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CHAPTER VII
Jain Education International
B.
+1.2
RELATIONS
It has been observed more than once that a relation is possible, if the terms are both identical with and different from each other. Relation cannot hold between absolutely different, or between absolutely identical facts. Identity and difference both are the presupposition of relation. Absolute identity would annul the duality of the terms and make them one self-identical entity. A self-identical entity is a unit, which is self-sufficient so far as its independent being is concerned, and as such it does not require any internal or external relation for its being. An internal relation would have been necessary, had the real actually broken up into differents. But that is ex hypothesi denied in the assumption of absolute identity. A relation is also not possible, far less necessary, between two terms, which are absolutely distinct and different. Now two reals, which are absolutely independent of each other in respect of their genesis, being and cognition, cannot be supposed to bear a relation to each other. They are unrelated and separate facts. It would be a travesty of fact, if not of logic, to think unrelatedness or separation to be itself a relation, as the logical form of predication might suggest. The logical relation of unrelatedness involved in subject-predicate form is only a conceptual relation, which is necessitated by the exigency of our thinking them together. It is the subject who thinks of the two terms and in the act of thinking superposes a relation upon them. Such a relation is ideal, conceptual or subjective. The opponent's denial of relation has reference to objective relation, and if a logician were to find a contradiction in this denial, he would be guilty of sophistry or lack of objective knowledge or perhaps both. The question - whether the totality of existents is only an ideational aggregate without objective nexus among them, or a system of reals with a connective link running through them all is a grand problem of philosophy, which will engage our thought in the next chapter. We are here concerned with a less ambitious problem, firstly,
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