Confluence of Opposites

SR No.: 006704
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Champat Rai Jain
Publication Year: 1921
Total Pages: 422
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 15 MB

Page 76

58
SCIENCE
and that it subsequenlty became transformed into a liquid state from absolute formlessness. But this is absurd, because things cannot be conceived as existing without some kind of form.
The world is resolvable into two kinds of substances in the main, the living and the nonliving. The former of these signifies that which is characterised by life or consciousness and the latter, what is not so characterised, e. g., matter. They are technically termed Jiva (living) and njiva (a=not + Jiva, thus the non-living) respectively. We may also call them Spirit and non-spirit. Modern science denies the existence of spirit (Jiva substance), and attributes consciousness to matter. But scientists are hard put to it to account for the origin of life, and invent fanciful theories to explain its first appearance ou the earth, some holding that its germ or seed fell on our globe from some other planet in the first instance, others that it arose spontaneously, and so forth. We shall first of all examine the theory according to which there is a primitive nucless of sensitivity bound up in each atom of matter. This elementary consciousness, it is premised, in the course of evolution developed into the keen, refined and complex intellectualism of a Kant, a Schopenhauer or a Tyndall, and may develop still further. Upon this supposition the higher forms of consciousness would arise by the intensification of the original nucleus, But this is pure guess-work ; and it rests upon two