Indian Philosophy v2.c24.s28.2

v2.c24.s28.2

All organic beings have a principle of self-determination, to which the name of “soul” is generally given. In the strict sense of the word, “soul” belongs to every being that has life in it, and the different souls are fundamentally identical in nature. The differences are due to the physical organisations that obscure and thwart the life of the soul. The nature of the bodies in which the souls are incorporated accounts for their various degrees of obscuration. The souls cannot be referred to the same principle from which physical organisations spring. So the Sāṁkhya asserts the existence of puruṣas freed from all the accidents of finite life and lifted above time and change. There is the testimony of consciousness that, though the individual is in one aspect a particular finite being subject to all the accidents and changes of mortality, there is something in him which lifts him above them all. He is not the mind, life or body, but the informing and sustaining soul, silent, peaceful, eternal, that possesses them. When the facts of the world are viewed from the epistemological point of view, we get a classification into subjects on the one side and objects on the other. The relation between any subject and any object is that of cognition or, more broadly, experience. The Sāṃkhya regards the knower as puruṣa and the known as prakṛti.