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SACRED PHILOSOPHY
The cause of the error into which materialism has fallen seems to lie in the erroneous notion that spirit could not be affected by matter, nor could influence it in its own turn. Obsessed with such a notion as this, the investigators could not but go astray, and no one need wonder if their investigations have not led them to a soul that is unchanging or to a consciousness that does not inhere in some kind of substance or other. .: We must now proceed to investigate the nature of spirit ourselves to understand its destiny.
The most striking feature of spirit, of course, is consciousness, though life is the real synonym for it. This is so because, while consciousness is latent and not always observable in certain conditions even in rational animals and men, as for instance when they are asleep, life is a sure indication of the presence of spirit, and easily distinguishable from a non-living substance. For this reason the term jiva (living substance) is employed in the Jaina Siddhinta for spirit, and ajiva (non-spirit) for the remaining substances.
As a conscious entity, every soul is omniscient by nature, however much that omniscience may remain unmanifest in ordinary cases. The argument which proves the omniscient nature of the soul consists of the following two propositions, namely :-.
1. all things are knowable ; and 2. the soul is a substance whose function is to know.
The first of these propositions—all things are knowable-means that that which can never * be known by any one is non-existent ; for what nobody can ever know will never be proved to exist, and what will never be proved to exist can never have the remotest claim to existence. To put the same argument in different words, before we concede existence in favour of a thing some one will have to
fry, things breus That teradditional attribute engagedwireless telegraphics
ope, although nown, but possessoat term, it w
* The argument that if living beings come to an end before the completion of scientific enquiry, things must remain unknown, is not to the point, for that would not make them unknowable. That term, it will be seen, is not a synonym for what is termed unknown, but possesses the additional attribute of never being known to any one, although capable enquiring minds exist and become engaged in the exploration of nature and the investigation of truth. Hence, if radium, wireless telegraphy, gramophone and the like discoveries and inventions of the nineteenth century A.D. had remained for ever unknown because of the total disappearance of knowing beings at the end of the eighteenth century, it would only have been a case of knowable things remaining unknown, but not of any of the unknowable sort.
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