Samayasara

Author(s): Kundkundacharya, Hiralal Jain, A N Upadhye
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

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SAMAYASARA
of man. According to Descartes man has a dual nature, his body belonging to the realm of extension is associated with the soul which belongs to another realm altogether. Each is a closed system controlled by the operation of distinct laws. In spite of this distinctness the behaviour of man illustrates the strange phenomenon that a particular change in the mind produces a corres ponding change in the body and vice versa. How could there be such a relation between two things which are absolutely distinct from each other in nature and attributes. The body is subject to the laws of the external world, the mind is the subject to the psychological laws and strangely these two appear to be related in the human being. This is a problem for Malebranche to explain, How could there be a correspondence between an event in the physical realm and an event in the mental realm when they belong to the isolated systems. The solution offered by him consists in his throwing the responsibility on the shoulders of God for maintaining such a correspondence between events belonging to two different and isolated systems of reality.
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According to Malebranche, God so arranges things that there is a parallel and harmonious correspondence between events in the physical realm and events in the psychical realm. Such a solution of a harmony secured through divine intervention was found inadequate. His successor Spinoza, the famous God-intoxicated philosopher took up the trend of thought as left by Malebranche and developed to a wonderful pantheism. He found the dualism of substances, thinking thing and the extended thing, which was the legacy of Descartes to be an inadequate explanation of experience, necessitating the intervention of a third substance to make the relation between the two intelligible, Spinoza thought such a multiplication of substances to be purely unnecessary. According to Spinoza there is only one substance, God, endowed with a number of attributes of which the extension and thought are but two important attributes. All physical objects in the external world are but modifications of this ultimate substance through the attribute of extension and all the living beings, the souls are again the modifications of the ultimate substance through the other attribute of thought. The theory of harmony through divine intervention introduced by Malebranche for the purpose of explaining human behaviour was considered to be quite irrelevant and unnecessary by Spinoza. Man being a modification of the ultimate substance must exhibit corresponding changes both in extension and thought, the ultimate substance being the necessary condition for corresponding changes. Thus the thinking substances with which Descartes started passed through the two natured man of Malebranche and ended with the all-absorbing pantheism of Spinoza. The Spinozistic pantheism though extremely fascinating did not last long. It reduced human personality to an entirely inadequate and unimportant position