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OF WORDS
in a word by memory or the intellect is not the direct knowledge that we mean by the perception of a word. The Naiyāyikas were forced to draw this conclusion by their view of the mind as atomic and therefore incapable of having more than one cognition at one instant Had they fully realised the implication of their view of the present' as a block of time comprising several instants, they could have easily solved this problem. As many modern psychologists like James, Titchener, Royce and others have shown, our present consciousness is not like an indivisible mathematical point, but is extended like the saddle-back. It has a span or duration of its own. It extends both backward into the past and forward into the future. Hence in the present consciousness we may have a nurober of successive facts, although that is very limited in our case Thus there is a simultaneous perception of all the letters of a word, although these are successively read or heard by us Hence we conclude that the unity of a word is due to the synthesis of perception and not of memory or anything else 1
i Vide Jumer. Principles of Psychology, Vol 1, pp 608-10, Titchener, Text-Book of Psychology, p), 341, Royce, The World and the Individual, II, .
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