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never becomes a conscious being. They are acknowledged as existing, and do not need a cause; events need causes; matter, space, and living beings, time, and the two ethers do not need causes, they are themselves the causes of events.
Of these six things, living beings are the ones to whom religion and philosophy apply. The distinguishing characteristic of living beings is consciousness, sentience, knowledge. "We may imagine a quantity of movements of material elements, and we may attribute to them whatever degree of complexity we choose; but we shall never reach a given moment at which
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we can say, Now it is obvious that this sum of movements can 14 remain movements on longer but must pass into sweetness, "brightness, or sound. The only obvious change we could ever "anticipate from them would be a fresh set of movements. We 'shall never succeed in analytically deducing the feeling from 'the nature of its physical excitant; we can only connect the two 'synthetically; and the physical event does not become a condition of the rise of the feeling until the sum of motions in which it consists meets with a subject which in its own nature "has the peculiar capacity of producing feeling from itself". (quoted from the English translation of Hermann Lotze's Metaphysic, vol. ii, page 167 2nd ed.). If we make one small alteration this is, as I understand it, the Jain teaching. Instead of saying until the sum of motions......meets with a subject" we should say unless the sum of motions is associated with a subject etc. The usual name for this subject is soul, and we may as well use it. The soul is the knower; it is the soul and not the body which sees, hears, smells, touches, tastes, imagines, remembers, conceives, judges, reasons, believes, feels, plans, chooses, and wills; the soul is the living being. He is either embodied or liberated; and the aim of the embodied soul is or should be to reach the liberated state. This aim is accomplished by means of right belief, right knowledge, and right action, the latter being summed up in the words non-injury; all the rules of life are based upon love (daya), and non-injury to living beings is considered to be the highest religion. The embodied state is regarded as a misery, and the liberated state Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
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