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The Jaina Philosophy of Non-Absolutism
his own thought. He must admit that the world of experience and thought is an illusion. The question can be posed to the sceptic whether he accepts his conclusion to be true or not. If his conclusion is true, then illusion must be a fact and a reality. If illusion be itself an illusion, that is to say, if the conclusion that everything is an illusion be itself an illusion, the reality of the world of experience and thought would remain unimpeached. But the Voidist has argued that his recourse to logic is rendered necessary to remove doubt and error on the part of the opponent and not for proving that everything is void. It is self-evident that our consciousness bereft of subjectobject polarisation, which has been shown to be impossible by the proof of the unreality of relations, is not a fact since all our experience of consciousness finds it to be polarized. Polarized consciousness cannot be real, because it presupposes relation between the subjective and the objective pole and because relations as such are unreal. There is no evidence of unpolarized consciousness and so also it cannot be accepted as real. But this defence seems to be a deception. He must accept his awareness of the unreality of polarized consciousness to be real, otherwise he would not be in a position to assert the unreality. In that case the awareness in question cannot be an illusion. An illusion is corrected only if something is the basis of this correction: that is to say, there must be a real substance which is to appear as what it is not. A false judgment or a false assertion means that the predicate is falsely attributed to a subject. The that of the judgment has a what which is false. But though the what may be false, the that must be real. If both that and what are believed to be false, there is no meaning in correction or removal of errors. To take an instance the judgment 'It is silver' is false, as the predicate is not truly affirmed. The correction of the false judgment presupposes a true judgment, viz., “It is a shell.' But if the result of the corrected false judgment is no true judgment, and the implication of the correction is not the assertion of a real datum, we cannot conceive how the correction is possible at all. If the correction is not real, in other words, if the correction of a judgment is itself an illusion, the original judgment must be true. At any rate, the reality of a datum, upon which the
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