←IndexThe Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Lecture 2: The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience

Section 2 of 10

The Nature of Matter

Section summary

In brief

Iqbal shows that materialism has already refuted itself from within: the classical picture of matter as inert substance has been dismantled by Berkeley, Whitehead, and Einstein, and what physics now describes is not stuff but a 'system of inter-related events' — a continuous creative flow much closer to the Qur'an's vision than to Newton's clockwork.

Having demolished the three classical proofs in Section 1 and announced the alternative method — a patient examination of experience at its three levels of matter, life, and mind — Iqbal now begins the constructive work. He starts with matter, and the choice is strategic. Matter is the level at which the dualism of thought and being appears most solid, the level on which materialism rests its claim to being the only honest worldview, and the level that is most resistant to any talk of God. If Iqbal can show that even here — at the most apparently God-resistant rung of experience — the materialist picture has already collapsed, then the harder arguments about life and consciousness will build on ground already cleared. The section's task is therefore not to refute materialism from outside but to show that materialism has refuted itself from within.

The section advances through four connected moves. First, Iqbal begins with a concession to empiricism that will become a weapon: physics, as an empirical science, begins and ends with sense-experience, and any imperceptible entities it postulates (atoms, fields, forces) are explanatory constructs in the service of what is observed. Second, he carefully lays out the traditional theory of matter — the substance-attribute distinction, the splitting of qualities into 'primary' (shape, size, solidity) and 'secondary' (colour, sound, smell, treated as 'mere impressions in the mind') — so that the reader feels its full weight before it falls. This is the theory that Descartes, Galileo, and Newton inherited and that became the implicit metaphysics of the Scientific Revolution. Third, he deploys Berkeley and Whitehead to demolish it. Berkeley first noticed that the concept of an imperceptible 'matter' lurking behind perception is incoherent; Whitehead, two centuries later, showed from inside the scientific establishment that the theory bifurcates nature into two unworkable halves — a 'dream' of mental impressions on one side and a 'conjecture' of unverifiable entities on the other — and that this bifurcation saws off the very branch on which physics sits. If our observations are mere subjective states, then the physicist who depends on observation is studying illusions. Materialism refutes itself. Fourth, Iqbal delivers the decisive blow via Einstein, quoting Russell — a hostile witness, no friend of religion — to the effect that relativity has 'damaged the traditional notion of substance more than all the arguments of the philosophers.' Matter is no longer a persistent thing with varying states but a 'system of inter-related events.' The old solidity is gone.

Out of this demolition emerges a positive vision, and Iqbal lets Whitehead state it: nature is 'not a static fact situated in an a-dynamic void, but a structure of events possessing the character of a continuous creative flow which thought cuts up into isolated immobilities.' Three claims are packed into that sentence, and each will reverberate through the rest of the lecture. Reality is events, not things. The flow is creative, not merely repetitive. And the spatial and temporal grids we use to describe it are tools of the analytical intellect, not features of reality itself. The resonances with Iqbal's own tradition are deliberate. The Qur'an does not present creation as a finished act but as ongoing — 'every day He is upon some affair' (55:29) — and the Ash'arite doctrine of continuous creation (khalq jadīd), often dismissed by modernist Muslims as a quaint theological oddity, turns out to be structurally closer to the world disclosed by relativity than the self-sufficient enduring matter of Newton ever was. The section closes with a question rather than an answer — is space an independent void in which things are situated, or is it constituted by the relations between events? — that opens directly into Section 3's reckoning with Zeno and the nature of movement.

For the Tadreej project, this section delivers one of the most consequential lessons in the entire Reconstruction: the bifurcation Iqbal demolishes is the same bifurcation that structures Pakistan's contemporary intellectual culture. 'Science' is presented as the domain of 'real' things — material, measurable, objective — while 'religion' is relegated to the domain of 'other' things — spiritual, immeasurable, subjective. This framing is offered as the sensible modern division of labour, but it rests on exactly the materialist metaphysics that physics itself abandoned a century ago. The Pakistani student trained to keep religion and science in separate boxes is not being modern; they are being nineteenth-century. And the alternative Iqbal points toward — matter as event, nature as continuous creative flow, the world as a sustained pattern rather than a self-grounding stuff — is not a retreat from science but a more honest reading of what science has actually discovered. Science, pursued without ideological blinkers, breaks its own idols. It is not faith's enemy. It is, in Iqbal's striking image, faith's unwitting ally — an empirical practice that, when followed where it leads, clears away the false ultimacies that obscured the view of the real one.

Original text

Now experience, as unfolding itself in time, presents three main levels — the level of matter, the level of life, and the level of mind and consciousness — the subject-matter of physics, biology, and psychology, respectively. Let us first turn our attention to matter. In order exactly to appreciate the position of modern physics it is necessary to understand clearly what we mean by matter.

