Samayasara OR Nature of Self

Author(s): A Chakravarti
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

Page 27

XXVI
SAMAYASAKA
Being. The Cartesians recognised the importance of such necessary ideas besides sense perception. But the English empirical philosophers start with this assumption that there is nothing in the mind which was not obtained through the senses. Hence all the contents of the human understanding may be traced to sense perception. The mind itself is compared to a soit of photographic camera with the sensitive plate inside the mind on which the sense impressions are created by the stimuli from the environment. What the mind perceives is just the impression on this sensitive plate caused by the objects in the external world. The mind itself being a passive receptacle of impressions from outside and the contents of the mind must be ultimately traced to the impression caused by external objects. Starting with this assumption Locke tries to make a distinction among the impressions so created by external objects. Some of the characteristics of these sense impressions or images in the mind such as colour, taste, smell, etc., are dependent upon the nature and function of the sensory organs. These qualities are referred by the mind to the external objects These are called secondary qualites as contrasted with the primary qualities of extension etc. The spatial object perceived by the senses thus appears to be a complex constituted by the spatial properties of extension, solidity-etc, and the sense created properties of colour, taste, smell etc. According to Locke, the latter secondary qualities are purely mental and are present in the mind alone though they are referred to external objects. The object existing in space has only space qualities without these secondary qualities. Thus the external object is analysed into two groups of properties, the primary properties residing on the object in the external world and the secondary qualities as colour, taste and smell are really present in the mind though referred to the external object by the mental habit. By this analysis Locke emphasises the importance of the stimuli from the external world and reduces the mind or the self to a tabula rasa an inactive passive receptacle for impressions and converts the objects of the external world into colourless entities though endowed with spatial properties. This bifurcation of experience partly consisting of colourless external objects and partly consisting of