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The Nyāya Conception of Universals
217
Certainly this difference of character cannot be a figment of intellect with no reality underlying it. For a fiction has no character. The Buddhist attempts to equate the content of conception with negation, which, again, is asserted to be an unreal construction. The Naiyāyika does not admit the possibility of a fiction being the content of thought. Moreover, there is no evidence of negation being an element of concepts. That a person moves towards a cow and avoids a horse, when called upon to tether a cow, is due to the fact that the cowconcept has reference to the real objective cow, and the horse, either as an element of negation or as a substantive fact, is not felt to be meant. And even when by accident the horse is perceived on the way, the man avoids it simply because he is persuaded that the horse is not the "cow', which he is directed to tether.
Jñanaśrī, a later Buddhist exponent, has given a new orientation to the theory of apoha. He admits that a concept has a substantive positive content, but the element of negation is also felt as an adjective to the positive substantive in it. Thus, for instance, the cow concept, though positive in character and reference, has a negative element, which serves to distinguish the cows as a class from other classes of animals. The cow-character, or the cow-universal as it is called, subserves a double purpose, viz., it not only assimilates the different individual animals called cows under a class but also distinguishes the latter from all that is not-cow. The cow-universal is thus felt to determine the individual cows by differentiating them from the opposite classes. “The meaning of the word is therefore neither purely positive nor purely negative with contrary logical implication, but even psychologically a distinctive concept with the element of distinction or negation as a part of the felt content. The word 'cow' is conventionally affixed to the distinctive cowconcept felt as divorced from not-cows. Though the negative element is not distinctly articulated in words it is there as a felt content none the less. Just as the concept of 'blue-lotus' to which the word 'indivara' is affixed by convention is a complex of blue and lotus and the blue is felt as much as the lotus in one sweep, so in the case of such expression as 'cow' which gives rise to a complex concept of 'cow-as-distinct from non-cow'..
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