a living being (which term includes gods and animals) when it is connected with a soul (purusha) and consciousness depends on this connection, for neither is matter when isolated conscious, nor is the soul, at least not in our sense of the word.  Though the soul is neither the life which ends at death (for that is the gross body) nor yet the life which passes from existence to existence (for that is the subtle body) yet it is the vitalizing element which renders life possible.

The Sankhya like Jainism regards souls as innumerable and distinct from one another.  The word Purusha must have originally referred to the manikin supposed to inhabit the body, and there is some reason to think that the earliest teachers of the Sankhya held that it was infinitely small.  But in the existing text-books it is described as infinitely large.  It is immaterial and without beginning, end, parts, dimensions, or qualities, incapable of change, motion, or action.  These definitions may be partly due to the influence of the Vedanta and, though we know little about the historical development of the Sankhya, there are traces of a compromise between the old teaching of a soul held in bondage and struggling for release and later conceptions of a soul which, being infinite and passionless, hardly seems capable of submitting to bondage.  Though the soul cannot be said to transmigrate, to act, or to suffer, still through consciousness it makes the suffering of the world felt and though in its essence it remains eternally unchanged and unaffected, yet it experiences the reflection of the suffering which goes on.  Just as a crystal (to use the Indian simile) allows a red flower to be seen through it and remains unchanged, although it seems to become red, so does the soul remain unchanged by sorrow or joy, although the illusion that it suffers or rejoices may be present in the consciousness.

The task of the soul is to free itself from illusion, and thus from bondage.  For strictly speaking the bondage does not exist:  it is caused by want of discrimination.  Like the Vedanta, the Sankhya regards all this troubled life as being, so far as the soul is concerned, mere illusion.  But while the Vedanta bids the soul know its identity with Brahman, the Sankhya bids it isolate itself and know that the acts and feelings which seem to be its own have really nothing to do with it.  They are for the soul nothing but a spectacle or play originating in its connection with Prakriti, and it is actually said,[750] “Wherefore no soul is bound, or is liberated or transmigrates.  It is Prakriti, which has many bodily forms, which is bound, liberated and transmigrates.”  It is in Buddhi or intellect, which is a manifestation of Prakriti, that the knowledge of the difference between the soul and Prakriti must arise.  Thus though the Sankhya reposes on a fundamental dualism, it is not the dualism of good and evil.  Soul and matter differ not because the first is good and the second bad, but because the first is unchangeable