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Introduction
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Śrī Mahāvīra-svāmi, the last of the 24 Tīrthamkaras, which alone is characterised by the feature of manysidedness, the sole test of the relativity of knowledge, and which, in the words of a great American thinker, is “competent to descend into the utmost minutiae of metaphysics and to settle all the vexed questions of abstruse speculation by a positive method (not merely asserting na iti, na iti, not so, not so)- to settle at any rate the limits of what it is possible to determine by any method which the human mind may be rationally supposed to possess. It promises to reconcile all the conflicting schools, not by inducing any of them necessarily to abandon their favourite 'standpoints, but by proving to them that the standpoints of all others are alike tenable, or at least, that they are representative of some aspect of truth which under some modification needs to be represented: and that the integrity of Truth consists in this very variety of its aspects, within the rational unity of an all-comprehensive and ramifying principle.”
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