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A SOURCE-BOOK IN JAINA PHILOSOPHY
515
In the modern age, Descartes ani Spinoza built systems of rationalism. From the Cozito, ergo, sum he went on to heaven and looked at the physical world with compliments, which is indeed, away from that of the common sense. Descartes split the world into two substances and postulated a God separate from each of them. He arrived at the conception of the self on the basis of his method of "doubt". He doubted everything but he could not doubt himself. However, his scepticism was only a means to an end and not an end in itself. Spinoza's task was to establish a connection between the God and the world on the basis of mathematical deduction. The result was Spinoza's substances became lion's den to which all the tracks lead and from which none returned. Leibnitz continued the rationalistic tradition and arrived at metaphysical fantacy, in presenting his theroy of monds. God was for him, the monadus-monadum. The empiricist philosopher used a posteriori and inductive methods. In the Theavatatus, Socrates explains the protogoran doctrine that knowledge is through sense-experience. English empiricism repeats the logical movement, but does not save itself from its own conclusion of scepticism. We can see the empiricist's method steadily marching from Locke, Berkeley to Hume. Berkeley denied matter and Hume denied everything except impressions and ideas. Reid, summing up the English Empiricist movement, states that ideas first introduced for explaining the operation of the human understanding, under mind, everything by themselves, pitifully nacked and destitute, "set adrift without a rag to cover them". Knowledge became impossible and philosophy could go no further without a radical reconsideration of its fundamental
position.
Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher, claimed to have brought Copernical revolution in philosophy. Empiricism faced the blind wall of scepticism and phenomenalism while rationalistic philosophy built up a philosophical fantacy in the theory of spiritual monds. Kant's was a critical philosophy. He wanted to examine
1 Kant; Works, p. 105.
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