Jaina Psychology

Author(s): Mohanlal Mehta
Publisher: Sohanlal Jain Dharm Pracharak Samiti Amrutsar

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JAINA PSYCHOLOGY
apprehension is indeterminate, indefinite, indistinct, whereas comprehension is determinate, definite, distinct. SOUL AS THE PRINCIPLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
To arrive at a satisfactory solution of the riddle of the source of cognition in our psychological experience, we have no other alternative than to posit a conscious principle. True, this is a problem of metaphysics, nevertheless, the psychologist has to deal with it, since he attaches much importance to the inquiry of the nature of consciousness. It is evident that cognition is an important aspect of consciousness. Hence, our discussion of the problem of the existence of soul is not irrelevant.
The theory of soul declares that the principle of individuality must be substantial, since psychic phenomena are activities, and no activity is possible unless there is a concrete agent. This substantial agent cannot be brain but must be something immaterial, for its activity is immaterial. The brain is composed of matter, hence, it is incompatible with the power of immaterial thought-activity. Moreover, thought is spontaneous or free, whereas all material activity is determined from without; and the will can turn itself against all corporeal goods and appetites, which would not be possible were it a corporeal activity. These are some of the reasons why the principle of psychic activities must be both substantial and immaterial. This principle is the soul or the self.
William James confesses that to posit a soul influenced in some mysterious way by the brain-states and responding to them by conscious affections of its own, seems to me the line of least logical resistance, so far as we yet have attained.
Mary Whiton Calkins, a pupil of William James, argued that the self, far from being merely a metaphysical concept, was an ever-present fact of immediate experience and fully worthy to be made the central fact and a system of scientific psychology. She came to believe that the conscious self of each one of us is immediately experienced as possessed of at least four fundamental characters. I immediately experience myself as (1) relatively persistent-in other words, I am in some sense the same as my
1 Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, p. 181.