________________
CREATION
01.
find that most important of those faculties perform no normal function in physical life. Here, then, we have a personality, connascent with the physical organism, but possessing independent powers : a distinct entity, with the intellect of a god; a human soul, filled with human emotions, affection, hopes, aspirations, and desires : longing for immortal life with a passionate yearning that passeth understanding; possessing, in a word, all the intellectual and moral attributes of a perfect manhood, together with a kinetic force often transcending, in its visible manifestations, the powers of the physical frame; in a word, a perfect being, nobly planned,'-a being of godlike powers and infinite possibilities. Is it cenceivable that there has been created such a manhood without a mission, such faculties without a function, such powers without a purpose ? Impossible! If nature is constant, no faculty of the human mind exists without a normal function to perform. If no faculty exists without a normal function to perform, those faculties which do exist must perform their functions, either in this life or a future life. If man possesses faculties which perform no normal function in this life, it follows that the functions of such faculties must be performed in a future life."
Myers is even more emphatic when he writes* :
"I regard each man as at once profoundly unitary and almost infinitely composite, as inheriting from earthly ancestors a multiplex and colonial'organism-polyzoje and perhaps polypsychic in an extreme degree ; but also as ruling and unifying that organism by a soul or spirit absolutely beyond our present analysis--a soul which has originated in a spiritual or metetherial environment; which even while embodied subsists in that environment; and which will still subsist therein after the body's decay......I claim, in fact, that the ancient hypothesis of an indwelling soul, possessing and using the body as a whole, yet bearing a real, though obscure, relation to the various more or less apparently disparate conscious groupings manifested in connection with the organism and in connection with more or less localised groups of nerve-måtter, is a hypothesis not more perplexing, not more cumbrous, than any other hypothesis yet suggested. I claim also that it is conceivably provable,- I myself hold it as actually proved,--hy direct observation. I hold that certain manifestations of central individualities, associated now or
*"The Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death,' Chap. II.
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org