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CHAPTER V
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respect of their tenets, countries and age, profoundly concur with the Jaina. These thinkers are A. N. Whitehead, Kumārila Bhatta and Immanuel Kant. Their confirmatory views may now be stated briefly in order of their mention here :
Whitehead A. N. Whitehead finds the formulation of "the complete problem of metaphysics”, viz., “the metaphysics of 'substance", and "the metaphysics of 'flux"", in the two lines of the hymn:
Abide with me;
Fast falls the eventide. Elucidating how these lines embody “a full expression of the union of the two notions”, viz., permanence and flux, he observes: “Here the first line expresses the permanences, ‘abide', 'me' and the ‘Being' addressed; and the second line sets these permanences amid the inescapable flux. Here at length we find formulated the complete problem of metaphysics. Those philosophers who start with the first line have given us the metaphysics of 'substance '; and those who start with the second line have developed the metaphysics of flux'. But, in truth, the two lines cannot be torn apart in this way; and we find that a wavering balance between the two is a characteristic of the greater number of philosophers". This
1. PrR, p. 318. A little earlier also he speaks in the same
strain : "The elucidation of the meaning involved in the phrase 'all things grow', is one chief task of metaphysics. But there is a rival notion, antithetical to the former. I cannot, at the moment, recall one immortal phrase which expresses it with the same completeness as that with which the alternative notion has been rendered by Heraclitus.
