Jaina Philosophy

Author(s): Mohanlal Mehta
Publisher: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan

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JAINA PHILOSOPHY : AN INTRODUCTION
arrive at a permanent object underlying all the different people's sense-data."
2. It is simpler than any other hypothesis. A man of common-sense can understand the theory of the existence of external objects more easily than any other theory of the Idealists. Its details are answerable to a simple mathematical treatment.
3. We have a strong propensity to believe that there is physical reality of external objects. What the plain man believes about the table is that it is a square, brown, hard object which he sees existing now and which goes on existing, being brown and square and hard when no one is perceiving it. If you tell him that it is nothing of the sort, that the squareness, brownness and hardness disappear when he shuts his eyes and reappear when he opens them, that they are not parts of the Real Table at all, and that the Real Table has no colour, texture, shape and weight, but only some qualities which neither he nor even the greatest philosopher can even imagine, he will not understand you and certainly will have no strong propensity to believe what you say. He won't believe if you say that it is like a dream where although there are no physical objects still we see or enjoy them. Because he knows that our dream is contradicted when we get up but the valid knowledge of waking life is not contradicted afterwards. Even our dream is not quite unreal because it has impressions of our waking life which is quite real.
There are other arguments as well that prove the independent existence of physical objects. The intellect discovers but does not make concepts. In a different language, concepts are not merely functions of the intellect, they constitute a 'coordinate realm' of reality. Philosophy must then recognise many realms of reality which mutually
1. Problems of Philosophy, p. 32.