Introduction

IN seeking certitude in the name of a Science of the Absolute, covering at one and the same time the subject-matter of physics and the object-matter of metaphysics, we have travelled over five chapters. These chapters had their starting point in the problem of the visible world presented to thinking man. Such a world is 'out there' and cannot be present without some cause. Both philosophy and science agree in trying to explain mere appearances by delving into causes, immediately or remotely implied in the phenomenal world of effects. Colours have vibrations as their causes, and different kinds of vibrations might be an explanation for the varied colourful appearances. As a universal phenomenon given to the senses even this colourful appearance has to be included within the totality of any reality in a complete Science of the Absolute.

This colourful world presented to us can be subjected to deeper and deeper research. Travelling from apparent effects to causes imagined to lie one behind the other and treated as a whole, the world presented to us can have one cause. When cause is equated to effect and when the limbs of such an equation are considered interchangeable, we have a form of absolutist enquiry which properly pertains to the context of the first chapter. When cause and effect are directly related as dialectical counterparts we have a process and a method of reasoning which, starting from extreme effects consisting of essences of a mathematical order, proceeds negatively by stages to the inclusive notion of a material cause for the whole phenomenal world. Cause and effect are treated as belonging together to one and the same context of the Absolute. There is here a transition to be noted between the positive side represented by effects and the negative side represented by the total cause.

The end of the first chapter marks the absolutist status of an overall cause for phenomena in general. It also attained to an ontological and negative status. Such a cause is treated as a factor equal to the notion of God as the origin of all material manifestations, wherein every manifested object can be explained. Thus it is a negative method of research into a total cause that was undertaken in Chapter 1. The common man whose curiosity about the visible world takes the form of wonder and mystery is initially and summarily answered for the time being, within the limits of this chapter. A theological God 'sitting' in heaven as well as an ontological God who, like a seed to sprout, is the material cause, are both comprised within the scope of the chapter and given their legitimate position on the Omega and Alpha points of a vertical axis. The plus and minus and neutral structural ambivalent implications have also been recognized at the centre of this chapter. In the next four chapters we see how this negative reduction of effects into causes is further continued systematically. This reduction of multiplicity into unity is accomplished in the second chapter along lines acceptable to mathematics and science. Deeper and deeper seats of negative causes of a global or total order are revealed at the end of the third, fourth and fifth chapters, until we reach the terminating notion of the fifth chapter where the ontological Self is given a fully absolutist status of its own. The negative movement in the overall plan of this work attains its limit here, and from Chapter 6 onwards a reversal of methodology occurs.