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A Critique
And with different combinations of colour, etc., we have 5x2x5x4-200 types of paramāņus. Now, since the intensities of colour, taste, etc. vary from minimum one unit to maximum infinite units, there will be infinite varieties of paramāņus with different intensities and combinations of colour, taste, etc. e.g. in respect to colour, there will be paramāņus with one unit blackness, two units of blackness upto infinite units of blackness. The intensities of the qualities of any given paramāņu is subject to increase or decrease by its mutations into different states of association and dissociation within aggregates.
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COLOUR
Now, we should be quite clear about the meaning of the statement a paramāņu possesses one colour'. We have already said that an individual paramāņu by itself is never an object of sensuous cognition and we have also said that paramāņus are cognised by their collective or group behaviour only. What, then, do we mean by saying that only one out of the five primary colours can be associated with a paramāņu? It should be remembered that though a paramāņu is not an object of sensuous cognition by us, it can be cognised by a kevalin or a parama-avadhi-jñāni, that is, they are aware of the colour of the paramāņu and that is why it is rūpi or mūrta. Possession of one colour simply means that a paramāņu will reflect a precisely single wavelength corresponding to multiplicity of colour of its components. Thus, a paramāņu must manifest itself as having a single colour to a super-normal faculty as stated above. Whether it is actually so constituted as to behave in that fashion, it is for the physicists to determine.
Similarly, of the five different tastes and the two different smells, a paramāņu will manifest itself to possess only one of each.
SPARSA (TOUCH)
We now come to another important characterstic quality of paramāņu, viz. sparsa (touch). We have seen that there are two types of composite bodies (1) catuḥsparsi (those with four kinds of touch, and (2) aṣṭasparsi (those with eight kinds of touch).
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