Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/130

122 concentrated in inner self-knowledge; the many-branch- ing and multifarious, busied with many things, careless of the one thing needful is on the contrary subject to the restless and discursive action of the mind, dispersed in outward life and works and- their fruits. “Works are far inferior,” says the Teacher, “to Yoga of the intell- igence ; desire rather rcfuge in the intelligence; poor and wretched souls are they who make the fruit of their works the object of their thoughts und activities. ”

We must remember the psychological order of the Sankhya which the Gitt accepts. On one side there is the Purusha, the soul calm, inactive, immutable, one, not evolutive; on the other side there is Prakriti or Nature-force inert without the conscious Soul, active but only by juxtaposition to that consciousness, by scontact with it, as we would say, not so much one at first as indeterminate, triple in its qualities, capable of evolution and involution. The contact of soul and nature generates the play of subjectivity and objectivity which is our experience of being; what is to us the subjective first evolves, because the soul-consciousness is the first cause, incon- scient Nature-force only the second and dependent cause; but still it is Nature and not Soul which supplies the instruments of our subjectivity. First in order come Buddhi, discriminative or determinative power evolving out of Nature-force, and its subordinate power of self- discriininating ego. Then as a secondary evolution there arises out of these the power which seizes the discrimi- nations of objects, sense-mind or Manas,—we must record the Indian naines because the corresponding English words are not real equivalents.. As a tertiary