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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
in organic life, a division of labour is found to exist; nerve cells appear diversified and grouped together in a systematic way. Bergson observes :
“When a foreign body touches one of the prolongations of the amoeba, that prolongation is retracted; every part of the protoplasmic mass is equally able to receive a stimulation and to react against it: perception and movement being here blended in a single property, contractilily. But, as the organism grows more complex. there is a division of labour; fanctions become differentiated, and the anatomical elements thus determined forego their independence. In such an organism as our own, the nerve fibres, termed sensory, are exclusively empowered to transmit stimulation to a central region whence the vibration will be passed on to motor elements. It would seem then that they have abandoned individua) action to take their share, as outposts, in the mancuvres of the whole body. But none the less they remain exposed, .singly, to the same causes of destruction which threaten the organism as a whole; and while this organism is able to move, and thereby to escape a danger or to repair a loss, the sensitive element retains the relative immobility to which the division of labour condemns it" (Matter and Memory).
The dravya mana is composed of very fine material, and marks the limit of the specialization of the function of nervous matter and nerve cells. It is not conscious in its own right, since consciousness belongs not to matter of which it is composed. As a matter of fact, this mind is, in a way, the instrument of limitation of knowledge, because it narrows down the field of consciousness to what is actually the subject of attention at any particular moment of time.
To elucidate the point, full and unqualified omniscience is the nature of each and every soul ; but this is so only potentially in the case of those that are still involved in transmigration; for in their case the purity of spirit is vitiated, more or less, by the contact of matter, there being no transmigrating soul which may
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