________________
SACRED PHILOSOPHY
19
furnished by the fact that the soul pervades the physical body in its entirety. Now, if the soul did not pervade its body in its entirety, it would be confined to some specific place; but in that case it would not be able to feel pleasant and unpleasant bodily affections in those parts and limbs of its physical incasement which were not pervaded by it. The supposition that a sensory message is received by the soul from the seat of the trouble is untrue, inasmuch as there can be no feeling of pleasure or pain in that case. For just asit is impossible for a man, who hears that his house is set on fire, to experience the actual sensation of burning, however distressing the piece of information might otherwise prove to be, so is it not possible for the soul to experience aught but purely mental distress on the receipt of a message of pain from a place where it is not. And, lastly, even assuming that physical pain could be caused by the message received, then the painful feeling would be confined to the substance of the soul itself, and, therefore, necessarily to the cavity of the heart or wherever else the soul might be located. But since this is not the case, we must assume that the soul pervades its body in its entirety. It hardly needs any argument from me to convince you that a soul which is confined within the four corners of a tiny microscopical atom or to the physical matter of the brain cannot be regarded as pervading the whole body. The fact is that spirit is a substance by itself, though of a different kind from matter. Observation shows how it is affected by matter (e.g., increase of animation and consciousness by the use of such things as musk and coffee), and how, in its own turn, it is capable of affecting matter and conditions dependent on it, as the curing of disease by purely mental suggestion or will
power.
As for consciousness, it is an inalienable property of spirit, though liable to be affected by matter, as already observed. This is tantamount to saying that knowledge is the very nature of spirit (jiva). If any one will put to himself the simple question: what is knowledge? he will readily agree with me that there can be no knowledge apart from or independently of a knowing being. For knowledge is not a reflection of an object in consciousness, like a reflection in a mirror, nor anything other than a sense of awareness, which may be occasioned by the
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
