Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

208 • The Making of Islamic Sciencenarrowly defined province… the modern world has subjectedthe word “physics” to designate exclusively one particularscience…this process of specialization arising from theanalytical attitude of the mind has been pushed to such a pointthat those who have undergone its influence are incapable ofconceiving of a science dealing with nature in its entirety…(Guénon 1942, 63)Guénon goes on to describe how the different branches ofmodern science cannot be said to be the equivalent of the physics ofthe ancients.If one were to compare the ancient physics, not with whatthe moderns call by this name, but with the sum of all thenatural sciences as at present constituted—for this is its realequivalent—the first difference to be noticed would be thedivision that it has undergone into multiple “specialties” whichare, so to speak, foreign to one another. However, this is theonly the most outward side of the question, and it is not to besupposed that by joining together all these particular sciencesan equivalent of the ancient physics would be obtained… Thetraditional conception attaches all sciences to the principlesof which they are the particular applications, and it is thisattachment that the modern conception refuses to admit… Themodern conception claims to make the sciences independent,denying everything that goes beyond them, or at least declaringit “unknowable” and refusing to take it into account, whichcomes to the same thing in practice. This negation existed fora long time as a fact before there was any question of erecting itinto a systematic theory under names such as “positivism” and“agnosticism,” for it may truly be said to be the real startingpoint of all modern science. (Guénon 1942, 64–66)This view of modern science gained further clarity in the lucidprose of Frithjof Schuon. “Modern science, which is rationalist as toits subject and materialist as to its object,” he wrote, “can describe oursituation physically and approximately, but it can tell us nothing aboutour extra-spatial situation in the total and real Universe” (Schuon1965, 111). This “total and real Universe” is seen as beyond the reachof modern science, which is sometimes described as “profane science”to distinguish it from sacred science. “Profane science, in seeking to