Confluence of Opposites

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Champat Rai Jain

Page 75

CONFLUENCE OF OPPOSITES
57 The Law of persistence of substance implies that properties and attributes of substances are also constant though liable to modification in different combinations and groupings, e. 8, colour, smell and the like which are the attributes of matter have always been the attributes of matter and will always remain so. As a matter of fact, substance and attribute are the two sides or aspects of the same thing, for there can be no substance apart from its attributes. This is tantamount to saying that attributes only inhere in substances and substances are but bundles of attributes, e.g., gold is only the sum-total of all its properties, yellowness, heaviness, materiality etc., etc., and cannot be thought of as anything apart from these attributes.
Substance is characterised by the triple function of origination, destruction and continuance at one and the same time. When a bar of gold is melted in the crucible, there is destruction of bar-ness, origination of the liquid state and continuance of gold as gold throughout,
This is the triple function of substance. Nor may we hold that the destruction of bar-ness is not simula taneous with the origination of the molten state, because there is no intermediate state between them, so that the assumption of the liquid state is the very form of the destruction of the bar-ness of gold. If you allowed an interval of time between the two states or conditions of the piece of gold, you would be compelled to hold that the destruction of bar.ness left it without any form whatsoever in the first instance,