Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

4. Reason, Science and Yoga

Fragment ID: 218

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

August 28, 1934

As for the faith-doubt question, you ardently give to the word faith a sense and a scope I do not attach to it. I will have to write not one but several letters to clear up the position. It seems to me that you mean by faith a mental belief which is in fact put before the mind and senses in the doubtful form of an unsupported asseveration. I mean by it a dynamic intuitive conviction in the inner being of the truth of supersensible things which cannot be proved by any physical evidence but which are a subject of experience. My point is that this faith is a most desirable preliminary (if not absolutely indispensable – for there can be cases of experiences not preceded by faith) to the desired experience. If I insist so much on faith – but even less on positive faith than on the throwing away of a priori doubt and denial – it is because I find that this doubt and denial have become an instrument in the hands of the obstructive forces....

Why I call the materialist’s denial an a priori denial is because he refuses even to consider or examine what he denies but starts by denying it like Leonard Woolf with his “quack, quack” on the ground that it contradicts his own theories, so it can’t be true. On the other hand, the belief in the Divine and the Grace and yoga and the Guru etc. is not a priori, because it rests on a great mass of human experience which has been accumulating through the centuries and the millenniums as well as the personal intuitive perception. Therefore it is an intuitive perception which has been confirmed by the experience of hundreds and thousands of those who have tested it before me.