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CHAPTER V
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school of thought, understanding the concepts as their authors wish them to be understood before proceeding to find out their faults is not the least part of a critic's duty.
There is a deeper consideration underlying the repudiation of the forms of contradiction with regard to the Jaina conception of reality. It lies in the fundamental difference in the approach to the problem of reality between the Jaina and the non-Jaina-especially the idealistic Advaitic and the Buddhist-schools. The difference may be stated, in modern phraseology, to be one between aposteriorism and apriorism. Aposteriorism signifies a direct appeal to experience and apriorism to some kind of intuition' which is "pure and transcendental". The intuitional or the aprioristic view would not of course object to the idea of experience being the sphere of verification of a truth. But it objects to the treatment of experience as the sole determinant of the knowledge and of the validity of its truth. This point of view is clearly expressed in the following observation: “The opposition between being and non-being is known a priori and does not stand in need of verification to validate it. Its validity is self-certified, and though experience may illustrate its truth it does not confer validity upon it. Its validity is intrinsic, being derived from the aprioristic constitution of our thought-principle. If experience is found to be in consonance with this law, as known a priori, it is true and valid, and if it is found to be at variance with it, it must be rejected as false".
1. JPN, p. 18.
