeks; they may have painted not only the rocks in their caverns, but textiles, wood, everythingnot excepting themselves. They may have created masterpieces far superior to the fragments that survive. In one grotto a tube was discovered, made from the bones of a reindeer, and filled with pigment;  in another a stone palette Awas picked up still thick with red ochre paint despite the transit of two hundred centuries. Apparently the arts were highly developed and widely practised eighteen thousand years ago. Perhaps there was a class of professional artists among paleolithic men; perhaps there were Bohemians starving in the less respectable caves, denouncing the commercial bourgeoisie, plotting the death of academies, and forging antiques.

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