Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)

functions, five of knowledge, five of action. Manas, mind, is the original sense which perceives all objects and reacts upon them ; for it has at once an inferent and an efferent activity, receives by perception what the Gita calls the outward touches of things, bdhya sparsha, and so forms its idea of the world and exercises its reactions of active vitality. But it specialises its most ordinary functions of reception by aid of the five perceptive senses of 2hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell, which make the five properties of things their respective objects, and specialises certain necessary vital functions of reaction by aid of the five active senses which operate for speech, locomotion, the seizing of things, ejection and generation. Buddhi, t]hg^ discrimina> ting jprinciple; is at once intelligent and _willj, iT^is that powt in Nature which discriminates and coordinates, i^ankara, the ego-sense* is the suy ecllyel"^nnciple_ in Bulcidhi. by which the Purusha is induced to identify himself with Prakriti smaller activities. BiU these subjective principles are themselves as mechanical, as much a part of the inconscient energy as those which constitute her objective operations. If we find it difficult to realise how intelligence and will can be properties of the mechanical Inconscient and themselves mechanical (jada), we have only to remember that modern &ience itself has been driven to the same conclusion. Even in the mechanical action of the atom there is a power which can only be called an inconscient will and in all the works of Nature that pervading will does inconsciently the works of intelligence. What we call mental intelligence is precisely the same thing in its essence as that which discriminates and coordinates subconsciously in all the activities of the material universe, and conscious Mind itself. Science has tried to demonstrate, is only a result and transcript of the mechanical action of the inconscient. But Sankhya explains what modem Science leayes in obscurity, the jro cess by which 3io6 SANKHYA AND YOGA the mech anical a nd i nconscient takes on the agpe^nce of consciousness. 1 1 J[s_ because of the refltoioa.j[>f Prakriti in Purusha ; the light of consciousness of the ^bul is attributed to the workings of the mechanical energy and it is thus that the Purusha^ observing Nature as the witness and forgetting himself, is deluded with the idea generat^ln"felTiS it is Jie wh o thinks, fee ls, wills, acts,jvhile all the time the operation of thinking, feeling, willing, acting is conducted really by her and her three modes and not by himself at all. To get rid of this delusion is the first step towards the liberation of the soul from Nature and her works.