________________
94
INDIAN LOGIC
doctrine is an extremely significant aspect of the matter, an aspect underplayed by the Buddhist because of his misgivings about there being any abiding real thing like a soul. For as a matter of fact; all cognition is in essence of the form of recognising (= identifying) a thing on the basis of certain observed sensory features of this thing so that what Jayanta calls cases of fresh-cognition are not at all cases of fresh-cognition but cases of fresh-experience. At the time of such an experience the thing concerned is found to produce either a sensation of over-all comfort (= pleasure) or a sensation of over-all discomfort (= pain) while at the same time certain features of this thing are specially noticed because they are somehow most conspicuous. Now when this thing is encountered for another time these very features act as a mark for its recognition. (= identification) which in some measure also revives the sensation of comfort or discomfort that went along with the original experience; in the case of the former sensation the thing is sought to be approached, in the case of the latter it is sought to be avoided, All this (barring that point about fresh-cognition) is in Jayanta's mind when he is arguing why a soul must be posited, but the question is why all this should not be a characteristic performance of a living body just as (on Jayanta's own admission) metabolism on the one hand and the physiological acts like itching etc. on the other are such a performance. Jayanta only pleads that the agent engaged in the conscious acts like recognition, desire, aversion, effort must be something absolutely changeless while a, living body is something that changes all the time, but the plea makes no particular sense. For what is required is that the agent engaged in conscious acts (i.e. in cognition and cognition-based acts) must be in a position to experience things, to retain impressions left by an experience, to recognise things with the help of such impressions, and all this seems to be well possible on the part of a living body. Be that as it may, the anti-materialist philosophers found it inconceivable that acts like these could be undertaken by a mere body; and so the Buddhists conceived these acts in the form of a series running parallel to the body-series concerned while the rest conceived them in the form of the performance of an abiding soul inhabiting the body concerned. In his present treatment of soul Jayanta first discusses as to whether or not a soul is a possible object of perception, then argues against the Buddhist position that
