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PREFACE
XV
the word signifies. What he meant was that which could not be fully known, not that which was wholly unknowable ; for the mere fact that we know that there is a thing, however unknowable be its attibutes, removes it from the category of the unknowable or unknown and puts it in that of the known. The Jaina method is calculated to overcame this difficulty. It maintains that full knowledge of a thing is possible only when it has been looked at from all the different points of view which exhaust the categories of knowledge. For instance, to know merely what a thing is, is not enough ; we ought also to know what it is not. But as we are not here concerned with the Saptabhangi, we need not tarry to describe it any further.
It only remains to be added that the Key of Knowledge does not blindly follow the teaching of any particular sector creed, not even of Jainism to which sublime and noble faith the author has the privilege of belonging by a happy incident of birth. The views set out herein are based on a study of the nature of things, and the interpretation of the scriptures of some of the prevailing religions has been undertaken only to show that the impartial conclusions of Reason are precisely those which have been set before men in the form of doctrines and myths.
The reader is, however, requested to bear in mind that the author's profound admiration for the wisdom of the ancients compared with which the much boasted knowledge of the moderns is but a mere smattering, does not allow him to launch this book into the world except with the sincerely-felt observation that whatever is beautiful, grand or sublime in the following pages comes from the sages of the past, and all the rest which is wrong and ugly is his.
in dealing with the basic principles of religion it was not
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