MENTALITY AS THE CHARACTERISTIC ELEMENT OF HUMAN INDIVIDUALITY
We have said that consciousness understood in its most general sense cannot be regarded as strictly proper to the human state as such, capable of characterizing it to the exclusion of all other states; and even in the domain of corporeal manifestation (which represents only a restricted portion of the degree of Existence in which the human being is situated), and of that portion of it that surrounds us most immediately and constitutes terrestrial existence, there are a multitude of beings not belonging to the human species but which nevertheless bear enough similarity to it in many respects to prevent us from supposing them devoid of consciousness, even consciousness understood merely in its ordinary psychological sense. To one degree or another such is the case of all animal species, which moreover obviously bear witness to the possession of consciousness; it took all the blindness of the systematizing spirit to give birth to a theory as contrary to the evidence as that of the Cartesian 'animal-machines'. Perhaps one should go still further and envisage the possibility for the other organic kingdoms, if not for all beings of the corporeal world, of other forms of consciousness that would appear bound more particularly to the condition of life, but this is not important for what we are now proposing to establish.
However, there is assuredly a form of consciousness, among all possible forms, that is properly human, and this determinate form
(ahankära, or 'self-consciousness') is inherent in what we term the 'mental' faculty, that is, precisely that 'internal sense' which is designated in Sanskrit by the name manas, and which is truly the characteristic of human individuality. [1] This faculty is something altogether special, which, as has been amply explained on other occasions, must be carefully distinguished from pure intellect, which latter, on the contrary, by reason of its universality, must be regarded as existing in all beings and in all states, whatever the modalities through which its existence is manifested; and one should not see in the 'mental' anything beyond what it really is, that is, to use the terminology of logic, a 'specific difference' pure and simple, the possession of which does not itself confer on man any effective superiority over other beings. There can in fact be no question of superiority or inferiority for one being envisaged in relation to others, except in what they possess in common, which implies a difference, not of nature, but only of degree, whereas the 'mental' is precisely what is special in man, what is not held in common with non-human beings, and therefore cannot be the basis of a comparison between the beings concerned. To a certain degree, the human being could doubtless be regarded as superior or inferior to other beings, depending upon the chosen point of view (this superiority or inferiority only being relative moreover), but consideration of the 'mental', as soon as it is introduced as 'difference' into the definition of the human being, can never provide any point of comparison.
To express the same thing again in other terms, we can simply recall the Aristotelian and Scholastic definition of man as a 'rational animal'; if man is defined in this way, and if at the same time reason, or better still, 'rationality', is regarded strictly as that which the medieval logicians called a differentia animalis, it is evident that the
presence of the latter cannot constitute anything but a simple distinctive characteristic. In fact, this difference only applies in the animal genus, where it characterizes the human species by distinguishing it essentially from all other species of that same genus; but it does not apply to beings not belonging to this genus, so that such beings-the angels, for example-can in no case be called 'rational'; and this distinction implies only that their nature is different from that of man, without of course implying for them any inferiority in respect of the latter. [2] It should also be understood that the definition just recalled applies to man only as an individual being, for only as such can he be regarded as belonging to the animal genus; [3] and it is indeed as an individual being that man is in fact characterized by reason, or rather by the 'mental', including in this more extensive term reason properly speaking, which is one of its aspects, and doubtless the principal one.
When we say, in speaking of the 'mental' or of reason, or, which amounts to the same thing, of thought considered in its human mode, that they are individual faculties, these should naturally not be understood as faculties that would be proper to one individual to the exclusion of others, or that would be essentially and radically different in each individual (which, moreover, would come to the same thing, for one could not then truly say that they were the same faculties, without the equivalence being merely verbal), but rather faculties that belong to individuals as such, which would have no raison d'être if they were considered aside from a certain individual state and the particular considerations defining existence in that state. It is in this sense that reason, for example, is properly an individual human faculty, for if in the final analysis it is true that in its essence it is common to all men (for otherwise it would obviously not serve to define human nature), and that it differs from
one individual to another only in its application and its secondary modalities, it nonetheless belongs to men as individuals, and only as individuals, precisely because it is a characteristic of human individuality; and one must beware of envisaging its correspondence with the universal in any way but by purely analogical transposition. Thus-and we emphasize this to avoid all possibility of confusion, a confusion the 'rationalist' conceptions of the modern West render all too easy-if one takes the word 'reason' both in a universal and an individual sense, one must always be mindful that this double usage of one and the same term, which, strictly speaking, it would be preferable to avoid, is only the indication of a simple analogy, expressing the refraction of a universal principle (Buddhi) in the human mental order. [4] It is only by virtue of this analogy, which is to no degree an identification, that in a certain sense, and with the preceding reservations, one can give the name 'reason' to what in the universal corresponds, by an appropriate transposition, to human reason, or, in other words, to that of which the latter is the expression, as translation and manifestation, in individualized mode. [5] Besides, the fundamental principles of knowledge, even if one regards them as a sort of 'universal reason', understood in the sense of the Platonic and Alexandrian Logos, nonetheless surpass all assignable measure, the particular domain of individual reason, which is exclusively a faculty of distinctive and discursive knowledge, [6] on which they impose themselves as givens of a transcendent
order necessarily conditioning all mental activity. This is evident moreover from the moment one observes that these principles do not presuppose any particular existence but, on the contrary, are logically presupposed as the premises, at least implicit, of all true affirmations of a contingent order. One may even say that by reason of their universality these principles, which dominate all possible logic, have at the same time-or rather, before all else-a significance that extends far beyond the domain of logic, for this latter, at least in its usual and philosophical sense, [7] is and can only be a more or less conscious application of universal principles to the particular conditions of individual human understanding. [8]
Although these few points depart slightly from the principal subject of our study, they seemed necessary in order to explain in what sense we say that the 'mental' is a faculty or a property of the individual as such, and that this property represents the element that essentially characterizes the human state. Moreover, when we speak of 'faculties', we intentionally leave this term with a rather vague and indeterminate meaning, for thus it is susceptible of a more general application in cases where there would be no advantage in replacing it by some other term that is more special because more clearly defined.
As for the essential distinction of the 'mental' from pure intellect, we will only recall the following: in the passage from universal to individual, intellect produces consciousness, but consciousness, being of the individual order, is in no way identical with the intellectual principle itself, although it does proceed immediately from it as the result of the intersection of this principle with the particular domain of certain conditions of existence by which the individuality
under consideration is defined. [9] On the other hand, individual thought, which, according to what has just been said, includes reason along with memory and imagination, is formal and belongs exclusively to the mental faculty united directly to consciousness; in no way is it inherent in the transcendent intellect (Buddhi), whose attributes are essentially non-formal. [10] This clearly shows to what degree this mental faculty is really something limited and specialized, while nonetheless remaining capable of unfolding indefinite possibilities; it is thus both much less and much more than it appears in the simplified, and even 'simplistic', conceptions current among Western psychologists. [11]