it. Man's first crude attempts to control physical nature took the
form of magic and witchcraft. Later, more advanced pagans
outgrew magic and relied on their intellect to understand nature.
However, the ancient belief that physical nature was unfriendly and
alien to man lingered on and coloured the thinking of the greatest
pagan thinkers. Plato pinned his faith on human reason and finding
that the world of matter fell far short of the perfection of ideas and
forms that reason apprehends, he regarded it as a poor and faint
copy of the real world. He looked upon the physical world with utter
contempt as a mere shadow of Reality. The philosopher, he
believed, should be absorbed in the contemplation of eternal ideas
and forms. The otherworldly strain in Platonism appeared in a fully
developed form in Neo-Platonism, the source of all types of
mysticism. The true mystic regards the physical environment as
essentially evil and his chief concern is to shun it and take all
precautions against being contaminated by it. He seeks salvation not
with the help of the physical world but by avoiding all contact with
it. The mystics also subscribe to Plato's theory of knowledge. Plato
held that the senses are deceptive and knowledge gained through
them is unreliable. Sense-perception cannot yield true knowledge; at
best it can yield only opinion. Reason is the only source of true
knowledge. Instead of observing nature, we should fix our gaze on
the transcendental Reality. The mystic sought seclusion where he
could devote himself to meditation and contemplation. Absorbed
in himself, he was as indifferent to human society as he was to
nature. He took little or no interest in the problems of social life.
One social system was as good or rather as bad for him as another.
The goal of making life more enjoyable and agreeable for the
common man did not appeal to him. The ideal life for him was that
of the hermit. He desired communion with the Absolute, oblivious
to both the physical and the social world. With the extreme
subjectivism, it was distasteful to him to mix with people and work
with them for improving the conditions of life. Schemes of social
uplift failed to kindle a spark of interest in his mind, engrossed as it
was with otherworldly matters. It did not occur to him that by
understanding nature and learning to control its forces, he could
make far better progress in self-development and self-realisation.
He failed to see that by acquiring knowledge of nature he would
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