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It corrects the pettiness of the individual's search for pleasure by the search for the more indirect satisfactions of the community in the future From gross hedonism to the sense of social service in the most impersonal context such as illustrated in Goethe's 'Faust, runs the gamut of moral consciousness in modern times In the absence of any belief in revelation, intellectual intuition, pure and yet concrete reason or in any other kind of transcendence, modern thinking is inexorably led towards some kind of ethics with a psychological base In seeking an empirical ethics which would be relevant to our changing social experience, we tend to lose the element of necessity and universality which morality demands On the other hand, in searching for moral necessity in the empty forms of language, logic, or law, we run the opposite danger of having an ethics irrelevant to our social situation In Jainism we find an attempt to combine concrete empirical content with the necessity of principles, the former apperceived in terms of a sensitive spiritual discrimination and the latter provided by the philosophically understood principles of being itself There is here a union of phenomenology and ontology, of an acute analysis of moral experience with an equally thorough going analysis of spiritual being We must remember that the whole idea of an ethics independent of ontological or metaphysical assumptions has arisen, not from a deeper apperception of the characteristic moral quality of experience, but from philosophical agnosticism, religious doubt or disbelief and a worldly philosophy of life which has itself arisen partly from the acceptance of the dominance of sensuous values in common life, partly from the dazzling success of natural reason and empiricism in science and partly from the need to avoid religious conflicts in social and political life Since all these factors were more or less absent from the historical tradition of India, the traditions of ethical practice and reflection here have continued to maintain their organic link with metaphysics and religion The Jainas with a synthesizing dialectic have been able to preserve a system which is at once rigorous and adaptable to practical needs
If the Jaina monk seeks to live by a total denial of property,
