Jaina Philosophy

SR No.: 001180
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Mohanlal Mehta
Publisher: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan
Publication Year: 1998
Total Pages: 328
Language: English
Classification: Book_English & Philosophy
File Size: 15 MB

Page 50

REALITY
objects. They reduce existence or reality to mere perception which position is wrong according to the real definition of Idealism in which the mind only determines the objects and does not create them. Determination and creation are two different things. What needs emphasis at this place is that true Idealism has never disputed the existence of the external world. Green remarks: 'The fact that there is a real external world of which through feeling we have a determinate experience and that in this experience all our knowledge of nature is implicit, is one which no philosophy disputes. What Mr. Spencer understands by Idealism is what a raw undergraduate understands by it. It means to him a doctrine that 'there is no such thing as matter' or that 'the external world is merely the creation of our own minds', a doctrine expressly rejected by Kant, and which has had no place since his time in any Idealism that knows what it is about."
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Now, the point is quite clear. There is no difference between the Idealistic and Realistic creeds in so far as the reality of the material world is concerned, for both there is an external world which is not the creation of our own minds. The defect, as the Idealist holds, of Realism lies in the fact that it does not realize the universe in its completeness.
The conclusion of what we have discussed so far is as follows: Though the things we know do not depend for their existence on the fact that somebody knows them, and so in this sense they are independent of the knowing mind, yet, all the determinations of the things are discovered only in the knowledge-relation, so that the things which are referred to in our explanations of facts are necessarily determined in certain specific ways. Hence, to insist that we can know only phenomena is not to degrade the things into mind-dependent appearances; it is merely to indicate that things are what we know them to be. And we know only by bringing them into
1. Works, I, p. 386.