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enjoyment and future unconcern is the only good of life. And we may remark that such a philosophical speculation, by the perfect frankness, with which it eulogises the life of momentary experience and undermines the importance of calculating wisdom so essential in life, takes away from man what is of worth and dignity to him and thus bears its own condemnation.
The Jains, however, on the other hand hold out a different ideal-an ideal of freedom from bondage-which can only be attained by voluntary effort, both intellectual and moral. Here, as we have found in Buddhistic metaphysics, the soul is not
reduced to a continuum of conscious states, to a flux of psychical impermanent and mobile units, but is viewed as a substantial unity, a true verity, which has got to undergo all the consequences of its thoughts and deeds either in this life or in life to come, till it attains to that state of freedom and beatitudewhich is enjoyed only by the Kevalins or the Omniscients. The man here does not escape the effects of his own deed, virtuous or vicious. shuffling off this mortal coil as
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The Jain Ethics.
