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A Series of Lessons on the Inner Teachings of the Philosophies and Religions of India1164
bodies of Prakriti, ever changing and moving, and evolving—provided the
fundamental theories of the Sankhyas be accepted. Kapila taught inorganic
and organic evolution over 2,500 years before the days of Darwin and
Herbert Spencer, and several centuries before Heraclitus, the great Grecian
evolutionist.
Kapila’s conception of Prakriti was not that of gross Matter, as so many
of the Western writers on the subject are wont to assume. Instead, his
conception may be expressed by the word “Nature,” as used by Bruno and
other thinkers—that is, as a subtle, ethereal substance, partaking rather of
the nature of an Energy, rather than of Matter—a substance far more subtle
and ethereal than the Universal Ether of modern Western science.
Prakriti is the Cosmic Primordial Energy, or Substance from which the
universe is evolved, and into which it again resolves itself, in endless cycles
of change. Prakriti, he held, was not composed of ultimate atoms, as some
other Hindu philosophers had claimed, but was atomless and continuous, the
atoms being but centres of influence and activity caused by the embodiment
of the Purushas, which gave activity to them, and which afterward formed
the atoms into combinations. Mind was composed of Chitta, or Mind-Stuff,
which arose from the action of Purusha upon Prakriti. Prakriti is described as
active, according to energies of its own, along almost automatic lines, but it
is insentient and mindless in itself, the sentient qualities being possible only
when instigated and inspired by the Purushas.
Some of the illustrations used bring out the above mentioned point clearly,
as for instance the ancient one in which Purusha is pictured as a “lame man
possessed of eyesight and the other senses,” and Prakriti as “a man in whom
the senses of seeing and hearing, etc., had been omitted, but who possessed
a good pair of legs.” According to the fable, a combination is made and the
lame man (Purusha) mounts up on the shoulders of the blind man (Prakriti)
and together they move along briskly and intelligently, whereas separately
they could make no progress. In the Sankhya conception of Manas or Mind
as being of a semi-material nature, the conceptions of modern science of