Karma Mimansa

Author(s): Berriedale Keith
Publisher: Berriedale Keith

Page 76

GOD, THE SOUL, AND MATTER
67
being in one aspect a cogniser would at most give merely the bare recognition that there was a cogniser, but no personal identity. A true permaneat substance is, therefore, essential, and such a substance explains far more effectively than any other hypothesis such phenomena as desire, memory, and pleasure and pain, while it is the indispensable basis of merit and demerit.
This permanent entity is quite distinct from the body, the senses, or cognition. The elements of the body are seen to be without intelligence, and the combination of such elements cannot produce intelligence. If, again, one element alone had this nature, the others could not coalesce with it to form a body. A dead body, which consists of precisely the same material as the living body, contains ng intelligence. On the contrary, the fact that a body is an organised whole suggests irresistibly the fact that it serves the purpose of another which directs it, namely, the soul Such phrases as “I am fat," or "I go," are merely natural transfers of use. On the other hand, the phrase "My body" shows clearly that the ego and the body are different. The same argument can be applied to the case of the sense organs, but others are also available; thus the fact that I feel with my hand what I see with my eyes shows that there is something beyond the sense organs. Again, a blind man remembers what he saw when his eyesight remained, which would be impossible if the organ were the self. More generally the analysis of any cognition reveals to us the fact that the "I" is not the body, nor the sense organs nor the cognition itself, but something over and beyond Many people can have the same cognition as far as content is concerned, but each cognition has an individual reference, as is seen also with perfect clearness in the facts of memory; if there were no "I", how could we have the fact that one, who has learned half a lesson at one time, can later on resume the task at the place at which he left off ? The objection, that the terms “My soul” indicate a difference between the "I" and the soul, is met by holding that in the word 'soul" the meaning "cognition” is to be understood, cognition often being inaccurately described as the soul. The result can be confirmed by the evidence