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OCTOBER, 1966
at the engine driver. Therefore if the old gentleman is right in saying that he heard the two reports simultaneously, the station master must be right in saying that he heard the shot at the guard first. The logic of anekantavāda is not different from this. Bertrand Russell has written that when reasoning was limited, logic was supposed to teach us how to draw inferences. Thus animals and children are prone to inferences most, (though in spiritual matters even man presents no significant exception). A horse is used to a particular turning, but if you take an unusual turn, he is surprised beyond measure. The same is true of much of man's emotion which he carries from prehistoric times. But when man, with the growth of scientific outlook, began to reason, the reason clashed with his emotions and then the man's effort was directed not towards rejecting emotion but towards developing some sort of pseudoscientific arguments to jusify the age-old inferences that he or his remote ancestor had drawn unthinkingly. Much of this trash goes by the name of philosophy and science but it is 'bad philosophy' and 'bad science'. Russell says, "Great principles such as the 'uniformity of nature', the 'law of universal causation' and so on are attempts to bolster up our belief that what has often happened before will happen again, which has not better foundation than the horse's belief that you will take the turning you usually take". In the West modern science has already challenged this trash emotionalism and come into a headlong clash with the Church. And the result is queer indeed. Russell gives a nice example. The poet has written :
'One far off divine event
To which the whole creation moves.'
Apparently the notion is a static one, this far-off event may be all right to an observer who is fixedly rooted on the earth's surface. But mind that this far-off event has happened only in relation to our static observer and to him therefore it is an absolute event to which he turns with emotion. But science does not accept this superb nonsense. To one trained in relativity, if the event is sufficiently far off and the creation moves sufficintly quickly, some parts will judge that the event has already happened while others will judge that it is still in the womb of futurity, both being equally correct. Then the above poetry will have to be re-written
as follows:
'One far off divine event
To which some parts of the creation move,
while others move away from it.'
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