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Absolute Negativism and Absolute Particularism
subject for his conviction and progress of thought. There is no reason to think that concepts are untrue since they have reference to facts which may not be existent.1 The concept of humanity applies even to men who are dead and who are not yet born. But this should not make a concept invalid. The dead men were existent once and unborn men will also one day be existent. So concepts are never without their bearing upon existent facts.2 The denial of validity to conceptual thought would make nonsense of all our theoretical and practical activity.
Let us sum up the results of the epistemological enquiry. The Buddhist contention is based on the assumption that reals are particulars and universals are ideal constructs. In conformity with this assumption the Buddhist further assumes that senseperception is non-conceptual. It is deduced from these two premises that words have no relation to reals, since words have a necessary reference to universals, which, according to the Buddhist, cannot be real either independently or as elements in reals. The third assumption made by the Buddhist is that conceptual knowledge is made possible only by recollection of names and of their relations to things. Fourthly, it is assumed that the recollection of names cannot occur before the senseperception, since in that case it would make sense-perception independent of the objective datum. The Jaina denies all these assumptions and has exposed the flaws inherent in the Buddhist position. It is, in any event, incontestable that the Jaina's evaluation of perceptual knowledge does not make it necessary to sacrifice any one of our cherished beliefs and convictions. Perceptual judgment, which is felt to be directly conversant with reality by all of us, is not condemned. The Jaina interpretation of sense-experience squares with our beliefs and thus psychologically speaking, seems to be more faithful. The Jaina has also
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1. tato vikalpaḥ pramāņaṁ samvadakatvāt, arthaparicchittau sādhakatamatvāt, aniścitārthaniścāyakatvāt, pratipattrapekṣaṇīyaivāc ca ... na tu nirvikalpakam tadviparitatvät. ibid.
2. năpy asati pravartanāt, atītānāgatayor vikalpakāle 'sattve 'pi svakale sattvät. ibid, p. 37.
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