Sacred Philosophy

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

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city to become a God by purifying itself. The aim of Religion is to enable the soul to attain to Godhood and to obtain ever-lasting bliss. This, briefly, is the description of spirit in the Jaina Siddhanta.
Modern science, however, denies the very existence of spirit as a substance, holding knowledge and perception to be the outcome of special groupings of atoms of matter. The very first question before us now, therefore, is whether consciousness, that is, the faculty of knowledge and perception, appertains to matter or is something different from it?
Now, a great deal has been written on the subject by all sorts of writers in modern times, but unfortunately most of it is not to the point. So far as materialistic writers are concerned, they seem to hold that consciousness is either produced by the brain of man and certain other highly developed animals, or is the intensification of a primitive form of sensation with which they regard matter to be endowed. But neither of these views is sound philosophically, as will appear from an analysis of the functions of consciousness. The first hypothesis is contradicted by the fact of logical inference which is impossible on the supposition of consciousness being a function, not of a simple entity but of a composite substance, consisting of