104. 118 CHAPTER II

118 CHAPTER II

awareness of physical alterations ? On the contrary, there should be the experience of perfect identity with all. Two points have to be carefully noted here. (i) In the context of the Natural soul, Hegel is dealing with only an abstract state of mind. It is an abstraction of the same type as "bare sensation" of the psychologists. It is rather a thinner abstraction than even "bare sensation". It does not exist in men. (ii) Hegel's dialectical method means that higher stages are implicit in the lowest. Hence all the later stages of spirit, even the highest, are implicit in the Natural soul. Thus all the future stages such as those of sensibility, feeling consciousness, intellect, self consciousness, appetite, represen- tation and recollection etc. are implicit in the natural soul. As a logical assumption, it contains an illogical element. What is immediate cannot at the same time be blank or empty. And the conception of the presence of future states, implicitly in the first, cannot explain the attribution of blankness or emptiness to it. Emptiness and blankness presuppose duality, the substratum of negation and the negated. SONYA PRAMĀTĀ OF ABHINAVA. Abhinava also speaks of a stage in the spiritual manifestation of the Absolute, which he represents to be empty, blank or Sunya. But, according to him, it is not the first stage, nor is it immediate. It is, on the contrary, the seventh stage and it is mediate. In fact it is to remove the doubt about the immediacy of Sunya1 that he empha- tically asserts it to be mediacy. The experience of Sunya Pramata is a negative 1. I. P. V., Vol. I, 246-7.