Sacred Philosophy

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

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cation of the presence of spirit, and easily distinguishable from a non-living substance. For this reason the term jiva (living substance) is employed in the Jaina Siddhânta for spirit, and ajiva (notspirit) for the remaining substances.
As a conscious entity, every soul is omniscient by nature, however much that omniscience may remain unmanifest in ordinary cases. The argument which proves the omniscient nature of the soul consists of the following two propositions, namely:
1. all things are knowable; and
2. the soul is a substance whose function is to know.
The first of these propositions-all things are knowable-means that that which can never be known by any one is non-existent ; for what nobody can ever know will never be proved to exist, and what will never be proved to exist can never have
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*The argument that if living beings come to an end before the completion of scientific enquiry things must remain unknown, is not to the point, for that would not make them unknowable. That term, it will be seen, is not a synonymn for what is termed unknown, but possesses the additional attribute of never being known to any one, although capable enquiring minds exist and become engaged in the exploration of nature and the investigation of truth. Hence, if radium, wireless telegraphy, gramophone and the like discoveries and inventions of the nineteenth century A.D. had remained for ever unknown because of the total disappearance of knowing beings at the end of the eighteenth century, it would only have been a case of knowable things remaining unknown, but not of any of the unknowable sort.