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LATER BUDDHISTIC SCHOOLS
213 every one of them will have to be eternal-a conclusion which is accepted by none.
This conception of reality is criticized in several ways by the exponents of the other Indian systems. If everything be a flux and is being continually renovated, no recognition would be possible. The Buddhist meets this objection, as briefly remarked before (p. 145), by explaining away recognition. It is according to him not a single piece of knowledge at all, but a compound of memory and perception; and what we apprehend in it is not one object as we commonly assume, but two distinct ones though both are members of the same series. How can the same object, he asks, appear in two different temporal settings?. In other words, the things in the two moments are only similar, and similarity is mistaken for identity in recognition. He admits that our feeling, then, is that we perceive the same thing which we did once before, as is implied in the conative response resulting from recognition; but he explains the feeling as a mere delusion. He cites in illustration the example of the lamp-flame where, if recognition were valid, the identity of the flame-material in two different moments, which though ordinarily assumed is known to be false, would be established. All recognition involves a reference to past time which perception is not competent to apprehend as well as to present time which memory cannot refer to. To regard it as a single unit of knowledge, overlooking its hybrid character, is clearly erroneous. The main argument of the critics of this view is based upon the postulate that the invalidity of knowledge is established by its being contradicted by other knowledge which is better supported. In the case of the lamp-flame that has been mentioned as an illustration, the gradual consumption of the oil, for example, is a sign that the flame-material is not the same in any two stages. But no such indication exists in regard to everything. Rather inquiry in other cases generally confirms the identity of the thing. What the lamp-flame illustrates is only that recognition is not always true. That, indeed, is so in the case of all knowledge. The definition of the real as the 'causally efficient is also criticized. Though
NM. pp. 459-61.
