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The Inexpressible or the Indefinite
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upon. Similarly, if a word signifies one thing and not another, that should be interpreted as evidence of the definite significative power of the word and of the power of the thing to be so signified. If the meaning of a word is not known, the power is not discovered. But that does not argue that the power is absent or non-existent. It will not serve the purpose we have in view to enter into the discussion of the metaphysical necessity of powers as objective facts. Even leaving aside the discourse on the objective existence of powers, it can be maintained with the support of experience that a word cannot be made to signify more than one thing. Take the case of homonyms. Certainly the word 'pole' cannot mean 'a pole of the earth' and 'a staff' at one and the same time. The word is to be uttered or thought twice to give the two meanings. The necessity of repetition is proof enough that a word cannot signify two things, and the word repeated a second time is as good as a new word. The rule holds good of even those newly coined words which are made to stand for more than one thing. Thus, the word samyama is used by Patañjali in his Yogasūtra as the symbol for three distinct acts, viz., fixation of thought, meditation and ecstatic absorption. He might as well have used an unmeaning symbol 'X'. The crucial point is, firstly, whether the word yields one concept or more than one; and, secondly, whether the concepts two, three or any number as the case may be, arise in our consciousness simultaneously or in succession. Certainly, they occur in succession, and the word is to be recalled each time. This should clinch the issue that for each meaning we should have a different word, no matter whether the second word is ontologically the same with the first or not. The balance of reasons, however, seems to preponderate on the side of the Jaina and the Mimamsist. The Jaina position will be established if one word cannot be found for signifying being and non-being at one and the same time.
The law enunciated above that one word conveys one meaning is not found to break down even in the case of collective names, e.g., crowd, army, forest, village etc., which seem to signify many things at a time. The word 'crowd' denotes a collection of men, a unitary fact, and not the individuals costituting it; an 'army' stands for the collection of soldiers; a forest for the trees taken together as a unit; a village is the collective
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