Practical Path

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown

Page 18

TIIE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY.
of the pit-falls of philosophy into which almost all the non-Jaina metaphysicians have fallen unconsciously. The first one has reference to the idea of a beginning of the world process, and the second relates to the philosophy of stand-points on which the greatest stress has been laid by Jaina acharyas.
In respect of the world-process, it is obvious to every thinking mind that philosophy is concerned with the determination of the nature of things, and that the starting point of all rational speculation is the world of concrete reality which is presented to the individual consciousness through the media of senses. A philosopher takes, in the first instance, the world as he finds it, and, aided by the methods of analysis and research, reduces the perceptible phenomena to their simpler components, so that when he arrives at simple elements he knows them to be the eternal causes of the ceaselessly shifting panorama of form and shape which constitutes our universe. Beyond these eternal causes or realities, it is impossible to proceed, because being simple in their nature they cannot depend, for their existence, on any thing else; in other words, their own individual natures alone are the causes of their existence individually. It follows from this that however far back we may go in time, no beginning of simple elements can be discovered or conceived, so that we never arrive at a point in the life-story of nature when they were not. This is a death blow to the idea of a beginning, and its force will be felt by any one who seriously puts himself the question : how can a simple (non-compound) substance be brought into existence? It should be remembered that a simple