The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c7.53

c7.53

On the other hand, there must be recognized in the Sāmkhya the definite rejection of the absolute and the substitution for the absolute, which is the real basis of the individual souls, of a multitude of spirits. These spirits if examined are clearly nothing but abstractions of the concept of subject, and are philosophical absurdities, since in the abstract there can be but one subject and one object, neither, of course, being anything without the other. To a philosophical absurdity the system can only have arrived by a historical process, and in the number of spirits we must recognize an attempt to reproduce the number of the finite souls of experience, while in the abstract conception of the essence of spirit we have a reflex of the abstract view taken of the absolute, which is represented in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, and elsewhere, as the unseen seer, the unthought thinker, and so forth. On the other hand, the independent position given to nature is a distinct concession to realism: nature as objective is not dependent on spirit, though it is the object of spirit and is unconscious without spirit, and though intellect—made conscious by spirit—rises from nature, and from it other things are evolved, even so in the classical Sāmkhya there is a tendency to regard the non-organic world as in some way in direct connection with nature. The insistence on the multitude of souls and the conceding to them of quasi-individual existence and the allowing of a certain reality to the world are characteristic features of the interpretation of the Upaniṣads as set out in the Brahma Sūtra of Bādarāyaṇa, and in point of fact the Upaniṣads contain clear traces of a doctrine which allows to the world of matter and to the individual souls a certain reality. The purely idealistic attitude towards the absolute, which is doubtless the real interpretation of the doctrine of Yājñavalkya in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, is not so frequently found in the Upaniṣads as the pantheistic, while side by side with these higher forms of doctrine we often find the conception of the absolute producing matter, into which it enters in the form of the soul, from which it is but a step to the doctrine that the individual soul thus produced has some self-importance of its own and stands in a quasi-independent relation to the absolute self.