New Dimensions in Jaina Logic

Author(s): Mahaprajna Acharya, Nathmal Tatia
Publisher: Today and Tommorrow Printers and Publishers

Page 141

Universal Concomitance
133
pervasion (vyāpti) is dependent on non-contingent (avyabhicari) concurrence between two facts.
While Darwin upholds the maxim nature non facit saltum-'nature does nothing by jumps', and seems to suppose a blending of hereditary factors, according to Mendel inheritance is particulate: The advances in genetics, since Darwin's day, do not alter the main outlines of his theory. The mechanism of heredity may be much more complicated than what Darwin knew and involve much of which he was ignorant, such as, mutation-rates or the various types, causes and effects of hybridization. But that merely leads to a more elaborate or different explanation of genetic variation in offspring and the transmission of ancestral traits. No matter how these are explained, their occurrence is all that is needed to permit new species to originate through natural processes of heredity and selection. If Darwin were alive today', Julian Huxley writes, 'the title of his book would have to be not the 'origin' but the 'origins' of species. For perhaps the most salient single fact that has emerged from recent studies is that the species may arise in a number of quite distinct ways.'*
According to the theory of leaps and jumps (plutasamcaravāda) there are transgressions of the general laws. One can know the particulars by means of sensuous cognitions. But the searching out of the general laws and their invariability among those particulars is a tremendous task, and the question of the universal validity of those principles is still more intractable. The universal concomitance is possible only when the invariability of the relation at all times is known, and no exception of the law at any space or time is possible. The absence of contingency in the concurrence can be ascertained only in the cases that are before us at present or within our memory of the past, but it is not possible to assert the validity of the law with reference to the past beyond the memory or in the infinite future. It is, therefore, necessary to examine the element of 'validity at all times', so closely associated with the principle of concomitance. The discovery of a principle is made on the basis of the experience that we have, although the range of our ignorance is more vast than the ambit of our experience. Under such circumstances how is it possible to arrive at the unconditional certainty of the concomitance? The principle of concomitance must necessarily be based on the experience that we have. The Jaina logicians also
*The Great Ideas, A Syntopicon, part I, page 456.