n of
recognised mental eminence, may he now be Kapila or anybody else; since
we observe that even men of the most undoubted mental eminence, such as
Kapila, Ka/n/ada, and other founders of philosophical schools, have
contradicted one another.

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 /s/astra 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 re