Buddhist Romanticism

to question the mechanical worldview of Newtonian physics, and the strict
division between mind and matter. This new line of questioning derived
from new discoveries in the fields of biology, geology, paleontology, and
astronomy.
In biology, the study of organisms had revealed two major discoveries:
one, that causality within an organism, and between the organism and its
environment, was reciprocal; and two, that electric currents were at work in
the transmission of impulses along the nerves and in the movements of the
muscles.
The first discovery resulted in a new view of causality that was not
strictly deterministic. An animal responded to stimuli in its environment
not in simply passive or mechanical ways, but through an active faculty
called sensibility: its ability to organize its intake of and response to stimuli.
This ability had two implications. The first was that life was not simply
passive. In constant interaction with its environment, it was alternately
passive and active, adapting to its environment and appropriating its
environment as sustenance. The same reciprocal passive/active interaction
also took place within the organism, among the individual organs of which
it was composed. The more advanced the form of life, the more complex the
sensibility it displayed.
The second implication of sensibility was that life interacted with its
environment with a purpose: survival.
The resulting view of biological causality thus differed from mechanical
causality in two respects. It was both reciprocal and teleological, i.e., acting for
an end.
The second discovery—of the role of electricity in moving living tissues
—showed that matter was not inert, a fact that helped to erase the line
between matter and mind. Instead of simply being dead “stuff,” matter was
now seen to have a force or potency similar to that of the mind. This led
some thinkers to speculate that mind and matter differed not radically in
kind, but simply in the degree of their sensibility. Perhaps the physical
universe was actually a less advanced form of life. Other thinkers removed
the “perhaps” and treated it as a proven fact: Mind and matter were
nothing but different aspects of a larger unified pattern of energy.
Although these currents of thought were not universally embraced, they
were echoed in new theories appearing in German geology and
paleontology. Geologists, when exploring caves or far-distant locations, had
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