Book Title: Reals on the Jaina Metaphysics
Author(s): Harisatya Bhattacharya
Publisher: Shatnidas Khetsy Charitable Trust Mumbai

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Page 165
________________ 150 Reals in the Faina Metaphysics is but a developed form of our sensation of co-existent spacepoints. In a way, then, Spencer attempted to get extensity out of extension and his theory is comparable to the Vaibhāșika doctrine that our experience of the oneness and the wholeness of a thing is due to our perception of the aggregated atoms constituting it. Ward, on the contrary maintains that “the feeling of crude extensity” "discernible in each and every sensation is an original one”. “We do not first experience”, says he, "a succession of touches or of retinal excitations by means of movements and then when these impressions are simultaneously presented, regard them as extensiveness, but before and apart from movement, altogether, we experience that massiveness or extensity of impressions in which movements enable us to find positions”. The theory of Ward is thus similar to the theory of the Nyāya-Vaiseșika regarding the originality and the uniqueness of our experience of Ekatva and Mahatva in a gross thing constituted of discrete atoms. AVAYAVA AND AVAYAVI The Nyāya-Vaišeșika explains this unique experience by their doctrine of Avayava. They call atoms Avayava's and point out that although atoms constituting a gross thing are many in number and magnitudeless points in themselves they when combined give rise to altogether different characteristics, Vijātīya, as they call them, viz. of massiveness and oneness. Thus when we say that we perceive a gross thing, we do not perceive the atoms, nor a mere arithmetical sum-total of them. We perceive then an altogether new thing, called Avayavi by them which is a strictly one whole substance. This Avayavī is an indivisible whole which with its wholeness is present in every part of the thing under observation, so that the perception of a part of the thing gives an immediate impression of the thing in its totality. This is in consistency with the position of natural realism taken by the Nyāya-Vaiseșika according to which our percepts have a corresponding counterpart outside us, so that our experience of oneness Jain Education International For Private & Personal Use Only www.jainelibrary.org

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