Nyaya Ratnamala of Parthasarathi Misra 4.4.p1

4.4.p1

For the previous paths were crooked, resorting to great contrivance, not based on direct experience, and resorted to out of mere impudence by the maxim of 'the resort of the helpless', because of resorting to the perception-hood—which contradicts direct experience—of a cognition whose nature is conjecture, namely: 'Surely this smoke is restricted to fire.' And there is this straightforward path: restriction is cognizable by repeated observation. What then is this means of valid cognition called 'repeated observation'? It cannot be stated restricting it to any single one; rather, by whichever one among perception and the rest the frequent co-presence of the inferential mark with the possessor of the mark is cognized, that very thing, accompanied by the non-observation [of the mark] in counter-instances, can serve as the means of valid cognition for restriction. [Objection:] Surely, co-presence is cognized in various places by repeated observations, but co-presence everywhere cannot easily be found by living beings. Even from non-observation in counter-instances, an absence is cognized only in proximate counter-instances; but exclusion from all counter-instances is truly impossible to obtain, because there is no non-cognition of the perceptible [in distant ones],