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The Syadvāda System of Predication 135
to do so on command. In Pavlov's experiments a dog which previously only salivated (R) when given food, will do so when certain auditory or other stimuli are given. Thus for such a dog all situations fall into the classes r r, RR, and rR. It can easily be seen that the effect of any experience on an animal can be classified according as the situations in which it can be placed fall into one, two, three, or all four of these classes. There are thus 2-1, or 15 qualitatively different results of an experiment in which an attempt is made to alter an animal's behaviours. In this classification the animal is assumed never to give an indeterminate response. If it can do so, both before and after, there are, as I pointed out, 2-1, or 511 possible results. The same principles may be applied to the comparison of the behaviour of two different animals, or two different races or species.
It is foolish to pretend that ancient philosophers anticipated all modern intellectual developments. And I believe that we, today, can do more honour to their memories by thinking for ourselves, as they did, than by devoting our lives to commentaries on them. But if we do so it is our duty to point out cases where it turns out that our own thought has run parallel to theirs. I was unaware of Bhadrabahu's existence when I wrote the paper to which I refer. The fact that I reached a conclusion so like his own suggests that we may both have seen the same facet of many-splendoured truth.
No doubt we reached it by very different methods, Bhadrabahu by meditation, I by thinking about the results of concrete experiments on animals. Such methods will often lead to different conclusions. This was the view of Warren Hastings in his introduction to 'Wilkins' translation of the Bhagavad Gita.
"But if we are told that there have been men who were successively, for ages past, in the daily habit of abstracted contemplation, begun in the earliest period of youth, and continued in many to the maturity of age, each adding some portion of knowledge to the store accumulated by his predecessors, it is not assuming too much to conclude, that as the mind ever gathers strength, like the body, with exercise, so in such exercise it may in each have acquired the faculty to which they aspired, and that their collective studies have led them to the discovery of new tracks and combinations of sentiment, totally different from the doctrines with which the learned of other nations are acquainted : doctrines, which however speculative
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