Nevertheless, the sentence would perhaps have
gained in clearness if we had said, instead of the "life-atoms of jiva,"
the atoms "animated by dormant Jiva or life-energy." Again, the
definition of Jiva quoted above, though quite correct on the whole,
might be more fully, if not more clearly, expressed. The "jiva," or
life, principle, which animates man, beast, plant, and even a mineral,
certainly is "a form of force indestructible," since this force is the
one life, or anima mundi, the universal living soul, and that the
various modes in which objective things appear to us in Nature in their
atomic aggregations, such as minerals, plants, animals, &c., are all the
different forms or states in which this force manifests itself. Were it
to become--we will not say absent, for this is impossible, since it is
omnipresent--but for one single instant inactive, say in a stone, the
particles of the latter would lose instantly their cohesive property,
and disintegrate as suddenly, though the force would still remain in
each of its particles, but in a dormant state.
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