Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man QUOTES

1 " The ecological crisis is only an externalizationf an inner malaise and cannot be solved without a spiritual rebirth of Western man […] It is still our hope that as the crisis created by man's forgetfulness of who he really is grows and that as the idols of his own making crumble one by one before his eyes, he will begin a true reform of himself, which always means a spiritual rebirtn and throughis rebirth attain a new harmony with the world of nature around him. Otherwise, it is hopeless to expect to live in harmony with that grand theophany which is virgin nature, while remaining oblivious and indifferent to the Source of that theophany both beyond nature and at the centre of man's being. (p. 9) "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

2 " Alchemy is neither a premature chemistry nor a psychology in the modem sense, although both of these are to be found in alchemical writings . Alchemy is a symbolic science of natural forms based on the correspondence between different planes of reality and making use of mineral and metal symbolism to expound a spiritual science of the souh For alchemy, nature is sacred, and the alchemist is the guardian of nature considered as a theophany and reflection of spiritual realities . A purely profane chemistry could come into being only when the substances of alchemy became completely emptied of their sacred quality. For this very reason, a re-discovery of the alchemical view of nature, without in any way denying the chemical sciences which deal with substances from another point of view, could reinstate the spiritual and symbolic character of the forms, colours and processes that man encounters throughout his life in the corporeal world. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

3 " Henceforth the Cartesian surgical operation in which spirit and matter become totally separated dominated scientific and philosophic thought The domain of science was matter which was a pure "it" divorced completely from any ontological aspect other than pure quantity. Although there were protests here and there especially among English and German thinkers, this view became the very factor that determined the relationship between man and nature, scientifically and philosophically. Thus seventeenth-century rationalism is the unconscious background of all later scientific thought up to the present day. Whatever discoveries are made in the sciences and whatever changes are brought about in conceptions of time, space, matter and motion, the background of seventeenth-century rationalism remains. For this very reason, other interpretations of nature, especially the symbolic, have never been seriously considered and accepted. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

4 " Nineteenth-century inventors of the steam engine used a physical theory which today is considered as scientifically false . In fact most of the inventors up to very recent times have been, for the most part, ignorant of the science of their day and have applied theories that have proved to be false. Moreover, even today a physical or chemical theory can change while its application continues untouched. The success of applied science, therefore, is no reason for accepting the infallibility of the scientific theories involved. There should be an intelligent and conscious criticism of science and its implications, both for those involved in the sciences, and most of all for those who are the recipients of the popularized versions of scientific theories. The philosophy of science has in certain cases tried to point to the lack of logical consistency in some scientific definitions and methods. But having surrendered itself to the fruits of the experimental and analytical methods, it cannot itself be an independent judge of modern science. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

5 " In fact it might be said that the main reason why modern science never arose in China or Islam is precisely because of the presence of metaphysical doctrine and a traditional religious structure which refused to make a profane thing of nature. Neither the ‘Oriental bureaucratism' of Needham nor any other social and economic explanation suffices to explain why the scientific revolution as seen in the West did not develop elsewhere. The most basic reason is that neither in Islam, nor India nor the Far East was the substance and stuff of nature so depleted of a sacramental and spiritual character, nor was the intellectual dimension of these traditions so enfeebled as to enable a purely secular science of nature and a secular philosophy to develop outside the matrix of the traditional intellectual orthodoxy. Islam, which resembles Christianity in so many ways, is a perfect example of this truth, and the tact that modern science did not develop in its bosom is not the sign of decadence as some have claimed but of the refusal of Islam to consider any form of knowledge as purely secular and divorced from what it considers as the ultimate goal of human existence. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

6 " The order of the Universe is identified with the Divine Mind, and the scientist is said to be discovering the mind of God in his scientific pursuits. Scientific method itself has been called a Christian method of discovering God's mind. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

7 " The ecological crisis is only an externalization of an inner malaise and cannot be solved without a spiritual rebirth of Western man […] It is still our hope that as the crisis created by man's forgetfulness of who he really is grows and that as the idols of his own making crumble one by one before his eyes, he will begin a true reform of himself, which always means a spiritual rebirth and through his rebirth attain a new harmony with the world of nature around him. Otherwise, it is hopeless to expect to live in harmony with that grand theophany which is virgin nature, while remaining oblivious and indifferent to the Source of that theophany both beyond nature and at the centre of man's being […] Few are willing to look reality in the face and accept the fact that there is no peace possible in human society as long as the attitude toward nature and the whole natural environment is one based on aggression and war. Furthermore, perhaps not all realize that in order to gain this peace with nature there must be peace with the spiritual order. To be at peace with the Earth one must be at peace with Heaven. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

8 " It must never be forgotten that for non-modern man - whether he be ancient or contemporary - the very stuff of the Universe has a sacred aspect. The cosmos speaks to man and all of its phenomena contain meaning. They are symbols of a higher degree of reality which the cosmic domain at once veils and reveals. The very structure of the cosmos contains a spiritual message for man and is thereby a revelation coming from the same source as religion itself. Both are the manifestations of the Universal Intellect, the Logos, and the cosmos itself is an integral part of that total Universe of meaning in which man lives and dies. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

