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the problem, they will not fail to perceive that it is clearly impossible to construct a material world without positing, in the first instance, certain kinds of constant units, particles or atoms, from whose combination bodies could be made.
THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
The insufficiency of a system of thought which proposes to construct a solid, material world from pure processes, becoming or change is evident from the very terms employed to give it expression. For a process is a movement of a something, and not a thing by itself, while becoming and change are equally impossible in the absence of a material substratum, or basis, in which they might inhere. Thus, where there is nothing to proceed or pass from one state to another, there can be no process, becoming or changing there, and the only harvest one can hope to gather from this kind of sowing is a whirlwind of wordy abstractions. The beautiful simile of the flame of a lamp which the Enlightened One, as Buddha was called by his followers, employed to illustrate his philosophy is only valuable in relation to forms; it is utterly misleading in the department of substance the absence of which would be fatal to the very existence of things. For while it is true that the universe is a changing, shifting panorama like the flame of a lamp, in which luminous particles are being constantly replaced by others of their kind, it is also true that no change whatsoever is ever known to or can possibly occur in respect of the ultimate basis of all changes themselves. As Jainism points out, every substance is characterised by the three-fold phenomenon of origination, destruction
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