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SOME PROBLEMS IN JAINA PSYCHOLOGY
into immediate experience. Stout further says that all recognition of sensation as of a certain kind, and all apprehension of it as continuing to be of the same nature or as changing in nature at different moments, involves a reference beyond this experience. For, sensation is immediate experience and nothing more. At any one moment there is no other immediate experience except just the experience itself at the moment.63 Sensations are genuine and factual, while mental constructs are spurious and artificial. Sensations are new, uncontaminated and untouched by those mental processes which render ideas suspect. They are not structured by perception, dimmed and blurred through detention, abridged through forgetting or artificially arranged as a result of fortuitous associations. From Hume to Russell, modern empiricism has tended to regard the inchoate beginnings of knowledge in unformed sensation as more authentic than the cognitive refinement which recent enquiry provides. 64
The Jainas have raised another problem regarding the subdivision of the stages in avagraha, sensational experience. This is based on the problem of contact of the sense organs with the object, the prāpyakāritva and aprūpyakāritva. This problem has been discussed in the last chapter. According to the Jainas, the visual sense organ is aprāpyakāri, because there is no contact of the sense organ with the object. Other sense organs are prāpyakāri. Vyañjanāvagraha, it is maintained, is essentially concerned with the contact of the sense organs with the stimulus coming from the object, gradually giving rise to awareness of the object. In this sense, according to the Jainas, there are four types of vyañjanāvagraha there being no vyañjanāvagraha for the sense of sight. The visual sense organ is incompetent to establish direct contact with objects of the external world through the stimulation.65 But, arthāvagraha is awareness itself. It is of six types --- due to the five sense organs and due to the mind which is a quasi-sense organ.66 Thus, according to the Jainas, the visual sensation does not require accumulation of the sense stimulus coming from the object. It would mean there is no mental state below the 'threshold of awareness'.
But it would be difficult to justify the view regarding the visual sense in the light of modern science. It may be said that even in the case of the visual sense organ, the light rays have to pass through the lens of the eyes and reach the retina. In this sense, there is contact between the sense organ, the eye, and its object, which is illuminated by light.
63 Stout (G. F.): Manual of Psychology, p. 124. 64 Sense---datum thoery and observational fact. Some contributions of Psychology to
Epistemology. Article by Charles F. Wallraff, in the Journal of Philosophy Jan.
2, 1958. p. 23. 65 Nandisūtra, 28, and Viseşāvasyakabhäsyä, 204. 66 Ibid, 29, and Tattvārthasūtra.
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