pupil or imitator[252].
Even had its independent appearance been later, we might still say that
it represents an earlier stage of thought. Its kinship to the theories
mentioned in the last chapter is clear. It does not indeed deny
responsibility and free will, but its advocacy of extreme asceticism and
death by starvation has a touch of the same extravagance and its list of
elements in which physical substances and ideas are mixed together is
curiously crude.

Jainism is atheistic, and this atheism is as a rule neither apologetic
nor polemical but is accepted as a natural religious attitude. By
atheism, of course, a denial of the existence of Devas is not meant; the
Jains surpass, if possible, the exuberant fancy of the Brahmans and
Buddhists in designing imaginary worlds and peopling them with angelic
or diabolical inhabitants, but, as in Buddhism, these beings are like
mankind subject to transmigration and decay and are not the masters,
still less the creators, of the universe. There were two principal world
theories in ancient India. One, which was systematized as the Vedanta,
teaches in its extreme form that the soul and the universal spirit are
identical and the external world an illusion. The other, systematized as
the Sankhya, is dualistic and teaches that primordial matter and
separate individual souls are both of them uncreated and indestructible.
Both lines of thought look for salvation in the liberation of the soul
to be attained by the suppression of the passions and the acquisition of
true knowledge.

Jainism belongs to the second of these classes. It teaches that the
world is eternal, self-existent and composed of six constituent
substances: souls, dharma, adharma, space, time, and particles of
matter[253]. Dharma and adharma are defined by modern Jains as subtle
substances analogous to space which make it possible for things to move
or rest, but Jacobi is probably right in supposing that in primitive
speculation the words had their natural meaning and denoted subtle
fluids which cause merit and demerit. In any case the enumeration places
in singular juxtaposition substances and activities, the material and
the immaterial. The process of salvation and liberation is not
distinguished from physical processes and we see how other sects may
have drawn the conclusion, which apparently the Jains did not draw, that
human action is necessitated and that there is no such thing as free
will. For Jainism individua