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SYADVADA
95
The above are all the possible forms of contradiction that can occur in thought. They may be contradictory in reference to one another or their own contents, as is the case with the compound forms, especially the seventh. It will be noticed that the first three of these forms are simple judgments or predications, and the remaining four, their compounds, or combinations, formed by combining the simple statements in different ways.
The first three are also the possible modes of predication in human speech ; for wher, talking we only talk about some thing or object, and in talking about an object or thing we either affirm something about it or deny something with reference to it, or say that it is incomprehensible altogether, which means that it presents, at one and the same time, the two contrary aspects of existence and non-existence, which make it impossible absolutely either to affirm or deny its being. To illustrate, the world is unperishing and eternal with reference to its substances ; it is perishing and non-eternal with reference to the forms that the substances assume from time to time; and it is incomprehensible, or rather indescribable, when taken into consideration with respect to its dual constituents, namely, substance and form, both. For, when we think of both substance and form at the same time the world presents to the view both perishability as well as unperishingness at once, and as there is no word in our language except indescribability that can represent the existence-non-existence thought that rises uppermost in the mind at the time, we must say that it is indescribable. These three--affirmance, denial and indescribability--then, are the three simple forms of predication in human speech. Their combinations give rise to four other forms which have been enumerated at numbers 4 to 7 in the list given above.
It may be pointed out that the distinction between simultaneous affirmance and denial and in what is put down as affirmance+denial is rather important; for in the former the view is held simultaneously from both the standpoints (e.g., the reference to substance and form in the example of the world), while in the latter there is a summing up only of the results obtained by viewing things successively from the two view-points.
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