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Absolute Negativism and Absolute Particularism
determinant of the co-perception of a perceptual cognition and its object, then there would be no ground for preventing the perception of the sense-organ or its causal efficiency, which are also the cause of the perceptual cognition. It is held in defence that though the sense-organ and its causal efficiency are also the cause of the sense-perception, there is difference between an object and a sense-organ. The cognition emerges with an image of the object and not of the organ. Therefore the object is perceived along with the cognition and the sense-organ is not. Not every cause, but the cause that imprints its likeness upon perceptual cognition, is capable of being perceived when the cognition is perceived. But we do not see any logical necessity that causality should be so circumscribed with restrictions. Besides, the question would arise, why does perception take the likeness of the object and not of the sense-organ, though both are equally the causes of perception? Again, a further problem would be raised, why should the perceptual cognition copy the object, and not the previous cognition, which is also the cause of the former? The perceptual cognition is supposed to be produced by the object, the sense-organ and the previous consciousness-unit. The lastmentioned cause is called homogeneous-antecedent (samanantara-pratyaya) from which the perceptual cognition is supposed to derive its conscient character. It has not been satisfactorily explained why perceptual cognition should receive the image of the object, and not of any other cause. It is no solution of the problem to say that the reflective judgment, that arises in the trail of sense-perception, has reference to the object and not to the sense-organ or any other cause, and that, therefore, the object is the only cause which should impart its likeness to the perception. The solution begs the question. The question, why the reflective judgment (adhyavasaya), that follows a sense-intuition, should not have reference to the sense-organ or any other cause, is not answered. The Buddhist attempts an impossible task. He seeks to determine by a priori logic what should be perceived and what should not be perceived. He argues that as words do not stand in the relation of causality or of identity to the objects of perception, words should not form contents of perception. What is perceived
cause
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