Religion and Philosophy of the Jainas

Author(s): Virchand R Gandhi
Publisher: Jain International Ahmedabad

Page 46

CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT
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this unreal phenomenal world. Whoever was supposed to have caught a new ray of truth was visited by young and old, was honoured by princes and kings, nay, was looked upon as holding a position far above that of kings and princes.'
The Western scholars and scientific men of the modern age draw a demarcation line between animals and men, and we are told that animals are only conscious, while human beings are selfconscious - selfconsciousness is supposed to be the naturally inherited property of every human being -, that animals have only the consciousness of feelings through sensations but that they have no consciousness of their own individual existence, while human beings, in addition to the consciousness of the external world through feelings and thoughts have also a consciousness of their own existence. This distinguishing mark of the human being is easy to understand in superficial thought but it leaves the question open : what is self-consciousness or consciousness of the self ? In fact, what is self ? Materialistic science does not admit the self other than body. Consciousness and self-consciousness, in this view, are merely the kaleidoscopic panorama, from the psychic side, of the various elements of the living body, elements that are changing every moment, replaced by others. According to this idea, man is a bundle of bones, muscles and nerves, whose chief and perhaps only function would be to store sensations, feelings and emotions. Man would, therefore, be very little different from the animal except in the supposed fact that in the human being an addtional series of kaleidoscopic changes in the arrangement of the particles of the body is presented which is called selfconsciousness. This is a very small credit given to the human stage of individual development. In that philosophy there can be no place for individual memory, as the incoming particles in the body can never come to know that what was done ten years ago by a certain multitude of particles was actually done by them, if they were not there then. It does not answer in a satisfactory way the question : what is it that preserves unity amid the continuous changes that are going on all the time in