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The Jaina Philosophy of Non-Absolutism
near from another point of view. In the absence of an absolute criterion we cannot legitimately place confidence in any one of our cognitions that are seen to vary with the relative distance of the observer. The contents of perception from a distance of one foot are seen to vary in degrees of distinctness from those of a perception from a yard's distance. Are all these perceptions to be condemned as false? Or is one among them to be regarded as the true perception? The former alternative is untenable as it makes all our theoretical and practical activity impossible. The second altenative, too, does not afford any advantage as it leaves no criterion by which one can pick out the privileged one from among the series of perceptions under consideration. If verification be the criterion, that also does not help one to pick and choose. All the members of the series of perceptions, that a man can have of an object as he app.oaches nearer and nearer to it, should have an equal claim to truth. There is no doubt that each succeeding intuition acquires an added content, but there is absolutely no reason to prefer one over the rest. The contents of all the intuitions in the series are equally verified. The succeeding intuition does not annul the contents of the preceding intuitions though there is an addition in each successive instance. A man may perceive a tree from a great distance as only an entity. But in his progressive approach towards the object, he may successively perceive it as a substance, and that of a particular kind and finally as a tree. The final intuition of the object as tree does not cancel the validity of the previous intuitions of it as an entity and as a substance, since the reality of the tree includes all these characters within it. So all the intuitions, irrespective of the difference of contents, are to be regarded as veridical.
The Buddhist has contended against this conclusion that verification is to be understood in terms of causal efficiency (arthakriya). It is unthinkable that a self-identical real can have a successive plurality of causal efficiencies. The content in consciousness is the effect of the external object. The difference of contents, qualitative or quantitative, cannot be set down to one self-identical reality. So only one cognition in the series can be veridical. But the contention does not help us from our previous difficulty of the impossibility of decision and choice. If the
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