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RECONCILIATION.
959
by any other system, whether oriental or occidental. It is a matter of daily experience that a set of rules applicable to a bundle of facts established with reference to a certain point of view do not hold good indiscriminately, that is, with reference to every other standpoint; yet there is not one non-Jaipa philosopher who has not fallen into a logical trap by mixing up his standpoints. Suppose we say, here is a jar of iron : if we remove its ironness, it will cease to exist. The statement is a metaphysical truth, for if the very substance of which a thing is made be conceived to be non-existent, it is evident that the thing itself can then have no manner of claim to an existence by itself. But now suppose further that we generalise upon this one instance and apply it to the case of a jar of x. It is conceivable that in certain cases the result may be true, but obvious that in certain others it must be simply disastrous; for x might not only stand for iron, copper, glass and other substances of which a jar may be made, but also for such things as water or butter which it might contain, as well as for the
which, in the words of a great American thinker (see the Nayakarnika, pp. 24-25) is "competent to descend into the utmost minutiæ of metaphysics and to settle all the vexed questions of abstruse speculation by a positive method......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 nec sarily 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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