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• THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
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common the positive feature 'cowhood' but not at all erroneous to suppose that they share in common the negative feature 'absence of non-cows', a misconceived view.
Some details of Dharmakirti's treatment of perception (pratyakşa) and non-perceptual cognition (anumāna) are also note-worthy. Thus he defines perception as that type of cognitive activity which is altogether devoid of kalpanā. Now kalpanā is Dharmakirti's word for thought and since bare sensory experience (also bare self-cognition) seems to be the only type of cognitive activity altogether devoid of a thoughtelement the surmise is natural that Dharmakirti equates perception with bare sensory experience (also bare self-cognition). The surmise is amply confirmed by what Dharmakirti says in this connection. Here it will be useful for us to confine our attention to the case of bare sensory experience (taking note of the case of bare 'self-cognition when necessary). Dharmakīrti argues that a svalaksana is really real because it possesses the capacity to perform a function (arthakriyākāritva), 'capacity to perform a function' being his equivalent for 'capacity to enter into a causal relationship’.15 And by way of denying real reality to a sāmānyalaksana he says that it is not possessed of the capacity to cause cognition, the idea being that the capacity to cause cognition is the minimum condition that a really real object must satisfy.16 A physical svalakṣaṇa satisfies this condition by acting on a sense-organ and thus producing sensory experience concerning itself while a sāmānyalaksana fails to satisfy it because it becomes an object of cognition without actually causing cognition.' Kalpanā, to be equated. with thought, is Dharmakirti's word for the type of cognition which makes a sāmānyalakṣaṇa an object of itself, and so the net purport of his argumentation is that thought concerning an object is not caused by this object while sensory experience concerning an object is caused by this object. It can easily be seen that Dharmakīiti is here drawing our attention to the important fact that sensory experience is an essentially physiological process and thinking an essentially psychological one, the former governed by the physiological laws of senseobject interactivity, the latter by the psychological laws of 'association of ideas'. This becomes evident from Dharmakīrti's repeated emphasis that there is much arbitrariness about a piece of thinking and little of it about a piece of sensory experience. Thus two persons even when seated at the same place at the same time will think of very different things depending on their respective life-histories, but they will have
