Fundamentals Of Jainism

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Veer Nirvan Bharti

Page 11

THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY
WORLD PROCESS
3
In respect of the world-process, it is obvious to every thinking mind that philosophy is concerned with the determination of the nature of things, and that the starting point of all rational speculation is the world of concrete reality which is presented to the individual consciousness through the media of senses. A philosopher takes, in the first instance, the world as he finds it, and, aided by the methods of analysis and research, reduces the perceptible phenomena to their simpler components, so that when he arrives at simple elements he knows them to be the eternal causes of the ceaselessly shifting panorama of form and shape which constitutes our universe. Beyond these eternal causes or realities, it is impossible to proceed, because being simple in their nature they cannot depend, for their existence, on any thing else; in other words, their own individual natures alone are the causes of their existence individually. It follows from this that however far back we may go in time, no beginning of simple elements can be discovered or conceived, so that we never arrive at a point in the life-story of nature when they were not. This is a death blow to the idea of a beginning, and its force will be felt by any one who seriously puts himself the question: how can a simple (non-compound) substance be brought into existence? It should be remembered that a simple substance, or reality, differs from a compounded effect of simple elements in so far as it is not the product of two or more substances, but is an unanalysable, unbreakable, indestructible thing in itself. Creation of these simple realities from pure nothing is out of the question, because nothing is devoid of all qualities including existence and substantiality.
If any one still wishes to adhere to the notion of a creation of all things from naught, let him put to himself the question, how can the different elements possibly owe their existence to one source? This would convince him that 'nothing' can never be turned into a concrete, substantial 'something' by means of any process whatsoever.
The conclusion we arrive at, then, is that the idea of a beginning of the elements is not entertainable in philosophy. Now>