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The Soul and Consciousness :: 119
held to be an activity if viewed in its functional aspect, knowledge is an activity of the soul with respect to its knowledge-attribute. If knowledge is considered in isolation from its substratum, it may be taken to be an entity in itself.
From Berkeley's dictum of 'esse est percipi' we drew the conclusion that knowability and existence go together. The soul has a capacity to comprehend things, and things are such as can be comprehended. On account or these capacities the relation of knowledge between the subject and the object is made possible. If an object is known by the soul, then, according to the Jaina the object is not transformed into the soul. Such a transformation is denied by Berkeley and the Jaina both. The former to avoid this transformation reduced the objects to perceptions. The implication behind the Berkeleye theory was that mind can prehend only what is mental, hence its own perceptions. The Jaina is also agreed to the view that perceptions and cognitions are spiritual affections; but, in order that they may be the perecptions and cognitions of the objects which are different from the perceiving mind, they must somehow be connected with the objects. In the same way the appearances, as Kant held, may be interpreted in two ways. Appearances as forms of our comprehensions may be looked upon as mental affections. They may also be seen as the partial aspects of the objects themselves, as they are caused by the objects. A. Chakravarti observes: "The apperarance is just the appearance of reality and the reality cannot exist apart from and independent of its appearance which is but its manifestation. The contradiction between reality and existence is but the result of mental abstraction, and as such has no basis in a genuine metaphysics.”l
The Sensum Theory of Knowledge and Its Criticism
It has been a common problem how an entity different from knowledge can determine the process of knowledge. 1. Samayasāra (Com. in English by A. Chakravarti), Introduction,
p. XXXIV
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