The Householder's Dharma (Ratnakaranda-Sravakachara)

knowledge, and a condition precedent to the awareness of all things, relations, and states of feeling. All mental modifications and states of consciousness, such as sensations of pleasure and pain and the like, pre-suppose a subject to which they belong. As a learned psychologist points out, a feeling necessarily implies a being who feels. Cognitions and emotions cannot inhere in nothing, nor can volition be the function of a pure nonentity. Hence, they must be the states of a something which exists, consequently, of a substance.

As regards the simplicity of the soul, it is sufficient to point out that it cannot be a compound, since otherwise it would be incapable of discharging the functions which it does.

"Every one's experience," says Maher, "teaches him that he is capable of forming various abstract ideas, such as those of Being, Unity, Truth, Virtue, and the like, which are of their nature simple, indivisible acts. Now, acts of this sort cannot flow from an extended* or composite substance, such as, for

* Mr. Maher's idea of inextension will become clear to the reader by a perusal of the following foot-note to page 444 of his 'Psychology':

"The schoolmen expressed the former attribute—absence of extension or composition of integrant parts—by the term quantitative simplicity. The fact that the soul is not the result of a plurality of principles coalescing to form a single nature (as, for example, in their view the formal and material principles of all corporeal objects) they signified by asserting that it is essentially simple—simplex quoad essentiam simple regarding essence."