Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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equilibrium and the soi^l returns to its ete rnal unchanging immobility ; it is delivered from pheno- mena. j This ^reflection and this giving or with- drawal of coiwent seem to be the only powers of Purusha;][he is the witn ess of Nature by virtue of reflection and the giver of the sanction, sa^ksht and anumantd. of. the Gita, but not actively the Ishwara. Even his giving of consent is passive and his withdrawing of consent is only another passivity. All action subjective or objective is foreign to the Soul ; it has neither an active will nor an active intelligence. It cannot therefore be the sole cause of the cosmos and the affirmation of a second cause becomes necessary. Not Soul alone by its nature of conscious knowledge, will and delight is the cause of the universe, but S oul and Nature are the dual cause, a passive Consciousness and an aciiveJE nergv . So the Sankhya explains the existence of the cosmos.
But whence then come this conscious intelli- gence and conscious will which we perceive to be so laige a part of our being and which we commonly and instinctively refer not to the Prakriti, but to the Purusha? According to the Sankhya this intelligence and will ^e jentirely a par t of the mechanical energy of Nature and are no t prqpmies of the soul ; they are the., principle of Buddh i, one of the twenty-four tattwus, the twenty- four* :osmic principles. Prakriti in the evolution of the world bases herself with her three gunas in her as the original substance of things, unmanifest, inconscient, out of which are evolved successively SANKHYA AND YOGA five elemental conditions of energy or matter — for same in the Sankhya philosophy. These are called by the names of the five concrete e lem ents of^ ancient thought, ether, air, fire, water and earth ; but it must be remembered that they are not elements in the modern scientific sense but subtle conditions of material energy and nowhere to be found in their purity in the gross material world. All j)b]ects ^re created by the combination, of thesg fiYe subtle conditions or eleinerits. Again, each of these five is the Tase 6F one of five subtle properties of energy or matter, sound, touch, form, taste and smell, which constitute the way in which the mind-sense perceives objects. Thus by jthese five elements of Matter put forth from primary energy and these f^.e_S£ii§e relations through which Matter is known is eyolYed what we would call in modern language the objective aspect of cosmic existence. Thirteen other principles constitute the sub- jective aspect of the cosmic Energy, — Buddhi or Mahat, Ahankara, Manas and its ten sense-
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