Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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for righ t knowledge and right action according to that knowledge, as a sympathe^c perception of the existence and claims of others, as an attempt to know the higher law of his own nature , which t he sattwic principle in him cr eate^ and to obey it, and as a conception of the greater peace and happiness which virtue, knowledge and sympathy bring in their train. He kn ows more or less imperfectly t hat he has to govern his rajas ic and tamasic by his sattwic nam re and that Either tends the perfection of his normal h u manity .
But is the condition of the predominantly sattwic natur e freedom and is this will in m an a free will ? That the Gita from the standpo int of a consciousness in which alone is tru e freedom " denies. The buddhi or con scious intelligent will is st ill a n instrument of Nature and when it acts, even in the most sattwic sehse,'lt is still Nature which acts and the soul which is carried on the wheel by Maya. At any rate at least nine-tenths of our freedom of will is a palpable fiction ; that will is crated and determined not by its own self-existent action at a given moment, but by our past, our heredity, our training, our environme nt, the whol e tremendous complex thing we call Karma, wliich is, behind us, the whole past action ofTJature on us and the world converging in the individual, determining what he is, determining what his will shall be at a given moment and determining, as far as analysis can see, even its action at that moment. Th e_ego associates it self alw a ys w ith its KanKa and it sa^**I did*"and THE DETERMINISM OF NATURE will” and **1 suffer**, but if it looks at itself and seesTiow it was made, it is obliged to say of man as of the animal, “Nature did this in me, Nature wills in me”, and if it qualifies by saying “my Nature”, that only means “Nature as self-determined in this individual creature.” It was the strong perception of this aspect of existence which com- pelled the Buddhists to decla re that all is Karma and that there is no self in existence, that the idea of self is , o nly a delusion of Ae ego-mind. Wnen the ^go thinks “I choose and will this virtuous and not that evil action”, it is simply associating itself, somewhat like the fly on the wheel, or rather as might a cog or other part of a mechanism if it were conscious, with a predominant wave or a formed current of the sattwic principle by which Nature chooses through the buddhi one type of action in preference to another. Nature forms itself in us and \yi lls in us, the Sankhya would say, for the pleasure of the inactive observing Purusha. But even if this extreme statement has to be qualified, and we shall see hereafter in what sense, still the freedom of our individual will, if we choose to give name, is very relative and almost
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