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TAE SIDDHANTA.
745
not the phases of the same thing, but of different things. The simple state of entering into the poet's idea does not mean the disappearance of the poet himself from the field of extension. Unless we roll up the poet along with his poem, in the state of intension, it is useless to endeavour to show that he too spreads himself out in the movement of regression. Expansion and contraction, thus, are the two phases of jivic consciousness, but not of other things in nature. And, inasmuch as, apart from the states of consciousness of living beings, actual things outside those states remain where they are, it follows that extension and intension are both in existence at one and the same time. Bergson's error, it seems, has arisen, like so many other errors of Monism, from a monistic aspiration of thought to which, as we have already seen in these pages, so many philosophers have fallen victims both in the East and the West. Thus, the statement that space is already possessed by the mind as an implicit idea in its own detension, that is to say, of the possible extension of its own mental operations, is true only to a certain extent.
Even the field of the possible extension of life must be taken to be a permanent one, for there is no warrant for maintaining that it is created along with the movement of regression. If life exist prior to the commencement of the said movement, it must exist in space, which must be conceived as an infinitely extended substance, leaving no emptiness anywhere, otherwise we shall have emptiness also existing by itself as space, which would be absurd. Space, therefore, can, in no sense, be regarded as resulting from the movement of
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