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180 OUTLINES OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY us not what is humanly unascertainable, but only what is not knowable through mere reason and perception. In other words, tradition stands for truths that are beyond the reach of common men, but have been directly perceived by those that were possessed of spiritual vision. For the orthodox, on the other hand, it means revelation which, if not exactly divine or coming from God, is, as we shall see, supernatural (apauruşeya) in some sense or other. The significance of the distinction is that while for the one school the realm of human experience understood in its widest sense exhausts Reality, for the other it does not. Human experience may be sufficient to understand nature; but nature, the latter contend, transcends itself and points to something beyond, and they postulate śruti or revelation as the sole means of acquiring what knowledge is possible of that transcendental sphere of being. According to the former, no such region at all exists, and to place anything beyond the reach of human powers is the same as denying reality to it. The question what sabda or tradition represents in the two schools thus resolves itself eventually into one of general philosophic outlook and connotes a fundamental difference between them in the conception of Reality.
The acceptance of Sruti as an authority in this sense, it will be seen, has its danger; for it may lead to belief in anything under the plea that it has been revealed. The ancient Indian realized the danger and has hedged in his view of it by various conditions. They show what exactly revelation as conceived in orthodox circles is, and how it stands related to experience in general and to reason in particular: (i.) The first of these conditions is that the revealed truth should be new or extra-empirical (alaukika), i.e, otherwise unattained and unattainable. The authority
We might understand by tradition agama in the one case and Śruti or, as it is sometimes styled, nigama in the other case. This distinction in the use of the several terms is not, however, strictly followed. · Cf. the expression arthe anupalabdhe-'in respect of an object (otherwise) unknown'-used in Jaimini-sútra, I. i. 5.
