* சைவ சித்தாந்த ஞான போதம்
15
learns that not one act but many acts of which the every succeding one is more intelligently performed than the preceding one, are necessary for achieving the conquest over matter.
It is such repeatged actions of living beings that are collectively called Karmas or Vinai in Saivism; or in the language of psychology habits. As we observe the infinite grades of lives, and the infinite degrees of intelligence, we are led to believe that no man who gains an insight into the nature and evolution of individual souls can at a bound conclude that the life of a soul can become perfect in a single birth when even the duration of which varies infinitely from a moment to an age.
Further, the actions of living beings acquire moral value only after they ascend to human existence in the scale of life. Therefore it seems most unreasonable to assert that the lower lives will become extinct after they have passed through a single existence and before they have reached the higher stages at which their actions acquire moral worth. Even after reaching the human stage sould do differ so widely among themselves in the amount of intelligence they exhibit that, here too, perfection is not attainable by all in a single birth. And so before attaining to the stage of perfection, it is reasonable to hold with the Saiva Siddhanta that all souls must accumulate habits after habits only by passing through myriads of bodily existences in this world and in others that are distant from ours. As has been put by Dr. James Ward, "At any rate 'metempsychosis' in some form seems an unavoidable corollary of thorough going pampsychism, so long as we look broadly at the facts of life as a whole. "9
Come we now finally to the fifth and the sixth categories, the pure and the impure Mayai. Modern science has discovered that the world of our experience is ultimately resolvable into protons and electrons. The impure Mayai is the direct material cause of the universe, while the pure: the protons and electrons, constitutes only indirectly so. The reason for this two fold classification of Mayai is this. The souls buried, as it were, in
