Sacred Philosophy

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

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case and painful in the other. Pleasure and pain are thus only conditions of my own being and are felt by me as states of my consciousness, that is to say, of the general feeling of awareness which I have of myself. The same is the case with knowledge.
We conclude, then, that spirit is a unique kind of substance which is characterised by consciousness and life. As such, it is the subject of knowledge and is quite independent of the brain and of the matter of which the brain is composed.
The cause of the error into which materialism has fallen seems to lie in the erroneous notion that spirit could not be affected by matter nor could influence it in its own turn. Obsessed with such a notion as this, the investigators could not but go astray, and no one need wonder if their investigations have not led them to a soul that is unchanging or to a consciousness that does not inhere in some kind of substance or other.
We must now proceed to investigate the nature of spirit ourselves to understand its destiny.
The most striking feature of spirit, of course, is consciousness, though life is the real synonymn for it. This is so because, while consciousness is latent and not always observable in certain conditions even in rational animals and men, as for instance when they are asleep, life is a sure indi