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Studies in Indian Philosophy
own, which refracts or discolours the light of nature." 1° The judgements are vitiated by individual moods and the personal factor in the constitution of the mind. Some minds are synthetic, and some analytic. Some show unbounded enthusiasm for antiquity, some others eagerly embrace novelty. Only a few can have a just perspective.
Truth has no parties. 11 (iii) The Idols of the Market Place arise from the commerce
and association of men with one another. They use language as the medium, hut they forget that words are sometimes misleading, as they are imposed according to the understanding of the crowd. We in the present day have used the word 'socialism' without understanding the connotation of the word. Philosophers have used the phrases like "The Infinite", or "The first mover unmoved". But these are Fig-leaf phrases used to cover naked ignorance
and perhaps indicative of a guilty conscience in the user.1 (iv) The Idols of the Theatre have migrated into men's minds
from the various dogmas of philosophers and also from the wrong laws demonstration. All the systems of philosophy are so many stage plays representing worlds of their creation after an unreal and scenic fashion. And in the plays of this philosophic theatre you may observe the same thing which is found in the theatre of poets,--that stories invented for the stage are more compact and elegant, and more as we would wish them to be, than true stories out of history. The world as Plato described it is merely a world constucted by Plato, and pictures
of Plato rather than the world. 18 (iv) We shall never get far along the path of truth if these
idols are still tied to us. We should free ourselves from the subjective elements in the pursuit of truth. Truth is not any man's monopoly. It is universal and objective. The philosophers and the seers from times immomorial have striven to reach the highest through the means of reason and intuition. Reason leads us to the understauding
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