The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c12.11

c12.11

In the main doctrines of the system the later texts throw little new or valuable light. Peculiar to them is the doctrine that the spirit throws light on the inner organ, or that the spirit serves as a mirror in which the inner organ is reflected. The importance of this doctrine lies in the fact that it is held to explain the mode in which spirit is apprehended. All perception is due to the inner organ forming in itself a picture of the thing to be perceived, which is reflected in spirit; similarly it forms such a picture of the spirit, and when the spirit reflects itself in the inner organ it brings its reflex, and therefore its self, to conscious knowledge. Another simile used to express the relation of spirit and nature which is in itself purely unconscious, is that of the reflection of the red Hibiscus shoots in a crystal near which the flower lies: the crystal remains unaffected by the reflection. Ingenious as all these comparisons are, it cannot be said that they lend much clearness to the subject-matter with which they deal. But they warn us of the danger of treating the evolutes of nature as being essentially material and as made into psychic states by the influence of spirit. The conception of the inner organ, consisting of intellect, individuation and mind, cannot be conceived as equivalent, as suggested by Garbe,* to the nervous system, to which psychic meaning is given by the reflection in spirit or the light thrown by spirit. Rather the conception is that everything including the psychic states of experience in an unconscious condition, is present in the inner organ, waiting to become actual by the addition of the element of consciousness given by spirit. With this view accords best the fact that the system of the Sūtra regards as persisting in unconsciousness in the intellect the impressions of experience which give rise to psychic dispositions, Saṃskāras.