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Reals in the Jaina Metaphysics
although both of them are aggregates of Paramāņu's. According to some Jain, philosophers Skandha-deśa should be looked upon, not as a 'half' but only as a 'part of the 'Skandha'; the Skandha-pradeśa, "not as a half of the Skandha-deśa, but as an unseparated minutest part of the Skandha. The Paramāņu is the ultimately separated minutest part of the 'Pudgala'. Of the four modes of matter, just described, Skandha and Paramāņu are the most important, for they exhibit matter in two of its extreme forms. We shall consider the nature of each of them and we take up the last first viz.
MATTER IN ITS SUBTLE FORM
MATERIAL ELEMENTS
Early philosophising began with a search for an ultimate element or elements which would explain the gross modes of matter of our sensuous experience. The “chow" is a part of the fourth book of the Chinese historical records, the "Shoo king” and in it a reference is made to a document supposed to date from 2000 B.C. in which earth, water, fire, metal and wood are described as the five elements. We have already seen how with Thales water, with Anaximenes air, with Heraclitus fire and with Empedocles earth, water, air and fire were the elementary reals. European thinkers of the middle ages generally stuck to this Greek doctrine of elements, so much so, that when Parcelsus in the sixteenth century asserted that sideric salts, sulphur and mercury were the three elementary principles, Boyle indignantly wrote: “Aristotle's hypothesis had not been called in question till in the last century Parcelsus and a few other sooty empiricks ... having their eyes darkened and their brains troubled with the smoke of their furnaces, began to rail at the Peripatetick doctrine which they were too illiterate to understand and to tell the credulous world that they could see the three ingredients in mixed bodies, which, to gain themselves the repute
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