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Jaina View of Life
head and the heart." Descartes maintains that the seat of the soul is the pineal gland. Fichte holds that the soul is a space filling principle. Lotze says that the soul must be located somewhere in the matrix of the arterial brain events. These accounts tend to make us believe that the soul is something material which occupies space. It is sometimes pointed out that the idea of the spatial attributes of the soul constitutes a contradiction. If the soul has no form it cannot occupy space, even the infinite pradesas; and if it is immaterial, it cannot have form. However, this contradiction is due to the difficulties of expressing the immaterial in terms of the material. This has been the perennial problem of philosophy, because the immaterial has no vocabulary of its own, The Greeks had the same difficulty. Plato had to resort to allegories and myths for expressing the immaterial. In Jainism, although the description of the soul is not metaphorical, it is just an attempt to come nearest to immaterialism. It may be that the difficulty is due to the complexity of substance in Jainism. Jainism gives the cross division of substances as spiritual and non-spiritual, and again as corporeal and non-corporeal substance like Dharma and Adharma; and there is the corporeal which is called Pudgala. From the phenomenal point of view, jiva comes under the spiritual but corporeal. The corporeal need not necessarily be material. The classification is as follows:--
Substance
spiritual
corporeal
Jiva
corporeal
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matter
non-spiritual
T non-corporeal
2.
1. Akāśa Dharma Kāla
3.
If this division is accepted, there need be no contradiction. Again, when size is attributed to the soul, it is possible that it
41. James (William): Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1, p. 301.
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