________________
322
OUTLINES OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY
relevant object. There may be several objects not found in a particular place; but we think of the absence of that alone among them all, which some other circumstance has made us think of. The Naiyayika divides 'negations' into two classes according as their correlate (pratiyogin) is perceivable or not. The means of knowing the former kind, he holds, is perception; that of the latter, inference. Here in the Mimämsā, this sixth pramāņa is postulated as the common means of knowing both varieties of negation. The knowledge of no negation, it is contended, is perceptual. For, in the first place, no sense-contact which is necessary for such knowledge is conceivable in the case of negation. Secondly, there are instances where a knowledge of the negation of perceivable objects arises even when no organ of sense is functioning. Thus a person who did not think of an elephant at all in the morning on a particular day, may later come to realize, owing to some circumstance or other, that he did not see it then. The knowledge, because it refers to the past, cannot be connected with the functioning of the senses at the time of realizing the negation. Nor can it be ascribed to their functioning in the morning, since the correlate (pratiyogin), viz. the elephant, was by hypothesis not thought of then for its negation to be apprehended. Again the pramana by which negation is known cannot be brought under inference; for, if it is, the major premise of the syllogism will be 'Wherever there is absence of knowledge of a thing, there is-other circumstances being the same-absence of the corresponding object.' This premise relates two negations and, as an inductive generalization should eventually be based upon perception, it assumes that their knowledge is perceptual which is against the present contention that it is inference. The Prabhakaras do not admit this pramaņa, for they do not recognize negation which is its sole object. They explain abhāva in terms of the positive factors involved in it, as we shall see in the next section.
SV. p. 479, st. 18.
2 PP. pp. 118-25.
