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with Right Faith and Right Conduct for the attainment of what I have described here as the highest good. Our conclusion, then, is that philosophy when divorced from practicability is like a rotting carcass, inert, insensible and useless.
We must now actually set out on a philosophical enquiry.
Of course, the one burning question is : what is this world we perceive and live in ? But the form that it generally takes with the non-Jainas is: whence is the world ? by whom was it made ? and when? The Jainas object to these questions, as they are liable to cause confusion of thought and to confound the real point. The proper question is truly only: what is this world? The investigator in putting the question about a beginning parts company from actuality, and starts from a point which has never been experienced by himself or by any one else; for no one has ever seen the beginning of the world, nor is it even a possibility of mental conception, since he who will conceive it will have to get rid of the existing actuality, namely, concrete nature, before he can place himself at a point in the current of time in the past when the world had still to be born. Let a man try to do this in thought and he will soon perceive that it is simply impossible to conceive of any rational method with which to effect the total disappearance
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