________________
SOUL
93
objection that itching etc. are a property of a body and yet a dead body does not exhibit this property; in answer Jayanta pleads that itching etc. have got some special cause of their own.' This was Jayanta's encounter with the fact that irritability is the basic form of physiological activity, an activity again characteristic of a living body. And by saying that itching etc. have got some special cause of their own Jayanta virtually concedes that physiological activity is a characteristic property of a living body, but his precise point is that consciousness is not thus a characteristic property of a living body. Really, just as in the case of metabolism so in the case of physiological activity it should have been argued that consciousness is a characteristic property of a living body just as physiological activity is. In any case, Jayanta's own understanding of the phenomena of metabolism on the one hand and itching etc. on the other should have 'conyinced him that it is possible for a living body to have characteristic properties of its own so that in principle there was nothing wrong for the materialist to suggest that consciousness is a characteristic property of a living body. Not only that, the suggestion was sound even in substance, and this too should become clear from Jayanta's own understanding of the phenomenon of consciousness. Thus on Jayanta's showing the chief forms of conscious activity are cognition, pleasure, pain, desire, aversion, effort, and it is his submission that the last three necessarily presuppose the application of a past cognition to a present case; thus on cognising a thing and recognising it as one that had produced pleasure in the past one develops a desire to get it and makes an effort to get it while on recognising it as one that had produced pain in the past one develops an aversion towards it and makes an effort to get away from it. As for cognition proper Jayanta would distinguish between fresh-cognition and recognition while submitting that the latter is and the former is not of the form of the application of a past cognition to a present case. Thus according to him the phenomena of recognition, desire, aversion and effort necessitate the positing of a soul in the form of an abiding non-bodily agent which on the one hand acquires freshcognition and on the other hand applies to new cases a cognition acquired in the past. The noteworthy thing is that this aspect of the matter so much emphasised by Jayanta as by the other nonBuddhist anti-materialist philosophers in the interest of the soul
