But (our adversary may here be supposed to say), we will fashion our reasoning otherwise, i.e. in such a manner as not to lay it open to the charge of having no proper foundation.  You cannot, after all, maintain that no reasoning whatever is well-founded; for you yourself can found your assertion that reasoning has no foundation on reasoning only; your assumption being that because some arguments are seen to be devoid of foundation other arguments as belonging to the same class are likewise devoid of foundation.  Moreover, if all reasoning were unfounded, the whole course of practical human life would have to come to an end.  For we see that men act, with a view to obtaining pleasure and avoiding pain in the future time, on the assumption that the past, the present, and the future are uniform.—­Further, in the case of passages of Scripture (apparently) contradicting each other, the ascertainment of the real sense, which depends on a preliminary refutation of the apparent sense, can be effected only by an accurate definition of the meaning of sentences, and that involves a process of reasoning.  Thus Manu also expresses himself:  ’Perception, inference, and the sastra according to the various traditions, this triad is to be known well by one desiring clearness in regard to right.—­He who applies reasoning not contradicted by the Veda to the Veda and the (Sm/ri/ti) doctrine of law, he, and no other, knows the law’ (Manu Sm/ri/ti XII, 105, 106).  And that ’want of foundation’, to which you object, really constitutes the beauty of reasoning, because it enables us to arrive at unobjectionable arguments by means of the previous refutation of objectionable arguments[275]. (No fear that because the purvapaksha is ill-founded the siddhanta should be ill-founded too;) for there is no valid reason to maintain that a man must be stupid because his elder brother was stupid.—­For all these reasons the want of foundation cannot be used as an argument against reasoning.

Against this argumentation we remark that thus also there results ’want of release.’  For although with regard to some things reasoning is observed to be well founded, with regard to the matter in hand there will result ‘want of release,’ viz. of the reasoning from this very fault of ill-foundedness.  The true nature of the cause of the world on which final emancipation depends cannot, on account of its excessive abstruseness, even be thought of without the help of the holy texts; for, as already remarked, it cannot become the object of perception, because it does not possess qualities such as form and the like, and as it is devoid of characteristic signs, it does not lend itself to inference and the other means of right knowledge.—­Or else (if we adopt another explanation of the word ‘avimoksha’) all those who teach the final release of the soul are agreed that it results from perfect knowledge.  Perfect knowledge has the characteristic mark of uniformity, because it depends