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Microcosmology : Atom
Both physicists and the Jain philosophers agree that physical universe is fundamentally interconnected, interdependent and inseparable. In other words, it is an internally coherent system.
The ideal way, therefore, to perfectly understand the nature and the structure of the physical world, is to apprehend it directly in one super-vision. Being a coherent system, it is possible to apprehend the entire physical universe in a single all-embracing experience by a superhuman observer. Let us first outline a fairly definite ideal of what a completely adequate apprehension of the whole physical reality would be.
Direct apprehension of Reality
A completely adequate apprehension of reality would be one which contained all reality and nothing but reality; it would, in the first place, be all-embracing; it would include in itself every datum of direct experience; it would contain nothing else. In the second place, it would contain all its data without contradiction as a part of single harmonious system and, in the third place, such an all-embracing harmonious apprehension would clearly transcend the separation of existence from content. To such an ideally complete experience, we may give the name, introduced into philosophy by Avenarious, of a 'pure experience,' that is, an experience which is in all its parts experience and nothing else.
Our own human experience clearly falls far short of such an ideal because our experience is incomplete in respect of its data ; there is much in reality which never directly enters into the structure of our experience at all. Again, there may well be much in the real world which never, even in this indirect way, enters into the structure of human knowledge at all Hence, our human experience and the intellectual constructions, by which we seek to interpret it, have always the character of being piecemeal and fragmentary. Perfect apprehension of systematic reality as a whole would be able to deduce from any one fact in the universe the
1. In words of Einstein, "We can know only the relative truth. The absolute
truth is known only to the Universal Observer. (See, The Universe and Dr. Einstein by Lincoln Barnett, New Yourk, 1954.)
MICRO-D.CHP
