Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/122

Rh appear to be in the soul, as, according to a favorite Sânkhya similitude, the red Hibiscus flower is reflected in a crystal that all the while remains inwardly unaltered by the presence of the flower. The result is a theory of a sort of psycho-physical parallelism, founded, to be sure, according to the Sânkhya, upon an illusion.

While the commentary just cited belongs, according to Garbe, to the twelfth century of our era, and the commented text of the Kârikâ itself is known to have existed not much before the fifth century, the metaphysical views here in question are no doubt of a very ancient date, and may well be quite independent of any but Hindoo origins. In any case the passage just quoted serves to give us, from a remote source, two or three very characteristic and universal features of realistic doctrines, — features whose meaning becomes all the clearer for our attention by reason of their foreign dress. The whole may be summed up in a phrase: This realistic world is a world of Independent Beings.

Any real being, as you see, has to be essentially, and if possible absolutely, independent. The nature of the gulf that divides the independent beings from one another is peculiarly indicated, and in fact is typically exemplified, by a certain separation that is discoverable between knowledge and its material objects. What is known, if it is a physical thing, is outside of the knower. To this sundering of knower and physical object common sense bears witness. Moreover, a certain proof of the fact of the sundering, and at all events an explanation of what the sundering means, is furnished by the further fact that many knowers, while notoriously isolated from one