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The Jaina Philosophy of Non-Absolutism
without any preconceived bias. And the results achieved by science by the pursuit of this procedure prove the soundness of the Jaina attitude and standpoint. The expression 'Laws of Thought is not free from ambiguity and has been a source of confusion of thought and issues. That these are self-evident principles is a proposition which can be accepted subject to a reservation. We shall endeavour to elucidate the Jaina position by examination of the Laws of Thought one by one. The Jaina thinks that the Laws can be true and valid only if they are laws of reality. It cannot be supposed that they are the laws of our thinking and not of the objects of thought, because the supposition involves preposterous issues. It makes not only agnosticism inevitable, but perforce deprives human thought of the faintest claim to validity. The Jaina does not agree to draw a line of cleavage between existent and existent. The subjective thought is as much existent as the objective datum and both have to be determined by experience to be what they are. That our consciousness and the modes of consciousness are known by themselves does not confer any privilege on them in so far as the question of their validity and truth is considered. The problem of truth is a logical problem and must be determined with logical means. The criterion of falsity is contradiction. If a judgment is found to be contradicted by another judgment of unquestionable truth, the former is to be rejected as untrue. Subjective experience, as illustrated by dream, is rejected as false because it is contradicted by our waking experience. There is no intrinsic characteristic of falsity. The problem of falsity is thus ultimately a question of experience. The problem of truth is no less a matter of experience and a priori logic is absolutely incompetent to deal with it. What are usually called self-evident principles do not derive their self-evidence so much from logic as from psychology. Of course our thought movement has a logic of it, but, the logic is not in antagonism with experience. Logic has to work upon the data of experience and is as much an instrument as experience is. Indian realists do not set an arbitrary limit to the denotation of the term 'experience. They would include within its scope much that passes for pure thought. The Naiyāyika under. stands by 'experience' (anubhava) not only perceptual cognition, but inferential and verbal judgments as well. The Jaina is more
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