Śyāmasundara: It's just like if someone points out to you, for instance, this material world is based upon sense gratification and everyone is striving to gratify the impulse of their senses. That's a verbalization of a truth which is not apparent in any other way, or it's very difficult to find out in any other way. So suddenly that knowledge awakens one to a higher desire, to attain something higher. So that is the point of verbalization of these things. If we are silent how will someone be awakened to that truth, that simply by saying this material world spins upon this principle of material sense gratification. That's a truth that you can easily verbalize.
Dr. Weir: Well, I think there's a double difference always with these things between the subject and the object. If in other words, it's objectively necessary to gratify the senses, if you like. In other words, you've got to have diets and things like that, and you've got to breathe, but you can also get a subjective pleasure out of doing that which is different from just doing it automatically. Sometimes we know when we're busy, we just shovel our food down. We don't really have any gratification out of it. We just ha...
Śyāmasundara: Yes. There are four basic principles that Prabhupāda mentioned, eating, sleeping, mating and defending, which are natural for the animals or to the humans. But man is using his propensity, his conscious propensity, to simply enjoy material nature on a more advanced level: to eat better, to sleep more, to have better sex life and so on. It still boils down to that. Everyone is seeking sense pleasure.
Prabhupāda: Such propensities are there in animals. Then what makes the difference between animals and man?
Dr. Weir: Animals, as far as I know, don't conduct scientific research.