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ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES
knowledge has a concrete existence in the outside world, so that our awareness of things is primarily the awareness of our own states. Reflection, no doubt, reveals the fact that these states of consciousness are occasioned by the external stimulus operating on the soul, the living principle or consciousness; but it is clear that the sense of awareness itself is actually a state of our own being and is only invoked from within. Neither the senses of a knowing being nor the stimulus from without constitute knowledge in any sense of the term. The eye contains no more awareness within it than the lens of a photographic camera, nor is the current of vibrations that impinge upon it charged or loaded with knowledge any more than the rays of light which being reflected reproduce an inverted image of their source on the ground glass. The truth is that the soul is a substance which nature has endowed with awareness, and it knows and feels its conditions and states. The photographic apparatus is not so endowed with the capacity to know and feel its modifications, and is consequently devoid of knowledge and conscious states.
Now, since nothing that is not proved to exist can be admitted to be existing and since all that is provable is knowable, it follows that knowability is an attribute of existence. Hence, all things are knowable, that is to say, that which will never be known to anybody at all must be non-existent. But what is known to one soul is also knowable by another, there being no difference between one soul and another in respect of the natural properties of the soul substance. It follows from this that each and every soul possesses the power to know all things, so that knowledge unlimited by time and space must be attributed to every living being, however much that knowledge might remain unmanifested owing to individual circumstances and conditions. In plain terms, every soul is omniscient by nature.
Nature has also endowed* every soul with immortality, for souls are simple things, not made up of parts which might disintegrate or
* Like modern Science, Jainism does not believe in the existence of a creator, holding that if nature could produce such a being-(otherwise we should have a maker of our supposed maker and another maker of that maker, and so forth ad infinitum et absurdum)-there is nothing surprising in its producing a world that is self-sufficient and capable of progress and evolution. This simply means that if a creator can be supposed to exist without having been created by any one, it implies no violation of the laws of thought to posit a world which is self-sufficient and self-existing.
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