The Sankhya Conception of Personality

Contents: Editor's note. Foreword. Introduction. 1. The existence of God. 2. The existence of God (contd.). 3. The personality of God. 4. The human personality. 5. Other forms of personality (A personalistic conception of nature).

"The word "personality" has been used in different senses and different meanings have generally been assigned to it. But the truth seems to lie in this : The essential characteristic of a person is self consciousness; but self-consciousness is not a bare or undifferentiated unity of an essence or of a substance, but a complex or differentiated unity of a system or a world. Thus, a person is a self-conscious system or world of diversified elements. Again, this system or world is not stationary, but progressive, so that a better definition would be that a person is "an active form of the whole"--a unique living centre of activity on the part of the absolute which strives to attain its absolute unity and completeness by absorbing and assimilating, through an infinite process, the apparently foreign element of multiplicity. He is a free voluntary agent in so far only as his freedom and initiative is nothing but "the inherent effort of mind, considered as a 'world,' in the direction of unity and self-completeness, i.e., individuality."

Next, the Sankhya view with regard to the other forms of personality has been considered. It has been satisfactorily proved that the Sankhya view with regard to the personality of Isvara and the evolution of the world inevitably leads one to the conclusion that all things in the manifested world are spirits possessing self-consciousness in different degrees and revealing it in widely diverse ways. They, therefore, may also be called 'persons,' but they are more imperfect forms of person than human beings.

Thus, the Sankhya System speaks of three forms of personality : The super-human personality, which is possessed by God or Isvara; the human personality, which is possessed by Jivas called men ; and the sub-human personality, which belongs to all other beings and things. Therefore, according to the Sankhya, the universe is a system of different grades of persons, in which Isvara or God is the super-person or the person of persons, and all other persons--men and other beings and things-- are his individualizations, modes or moments." (jacket)