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JAINA GAZETTE.
[Aug. & Sept.
This man is a two-fold entity. He is identified with a body and he makes it the vehicle of expressing his inborn or acquired mentality. He is as keen of Bodily sense as of Intellectual. He delights in a cloudy compound of both. On his psychical side, he is pre-eminently individualistic, independent, self-contained. But on his physical side, his limitations become manifest. He appears as one item, in the general scheme of things, as a wandering atom-may be of intelligence and great potency-still an atom in a vast Universe of spirit and matter.
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The moral problem is only one aspect of the whole problem of man and the Universe. It has its two sides too: The selfregarding and the non-self-regarding. With your permission I shall briefly touch upon these two aspects.
Self-regarding ethics deals with the ideals or form of conduct that we choose for ourselves. Its basis is our own inner satisfaction. Its source is the still small voice that is both word and light for the struggling soul of humanity. Its scope is co-extensive with our innermost religion. It is only in the light of this that the dictum of the great Roman jurist Modestinus is true. This great man held that what was immoral was impossible also. This saying is deeper and truer than it seems. For really no man or woman ever does anything which he or she considers to be immoral. Take the case of drink our special concern as members of this Lodge. A drinker, even a bad drinker finds justification for his course of conduct. A man loses a dearly-beloved wife. Life becomes a misery, an hourly torture. Society and conventional sympathy are lollow and a bore. Instead of taking his own life, he takes to drink. His grief is soothed; his life is saved. He thanks father Bacchus and can hardly understand why drink is tabooed by decent people. The moral standard of this man is self-regarding. The society that condemns drinking is looking at things from a different point of view, i. e., from the non-self-regarding point. We all are aware of the instinct of self-preservation. This is not confined to bodily self-preservation. The most illiterate and backward of us know that the body is not our whole self. We have a mind and a soul. These form our inner self. This inner self has
also to be preserved. And the experience, of our ancestors, according to Hobhouse in his Evolution of Ethics, appears in
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
