Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c16.159

c16.159

¹ It may be noted that the theory of perception in Western Psychology is based on the assumption that the sense-experiences are entirely different in their nature from the objects which they represent. This has given rise to a number of problems in the Western theory of knowledge, which are yet to be solved. The doctrines of Representationism and of Relations are some of the outstanding issues even in contemporary thought. The philosophical solution offered to these questions to-day mainly follow two leading ideas: (1) That the interests, attention, and apperception-mass lead the mind to the object, so that its external character becomes entirely hypothetical. We do not know how much of matter or external reality enters into knowledge. (2) That there is no duality between the sense-experience and the sense-object. There is merely the world of sense-data which through analytical reasoning is divided into two spheres of sense-experience and sensory objects. Some of the Indian theories offer a solution in which the first of these views is anticipated. This is, however, systematized in terms of certain metaphysical assumptions.