9 " Only too often the works of such authors have been deliberately neglected or suppressed. A case in point is the work by D. Dewar called the Transformist Illusion, Murfreesboro, 1957, which has assembled a vast amount of palaeontological and biological evidence against evolution. The author who was an evolutionist in his youth wrote many monographs which exist in the libraries of comparative zoology and biology everywhere. But his last work, The Transformist Illusion , had to be published in Murfreesboro, Tennessee(!) and is not easy to find even in libraries that have all his earlier works. There is hardly any other field of science where such obscurantist practices are prevalent.
(note 21, p140) "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

10 " Metaphysics would distinguish carefully between facts assembled diligently by scientists and hypotheses, many unproven, which are used to integrate these facts into some meaningful pattern. A total and complete science of things would be able to judge these hypotheses and their implications. It would stand as a standard with respect to which modern science would be compared and judged . It would criticize the vulgarizations of science and the popular philosophies based upon them as well as the contradictions within the sciences themselves. Moreover, this would be carried out not only in physics but in all sciences such as biology and psychology where even more than in physics wild conjectures are often paraded as scientifically proven facts. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

11 " It is not true to say that the sun is only incandescent gas, although this is an aspect of its reality. It is also as true to say that the sun is the symbol of the intelligible principle in the Universe and this element is as much an aspect of its ontological reality as the physical features discovered by modem astronomy. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

12 " A traditional Muslim would see in the bleakness and ugliness of modern industrial society and the ambiance it creates an outward reflection of the darkness within the souls of men who have created this order and who live in it. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

13 " The world is order or cosmos rather than chaos, one that is alive as an organism and at the same time governed by law. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

14 " Metaphysical doctrines can also assist in the elimination of false implications in biological theories, especially those of the theory of evolution. Throughout the world today particularly in the Orient where there are still societies that remain faithful to their religious principles and the social structure based upon them, men are asked to evolve and change simply because evolution is in the nature of things and is inevitable. A more objective assessment of the findings of biology would insist that as long as man has been living on earth he has not evolved at all; nor has his natural environment changed in any way. The same plants and animals are still born, grow, wither and die and regenerate themselves except for the unfortunate species that modem man who believes himself to belong to the process of evolution has made extinct. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

15 " The world can never be totally separated from its Creator, and there is no logical or philosophical reason whatsoever to refuse the possibility of continuous creation or a series of creations as all traditional doctrines have held. The understanding of metaphysics could at least make clear the often forgotten fact that the plausibility of the theory of evolution is based on several non-scientific factors belonging to the general philosophical climate of eighteenth-century and nineteenth century Europe such as belief in progress. Deism which cut off the hands of the Creator from His creation and the reduction of reality to the two levels of mind and matter. Only with such beliefs could the theory of evolution appear as ‘rational’, and the most | easy to accept for a world which had completely lost sight of the multiple levels of being and had reduced nature to a purely corporeal world totally cut off from any other order of existence. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

16 " The ambivalent nature of light points if anything to a continuous underlying substance, what traditional cosmology calls the ether, which also exhibits a discontinuous aspect by virtue of its being indistinct. The debate in this domain today, if one glances at the principles involved, is not very much different from that of the followers of hylomorphism and atomism in the Middle Ages and in Antiquity. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

17 " As a criticism of philosophies and general conclusions based on physics, one could point to the exclusivity accorded to mathematical logic as if this were the only form of logic. What is mathematically satisfactory is considered to be true even if it violates the principles of intelligence and the logic connected with the imaginative faculty. But there is no reason whatsoever to limit all the intellectual faculties to mathematical logic and overlook the demands of the rest. So much of modern philosophy that relies on physics, and so many generalizations within physics itself, are based on this unconscious mathematicism which Cartesian philosophy bestowed upon mathematical physics, and which has become accentuated in contemporary science. In the domains of both micro- and astrophysics direct contact with objective reality has been removed, leaving only an abstract mathematical model as the means of analysing the structure of matter. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

18 " The re-discovery of virgin nature does not mean a flight of individualistic and Promethean man toward nature. While in the state of rebellion against Heaven man carries with him his own limitations even when he turns to nature. These limitations veil the spiritual message of nature for him so that he derives no benefit from it. It is in this way that the modern urbanized citizen in search of virgin nature takes with him those very elements that destroy nature and thereby he destroys the very thing he is searching for. Nor is the re-discovery of virgin nature a return to paganism from a theological point of view. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

19 " Today, all kinds of philosophical conclusions are made concerning physical or astronomical theories and discoveries, often with total neglect for the limitations and assumptions originally made by the scientists. With Kant, physics became the source of philosophy and there developed a physicism very much similar to the earlier mathematicism of Descartes. With a real philosophy of nature there would be an independent matrix within which the implications of different sciences could be tested and tried and their meaning made known without the aberrations which so often accompany philosophical interpretations of scientific theories today. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man

20 " Man therefore occupies a particular position in this world. He is at the axis and centre of the cosmic milieu at once the master and custodian of nature. By being taught the names of all things he gains domination over them, but he is given this power only because he is the vicegerent (khalifah) of God on earth and the instrument of His Will. Man is given the right to dominate over nature only by virtue of his theomorphic make-up, not as a rebel against heaven. "

― Seyyed Hossein Nasr , Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man