Physics, as an empirical science, deals with the facts of experience, i.e. sense-experience. The physicist begins and ends with sensible phenomena, without which it is impossible for him to verify his theories. He may postulate imperceptible entities, such as atoms; but he does so because he cannot otherwise explain his sense-experience. Thus physics studies the material world, that is to say, the world revealed by the senses. The mental processes involved in this study, and similarly religious and aesthetic experience, though part of the total range of experience, are excluded from the scope of physics for the obvious reason that physics is restricted to the study of the material world, by which we mean the world of things we perceive.

But when I ask you what are the things you perceive in the material world, you will, of course, mention the familiar things around you, e.g. earth, sky, mountains, chairs, tables, etc. When I further ask you what exactly you perceive of these things, you will answer — their qualities. It is clear that in answering such a question we are really putting an interpretation on the evidence of our senses. The interpretation consists in making a distinction between the thing and its qualities. This really amounts to a theory of matter, i.e. of the nature of sense-data, their relation to the perceiving mind and their ultimate causes. The substance of this theory is as follows:

‘The sense objects (colours, sounds, etc.) are states of the perceiver's mind, and as such excluded from nature regarded as something objective. For this reason they cannot be in any proper sense qualities of physical things. When I say “The sky is blue,” it can only mean that the sky produces a blue sensation in my mind, and not that the colour blue is a quality found in the sky. As mental states they are impressions, that is to say, they are effects produced in us. The cause of these effects is matter, or material things acting through our sense organs, nerves, and brain on our mind. This physical cause acts by contact or impact; hence it must possess the qualities of shape, size, solidity and resistance.’ ⁶

It was the philosopher Berkeley who first undertook to refute the theory of matter as the unknown cause of our sensations.⁷ In our own times Professor Whitehead — an eminent mathematician and scientist — has conclusively shown that the traditional theory of materialism is wholly untenable. It is obvious that, on the theory, 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, which, according to the theory, is bifurcated into mental impressions, on the one hand, and the unverifiable, imperceptible entities producing these impressions, on the other.

If physics constitutes a really coherent and genuine knowledge of perceptively known objects, the traditional theory of matter must be rejected for the obvious reason that it reduces the evidence of our senses, on which alone the physicist, as observer and experimenter, must rely, to the mere impressions of the observer's mind. Between Nature and the observer of Nature, the theory creates a gulf which he is compelled to bridge over by resorting to the doubtful hypothesis of an imperceptible something, occupying an absolute space like a thing in a receptacle and causing our sensation by some kind of impact. In the words of Professor Whitehead, the theory reduces one-half of Nature to a ‘dream’ and the other half to a ‘conjecture’.⁸

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. Since objects, then, are not subjective states caused by something imperceptible called matter, they are genuine phenomena which constitute the very substance of Nature and which we know as they are in Nature.

But the concept of matter has received the greatest blow from the hand of Einstein — another eminent physicist, whose discoveries have laid the foundation of a far-reaching revolution in the entire domain of human thought. ‘The theory of Relativity by merging time into spacetime’, says Mr. Russell,

‘has damaged the traditional notion of substance more than all the arguments of the philosophers. Matter, for common sense, is something which persists in time and moves in space. But for modern relativity-physics this view is no longer tenable. A piece of matter has become not a persistent thing with varying states, but a system of inter-related events. The old solidity is gone, and with it the characteristics that to the materialist made matter seem more real than fleeting thoughts.’

According to Professor Whitehead, therefore, Nature is not a static fact situated in an a-dynamic void, but a structure of events possessing the character of a continuous creative flow which thought cuts up into isolated immobilities out of whose mutual relations arise the concepts of space and time. Thus we see how modern science utters its agreement with Berkeley's criticism which it once regarded as an attack on its very foundation.

The scientific view of Nature as pure materiality is associated with the Newtonian view of space as an absolute void in which things are situated. This attitude of science has, no doubt, ensured its speedy progress; but the bifurcation of a total experience into two opposite domains of mind and matter has today forced it, in view of its own domestic difficulties, to consider the problems which, in the beginning of its career, it completely ignored.

The criticism of the foundations of the mathematical sciences has fully disclosed that the hypothesis of a pure materiality, an enduring stuff situated in an absolute space, is unworkable. Is space an independent void in which things are situated and which would remain intact if all things were withdrawn?

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1. The Three Proofs Demolished

3. Space, Movement, and Zeno

Original text

‘The sense objects (colours, sounds, etc.) are states of the perceiver's mind, and as such excluded from nature regarded as something objective. For this reason they cannot be in any proper sense qualities of physical things. When I say “The sky is blue,” it can only mean that the sky produces a blue sensation in my mind, and not that the colour blue is a quality found in the sky. As mental states they are impressions, that is to say, they are effects produced in us. The cause of these effects is matter, or material things acting through our sense organs, nerves, and brain on our mind. This physical cause acts by contact or impact; hence it must possess the qualities of shape, size, solidity and resistance.’ ⁶

‘has damaged the traditional notion of substance more than all the arguments of the philosophers. Matter, for common sense, is something which persists in time and moves in space. But for modern relativity-physics this view is no longer tenable. A piece of matter has become not a persistent thing with varying states, but a system of inter-related events. The old solidity is gone, and with it the characteristics that to the materialist made matter seem more real than fleeting thoughts.’