Note (return) — SA@NKARA'S INTRODUCTION (continued 2)

The assumption of the sphota is further gratuitous, because the sense of the word may be apprehended from the letters.—But—our opponent here objects—I do not assume the existence of the sphota. I, on the contrary, actually perceive it; for after the buddhi has been impressed by the successive apprehension of the letters of the word, the sphota all at once presents itself as the object of cognition.—You are mistaken, we reply. The object of the cognitional act of which you speak is simply the letters of the word. That one comprehensive cognition which follows upon the apprehension of the successive letters of the word has for its object the entire aggregate of the letters constituting the word, and not anything else. We conclude this from the circumstance that in that final comprehensive cognition there are included those letters only of which a definite given word consists, and not any other letters. If that cognitional act had for its object the sphota—i.e. something different from the letters of the given word—then those letters would be excluded from it just as much as the letters of any other word. But as this is not the case, it follows that that final comprehensive act of cognition is nothing but an act of remembrance which has the letters of the word for its object.—Our opponent has asserted above that the letters of a word being several cannot form the object of one mental act. But there he is wrong again. The ideas which we have of a row, for instance, or a wood or an army, or of the numbers ten, hundred, thousand, and so on, show that also such things as comprise several unities can become the objects of one and the same cognitional act. The idea which has for its object the word as one whole is a derived one, in so far as it depends on the determination of one sense in many letters203; in the same way as the idea of a wood, an army, and so on. But—our opponent may here object—if the word were nothing else but the letters which in their aggregate become the object of one mental act, such couples of words as jârâ and râjâ or pika and kapi would not be cognised as different words; for here the same letters are presented to consciousness in each of the words constituting one couple.—There is indeed, we reply, in both cases a comprehensive consciousness of the same totality of letters; but just as ants constitute the idea of a row only if they march one after the other, so the letters also constitute the idea of a certain word only if they follow each other in a certain order. Hence it is not contrary to reason that the same letters are cognised as different words, in consequence of the different order in which they are arranged.