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INDIAN LOGIC
according to which a word is of the form of air; this view is criticised by saying that it is open to the same difficulties as the Jaina view according to which a word is made up of physical particles.50 This defence offered by the Mimāmsaka in support of his thesis that a word is an eternal verity makes one thing clear. Thus he pays utmost attention to the circumstance that a letter pronounced on one occasion and the same pronounced on another differ from one another in little save their loudness, quickness etc. Even so, his insistence that they do not at all differ thus is dogmatic; but the noteworthy thing is that the dogmatisation in question is essentially of the same nature as that exhibited by the Mīmāmsā and Nyāya philosophies while propounding their thesis on a 'universal'. For a 'universal' is supposed to represent an absolutely similar trait characterising all the members belonging to a class; as a matter of fact, it is on account of the supposed absoluteness of the similarity in question that a 'universal' is said to be of the form of one common entity belonging to all these members. Really, this is where lies the logical essence of the concept of a 'universal' while the supposition that a 'universal' is something eternal, ubiquitous, impartite is of the nature of an ontological accretion more or less arbitrary. We know how this understanding of a ‘universal' misleads Jayanta into thinking as if true-perception is a passive process of just noticing a ‘universal' in a sense-contacted object. It is only about a false perception that Jayanta would say that a sense-contacted object is here misidentified on the basis of certain observed features while in fact even in a true perception what happens is that a sense-contacted object is correctly identified on the basis of certain observed features. In this background it should be natural for Jayanta to say that when a letter is heard on two occasions what is noticed is the 'universal' concerned belonging to the two letter-sounds concerned just as when two cows are seen what is noticed is the universal 'cowness' belonging to these two particular cows. The intriguing thing is that the Mīmārsaka denies the validity of Jayanta's first explanation even while endorsing the second, the former's point being that the letter-sounds in question are absolutely similar while two cows are not. This way of looking at things cuts at the very root of the concept of 'universal', for two cows are in fact supposed to be absolutely similar in so far as the same universal 'cowness' resides in them both; this is going to be Jayanta's complaint against the
