To use a well-known simile, when a little baby feels a pin pricking it, it is conscious of pain, but not at first conscious of the pin, nor yet conscious of where exactly the pin is.  It does not recognise the part of the body in which the pin is.  There is no perception, for perception is defined as relating a sensation to the object which causes the sensation.  You only, technically speaking, “perceive” when you make a relation between the object and yourself.  That is the very first of these mental processes, following on the heels of sensation.  Of course, from the Eastern standpoint, sensation is a mental function also, for the senses are part of the cognitive faculty, but they are unfortunately classed with feelings in Western psychology.  Now having established that relation between yourself and objects outside, what is the next process of the mind?  Reasoning:  that is, the establishing of relations between different objects, as perception is the establishment of your relation with a single object.  When you have perceived many objects, then you begin to reason in order to establish relations between them.  Reasoning is the establishment of a new relation, which comes out from the comparison of the different objects that by perception you have established in relation with yourself, and the result is a concept.  This one phrase, “establishment of relations,” is true all round.  The whole process of thinking is the establishment of relations, and it is natural that it should be so, because the Supreme Thinker, by establishing a relation, brought matter into existence.  Just as He, by establishing that primary relation between Himself and the Not-Self, makes a universe possible, so do we reflect His powers in ourselves, thinking by the same method, establishing relations, and thus carrying out every intellectual process.

Pleasure and Pain

Let us pass again from that to another statement made by this great teacher of Yoga:  “Pentads are of two kinds, painful and non-painful.”  Why did he not say:  “painful and pleasant”?  Because he was an accurate thinker, a logical thinker, and he uses the logical division that includes the whole universe of discourse, A and Not-A, painful and non-painful.  There has been much controversy among psychologists as to a third kind —­indifferent.  Some psychologists divide all feelings into three:  painful, pleasant and indifferent.  Feelings cannot be divided merely into pain and pleasure, there is a third class, called indifference, which is neither painful nor pleasant.  Other psychologists say that indifference is merely pain or pleasure that is not marked enough to be called the one or the other.  Now this controversy and tangle into which psychologists have fallen might be avoided if the primary division of feelings were a logical division.  A and Not-A—­that is the only true and logical division.  Patanjali is absolutely logical and right.  In order to avoid the quicksand into which the modern psychologists have fallen, he divides all vrittis, modes of mind, into painful and nonpainful.