Prof. Muni Mahendra Kumar
Now we shall compare and contrast the philosophical view of Eddington with the Jain view.
As we have already seen, making the epistemological investigation as the basis of his philosophy, Eddington has propounded that consciousness, which is the source of all our activities, such as experience, thinking, memory and feelings, is the objective reality. The Jain philosophy also accepts the objective existence of soul and believes it to be the source of all the activities of consciousness. Thus both the philosophies hold identical views regarding the essence of spiritual reality. But it does not mean that the concept of soul is wholly identical in both the philosophies. For the Jain philosophy propounds a fully developed doctrine regarding the nature of soul, whereas no such elaborate theory is found in Eddington’s philosophy. Actually, Eddington thinks that consciousness, being a purely objective reality, lies outside the domain of physics. He puts this thus: “It seems to me that the enlarged physics, which is to include the objective as well as the subjective, is just science; and the objective, which has no reason to conform to the pattern of systematization that distinguishes present-day physics, is to be found in the non-physical part of science. We should look for it in the part of biology (if any) which is not covered by bio-physics; in the part of psychology which is not covered by psycho-physics; and perhaps in the part of theology which is not covered by theo-physics. The purely objective sources of the objective element in our observational knowledge have already been named they are life, consciousness, spirit.”[1]
