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1914.] JAINA GAZETTE:
281 I have known to dispute it. Nor do I think it in the least degree likely that you will be influenced by my argument, or appreciate its meaning until you have seriously studied the logical universal, which this startling announcement of yours clearly entitles me to assume that you have not done.
Aristotle, when defining a true whole, remarks that if any part is modified or removed, the total is entirely altered : for that of which the presence or absence makes no difference is no part of the whole. And when one is dealing with what is conceived by philosophy to be the truest spiritual whole, namely, the Universal Self, whose parts, content or members are the many particular selves, one would expect that, in seeking for an illustration, the clue to its appropriateness would be the degree of differentiation or heterogeneousness of its parts, an organ, to wit, the members of which are its multifarious organs. But how strange to select a whole whose parts are relatively homogeneous! However, taking your crude brick-wall illustration, if it be not more than a sum of its parts, it is indistinguishable from a heap of bricks. A numerical aggregate is indeed a whole, but about the poorest one to be found. Do you get an organism by counting its parts ? Or even a whole sentence by the more enumeration of its parts of speech? Quantity is a useful category in limited spheres of knowledge, but in higher spheres, chemism, life, mind, we need higher categories, and the inadequacy of number should be evident. “But”, you say, “the assumption of a whole which is anything more than the sum of its parts is obviously a phantom ; such an assumption introduces a second, so that as well as the mass there is also an additional one, thus making two." And you think that “this is so obviously true, that it cannot but be acknowledged.” The irresistible corollary of this is that because the adequate notion of the human organism, for instance, necessitates a great deal more than ascertaining the sum of its parts, the human organism is a phantom ! An engine, a clock, a work of art, a society, a state, and innumerable other wholes that are immensely more than numerical aggregates, are other phantoms. I am inclined to
say that if the “lurking faith of early days” will save us from Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
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