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120 :: Structure and Functions of Soul in Jainism
This very difficulty has led to the view that there is something lying between the subject and the object in the process of knowledge, and this something is the direct object of our knowledge. B. Russell thinks that. “Things immediately known are sense data as colour, smell, etc. Sensation is the awareness of the sense-data"! This sensum or sense datum is the direct object of our perception. As regards the identity of sensum Dawes Hicks says “The sensum is a particular existent but a particular existent of a particular kind. It is not a physical existent; and there is no reason for supposing that it is a mental existent; in the sense of being either a state of mind or existentially dependent on mind. It resembles physical entities, as ordinarily conceived, in having spatial and other characteristics usually ascribed to physical entities, it resembles mental entities in being private to the individual pecepient."2 H.H. Price also says: "When I am in a situation which is described as seeing something, touching something, hearing something, etc., it is certain in each case that a certain patch, or a pressure, or a noise exists at that moment and that I am acquainted with this colour, patch, pressure or noise. Such entities are called sense data, and the acquaintance with them is called sensing."3 Price also holds that the sensum is a third kind of entity which is neither mental nor physical. It should not be taken to mean that the sense data have no features, a new type of feature is assigned to them. “Sense data are neither physical nor mental but they are vital in the sense in which breathing and digesting are vital. Hence they must inhere in some sense organ... The concluson then would be that sense data are neither psychical, nor cerebral, but psychocerebral."5 This leads to the view that the sense data constitute an entity different from mind and matter both, but have some
1. B. Russell: Problems of Philosophy, p. 17 2. G. Dawes Hicks: Critical Realism, p. 48 3. H.H. Price: Perception, p. 18 4. Ibid., p. 18 5. Ibid., pp. 121 and 133
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