The Philosophical Test of the Revelation of Religious Experience - Excerpts

Physics, as an empirical science, deals with the facts of experience, i.e. sense-experience... colours, sounds, etc., are subjective states only, and form no part of Nature. What enters the eye and the ear is not colour or sound, but invisible ether waves and inaudible air waves. Nature is not what we know her to be; our perceptions are illusions and cannot be regarded as genuine disclosures of Nature... Thus physics, finding it necessary to criticize its own foundations, has eventually found reason to break its own idol, and the empirical attitude which appeared to necessitate scientific materialism has finally ended in a revolt against matter
The object observed is variable; it is relative to the observer; its mass, shape, and size change as the observer's position and speed change. Movement and rest, too, are relative to the observer. There is, therefore, no such thing as a self-subsistent materiality of classical physics
Personally, I believe that the ultimate character of Reality is spiritual
Natural sciences are like so many vultures falling on the dead body of Nature, and each running away with a piece of its flesh... thus religion, which demands the whole of Reality and for this reason must occupy a central place in any synthesis of all the data of human experience, has no reason to be afraid of any sectional views of Reality
Now my perception of things that confront me is superficial and external; but my perception of my own self is internal, intimate, and profound. It follows, therefore, that conscious experience is that privileged case of existence in which we are in absolute contact with Reality, and an analysis of this privileged case is likely to throw a flood of light on the ultimate meaning of existence
... Pure time, then, as revealed by a deeper analysis of our conscious experience, is not a string of separate, reversible instants; it is an organic whole in which the past is not left behind, but is moving along with, and operating in, the present. And the future is given to it not as lying before, yet to be traversed; it is given only in the sense that it is present in its nature as an open possibility. It is time regarded as an organic whole that the Quran describes as Taqdir or the destiny - a word which has been so much misunderstood both in and outside world of Islam. Destiny is time regarded as prior to the disclosure of its possibilities
The destiny of a thing then is not an unrelenting fate working from without like a task master; it is the inward reach of a thing, its realizable possibilities which lie within the depths of its nature, and serially actualize themselves without any feeling of external compulsion
Our acts of perception are determined by our immediate interests and purposes... The past, no doubt, abides and operates in the present; but this operation of the past in the present is not the whole consciousness. The element of purpose discloses a kind of forward look in consciousness. Purposes not only colour our present state of consciousness, but also reveal its future direction. In fact, they constitute the forward push of our life, and thus in a way anticipate and influence the states that are yet to be. To be determined by an end is to be determined by what ought to be
A state of attentive consciousness involves both memory and imagination as operating factors. On the analogy of our conscious experience, therefore, Reality is not a blind vital impulse wholly unilluminated by idea. Its nature is through and through teleological¹
Mental life is teleological in the sense that, while there is no far-off distant goal towards which we are moving, there is a progressive formation of fresh ends, purposes, and ideal scales of value as the process of life grows and expands. We become by ceasing to be what we are. Life is a passage through a series of deaths. But there is a system in the continuity of this passage. Its various stages, in spite of the apparently abrupt changes in our evaluation of things, are organically related to one another. The life-history of the individual is, on the whole, a unity and not a mere series of mutually ill-adapted events
To my mind nothing is more alien to the Quranic outlook than the idea that the universe is the temporal working out of a preconceived plan... it is a growing universe and not an already completed product
... a notion of the Ultimate Reality as pure duration in which thought, life, and purpose interpenetrate to form an organic unity
The knowledge of Nature is the knowledge of God's behaviour. In our observation of Nature we are virtually seeking a kind of intimacy with the Absolute Ego; and this is only another form of worship
The Absolute Ego... is the whole of Reality. He is not so situated as to take a perspective view of an alien universe
Philosophy is an intellectual view of things...It sees Reality from a distance as it were. Religion seeks a closer contact with Reality. The one is theory; the other is living experience, association, intimacy. In order to achieve this intimacy thought must rise higher than itself, and find its fulfillment in an attitude of mind which religion describes as prayer

¹ Related to the doctrine that phenomena are guided not only by mechanical forces but that they also move toward certain goals of self-realization; the belief that purpose and design are a part of or are apparent in nature.

The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

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