To this we reply (say the Sautrántikas): This is untenable, for if there be no external objects, there being no genesis of such, the comparison "as if they were external" is illegitimate. No man in his senses would say, "Vasumitra looks like the son of a childless mother." Again, if the manifestation of identity be proved by the illusoriness of the presentment of duality, and the presentment of duality be proved illusory by the manifestation of identity, you are involved in a logical circle. Without controversy we observe that cognitions take external things, blue or whatever they may be, as their objects, and do not take merely internal modifications as such, and we see that men in their everyday life overlook their internal states. Thus this argument which you adduce to prove that there is difference between subject and object, turns out a mere absurdity, like milky food made of cow-dung. When then you say "as if it were external," you must already suppose an external _percipibile_, and your own arrow will return upon you and wound you. If any one object that the externality of an object synchronous with the cognition is inadmissible, we (Sautrántikas) reply that this objection is inadmissible, inasmuch as the subject in juxtaposition to the sensory imposes its form upon the cognition then in production, and the object is inferrible from the form thus imposed. The interrogation and response on this point have been thus summarised-- "If it be asked, How can there be a past _percipibile_? They recognise perceptibility, "And a competent inferribility of the individual thing is its imposition of its form." To exemplify. As nourishment is inferred from a thriving look, as nationality is inferred from language, and as affection is inferred from flurried movements, so from the form of knowledge a knowable may be inferred. Therefore it has been said-- "With half (of itself) the object moulds (the cognition) without losing the nature of a half; "The evidence, therefore, of the recognition of a knowable is the nature of the knowable." For consciousness of the cognition cannot be the being of the cognition, for this consciousness is everywhere alike, and if indifference were to attach itself to this, it would reduce all things to indifference. Accordingly the formal argument for the existence of external things: Those things which while a thing exists appear only at times, all depend upon something else than that thing; as, for instance, if I do not wish to speak or to walk, presentments of speaking or walking must suppose others desirous of speaking or walking; and in like manner the presentments of activity under discussion, while there exists the recognition of a subject of them, are only at times manifested as blue and so forth. Of these, the recognition of a subject is the presentation of the Ego, the manifestation as blue and so forth is a presentment of activity, as it has been said--