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THE YOGA PHILOSOPHY
49
more than an incessant and immediate succession of states of properties.45 24. We have digressed from our discussion of the last three stages of yoga to a discussion of the substratum and its transformations' theory of the Yoga philosophy. But in doing so I had a purpose. The Yoga philosophy claims that by performing in on the transformations the past and future of their substratum is at once revealed to the mind.46 25. There is another result claimed by the Yogists to follow from ea and based on a theory to which we are now coming. Every school of philosophy has its own theory about the relation between word and meaning but it would be sufficient here to observe that the Yoga philosophy accepts what is generally known as the 4912 doctrine. F912 is a something indescribable which eternally exists apart from the letters forming any word and is yet inseparably connected with it, for it reveals itself on the utterance of that word. In like manner the meaning of a sentence is also revealed, so to speak, from the collective sense of the words used. So then, the eternal sense of a word is always different from the letters making that word; and the knowledge which in its turn is conveyed to our mind is equally apart from these two. The sense of words is generally classified' under four heads : objects, properties, actions and abstractions; and the impressions into which our mind transforms itself at the moment of cognizing is the knowledge produced. In ordinary intercourse it so happens that the letters, the sense and the knowledge all are so confused together as not to be separable from one another. Thus letters i.e. sounds,
45. YS 3.15 46. YS 3.16
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