________________
92
Jaina View of Life
cold, a specific tinge of pain, touch located in or at the surface of the body, rather than anything outside. Psychologists have extended the term to cover the visual data, the sounds and the smells that may enter into immediate experience. Stout further says that all recognition of sensation as of a certain kind, and all apprehension of it as continuing to be of the same nature or as changing in nature at different moments, involves a reference beyond this experience. For, sensation is immediate experience and nothing more. At any one moment there is no other immediate experience except just the experience itself at the moment.81 Sensations are genuine and factual, while mental constructs are spurious and artificial. Sensations are new, uncontaminated and untouched by those mental processes which render ideas suspect. They are not structured by perception, dimmed and blurred through detention, abridged through forgetting or artificially arranged as a result of fortuitous associations. From Hume to Russell modern empiricism has tended to regard the inchoate beginnings of knowledge in unformed sensation as more authentic than the cognitive refinement which recent enquiry provide. 89
ībā: Cognition of objects in empirical experience is not complete with the mere awareness at the sensational stage. In fact. pure sensations are not possible. As Stout says, we have hardly any pure sensations, sensations absolutely devoid of meaning, either original or acquired, except perhaps in the case of children. Sensations transcend the immediate experience because they are inseparably connected with thought. They have a reference to external objects. They mean something beyond themselves.
In this sense, our empirical experience will not be complete with avagraha. Avagraha is not self-subsistent. It involves meaning and it has reference to object. It brings in ‘īhā,' a factor
81. Stout (G. F.): Manual of Psychology', P. 124. 82. Wallraff (Charles F.) article in the Journal of Philosophy, January
1951, P. 23.
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
