Religion and Philosophy of the Jainas

Author(s): Virchand R Gandhi
Publisher: Jain International Ahmedabad

Page 64

CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT
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apprehending reality is a process which takes us away from it, and the further it advances, the more abstract our thought becomes, the further do we recede from the real objective truth of things." If the Nyaya and Vaiseșika thus represent the positive side of the method of abstract generalisation, the Carvākas, the materialists represent the negative aspect. They were not far from the modern materialists when they maintained life, thought or energy to be the result of material organisation, but their philosophy made few disciples and converted none. All experience is in favour of declaring that dead matter is never capable of producing life and even the best representatives of modern physical science stand confessed of their ignorance of the real nature of matter and energy per se, at the altar of eternal truth. Even Mr. Huxley says, "In perfect strictness it is true that chemical investigation can tell us little or nothing directly of the composition of living matter and it is also in strictness true that we know nothing about the composition of any body whatever as it is." Observation has proved that every atom of matter is full of energy in one form or another. So instead of postponing the appearance of mind to the last stage of material organization as the modern evolutionists have done, it is more consistent with reason to regard it as co-existent. Nyaya philosophy regarded it as the very beginning but the intermeddling of God isolated from His creation did not satisfy subsequent reasoners, such philosophy being subversive of that real knowledge which must by the very conditions of knowledge or thought look upon thought and intelligent being as inseparable. It is in some such train of reasoning that we find an explanation of prakṛti and purusa of Kapila's Sankhya. The Sankhyas had advanced further, if advance it may be called, than the Vaiseṣikas in the analysis of matter and had demonstrated a theory of evolution, anything more entirely novel than which even the Vedanta has not to teach. They postulated prakṛti or undifferentiated cosmic matter as the etemal basis of cosmic evolution; and they definitely enumerated the various evolving stages of this matter with its