associated with it.  The preceding knowledge determines the succeeding one and that another and so on.  Knowledge, pleasure, pain, etc. are not qualities requiring a permanent entity as soul in which they may inhere, but are the various forms in which knowledge appears.  Even the cognition, “I perceive a blue thing,” is but a form of knowledge, and this is often erroneously interpreted as referring to a permanent knower.  Though the cognitions are all passing and momentary, yet so long as the series continues to be the same, as in the case of one person, say Devadatta, the phenomena of memory, recognition, etc. can happen in the succeeding moments, for these are evidently illusory cognitions, so far as they refer to the permanence of the objects

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believed to have been perceived before, for things or knowledge-moments, whatever they may be, are destroyed the next moment after their birth.  There is no permanent entity as perceiver or knower, but the knowledge-moments are at once the knowledge, the knower and the known.  This thoroughgoing idealism brushes off all references to an objective field of experience, interprets the verdict of knowledge as involving a knower and the known as mere illusory appearance, and considers the flow of knowledge as a self-determining series in successive objective forms as the only truth.  The Hindu schools of thought, Nyaya, Sa@mkhya, and the Mima@msa, accept the duality of soul and matter, and attempt to explain the relation between the two.  With the Hindu writers it was not the practical utility of knowledge that was the only important thing, but the nature of knowledge and the manner in which it came into being were also enquired after and considered important.

Prama@na is defined by Nyaya as the collocation of instruments by which unerring and indubitable knowledge comes into being.  The collocation of instruments which brings about definite knowledge consists partly of consciousness (bodha) and partly of material factors (bodhabodhasvabhava).  Thus in perception the proper contact of the visual sense with the object (e.g. jug) first brings about a non-intelligent, non-apprehensible indeterminate consciousness (nirvikalpa) as the jugness (gha@tatva) and this later on combining with the remaining other collocations of sense-contact etc. produces the determinate consciousness:  this is a jug.  The existence of this indeterminate state of consciousness as a factor in bringing about the determinate consciousness, cannot of course be perceived, but its existence can be inferred from the fact that if the perceiver were not already in possession of the qualifying factor (vis’e@sanajnana as jugness) he could not have comprehended the qualified object (vis’i@s@tabuddhi} the jug (i.e. the object which possesses jugness).  In inference (anuma@na) knowledge of the li@nga takes part, and in upamana the sight of similarity with other material conglomerations.  In the case of the Buddhists knowledge itself was regarded as prama@na; even by those who admitted the existence of the objective world, right knowledge was called prama@na, because it was of the same form as the external objects it represented, and it was by the form of the knowledge (e.g. blue) that we could apprehend that the