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NYAYA THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
to be mortal, not because they are A, B, C, but because they are men. On the contrary, we know that A, B, C are wbite because they are A, B, C, and not simply because they are men as such. This means that while mortality is related to the essential nature of A, B, C, whiteness is not so related to them That individual men like A, B, C possess a certain essential common nature which is to be found in all men is borne out by the fact that we put together all men into the class 'man' and exclude all other animals from that class If, then, we find that mortality is related to the essential nature of some men, we know that all men must be mortal. That is, we know all men to be mortal when we know that mortality belongs to the essential nature of some men like A, B, C. But the first knowledge does not follow from the second To know mortality to be related to the essential nature of some men is just to know that it is related to all men or the class of men "What is related to the essential nature of some men must be related to all men' is a truth which is known directly or immediately, and for which we require no inference or reasoning. Hence our knowledge about the whole class is here an intuitive knowledge due to the knowledge of the class-essence or the universal It cannot be said that the knowledge of the class-essence oi the universal is got by inductive inference. The latter presupposes the former and so cannot be the ground of it. It seems to me that the universal, underlying a class of things is either directly known or never known. Observation of and experiment on things help us to find or discover the universal that is in them, but not to make or construct it out of them. And when by observation and experiment we find that the universal or class-essence is related to sometbing, we know at once that all the members of the class are related to that thing. According to the Naiyāyikas, it is the perception of the whole of a class as related to an
