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128
INDIAN LOGIC
Prabhakarite version. The Prabhakarite divides all cases of cognition into the cases of fresh cognition and the cases of memory, and then divides the former into cases of perception, those of inference, those of verbal testimony etc. But in all this the Naiyayika and the Kumärilite too will agree with him; the difference arises when unlike those two he refuses to grant that a fresh cognition might be true or false. Thus he would have us believe that a case of perception, inference, verbal testimony or the like is necessarily a case of true cognition. This stand of his is obviously untenable inasmuch as perception, inference, verbal testimony or the like might be true or it might be false. The anomaly remains somewhat concealed because in this connection all attention is devoted to the cases of perception and it is really somewhat of a problem as to how a true perceptual cognition differs from a false one; even so, it has to be. kept in mind that the Prabhakarite stands committed to maintain that not only a case of perception but so also a case of inference, verbal testimony or the like is necessarily a case of true cognition. However, the Prabhakarite is wrong also in denying that there are perceptions that are false, but in this connection his task was somewhat facilitated by the way the problem was viewed by the Naiyayika and the Kumarilite. For the latter submitted that true perception takes place when a sense-organ comes in contact with an object which might be of the form of a substance, quality, action or the like and notices the 'universal' concerned residing in this object; but this way of looking at things. prevented them from offering a corresponding explanation for false perceptions. For they could not say that in a false perception too there is noticed a 'universal' residing in the object with which a sense-organ comes in contact; thus they would maintain that in a false perception a sense-organ comes in contact with the object x and then for certain definite reasons recalling an object not-x perceives x as not-x. Now the Prabhakarite took advantage of this discrepancy and contended that 'perecption of x as not-x' thus spoken of is a myth. In this connection he totally endorsed the above account of true perception but argued that this precisely is the reason why the 'perception of x as not-x' is an impossibility; so what others called 'perception of x as not-x" he called 'an indiscriminate amalgam of a semi-perception of x and a semi-memory of not-x'. The only way to repudiate this mumbo-jumbo of his was to recognize that 'perception of x as x' and 'perception of x as not-x' are two essentially similar processes, that precisely being
