Jainism and World Problems

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown

Page 91

THE FIVE LADDHIS
83
the evolution of the animal kingdom, as postulated by it, constitutes a distinct breach of continuity. The argument from inconceivability also makes against Epiphenomenalism inore strongly than against Animism ; for the notion that material processes should generate consciousness out of nothing is certainly a more difficult concept than that of interaction of soul and body. Again, Epiphenomenalism, though it may perhaps be consistent with the law of the conservation of energy, offends against a law that has a much stronger claim to universality, namely the law of causation itself ; for it assumes that a physical process, say a inolecular movement in the brain, causes a sensation, but does so without the cause passing over in any clegree into the eftect, without the cause spending itself in any degree in the production of the effect, namely, the sensation. It thus saves the law of conservation of energy at the expense of the law of causation ...." (p. 150).
" Quite apart, then, from any question as to what the structure of the mind may be, what stuff it may be built of, we are able to infer its presence and operation from the orderly and lawful regularity of the stream of consciousness, which cannot be explained from the nature of the stream itself and from the nature and the order of succession of the sense-impressions; and we are able to discover a number of general laws of this structure and operation, and to describe how it gradually grows, every moment of conscious life leaving it altered in such a way that its influence upon later coming parts of the stream of consciousness is modified, until its structure and its influence upon conscious life become exceedingly complex. But as compared with consciousness itself, this conditioning factor, the structure of the mind, is relatively stable and unchanging; to its stability is due all that constancy of mode of conscious reaction which distinguishes one personality from another. The faithfui retention of memories through periods of many years, manifested by