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XX] Failure of Theistic Proofs
191 can be inferred as really has the unlimited powers required for producing such an effect. It is irrelevant to infer such a cause as cannot produce it. Also the unessential conditions of ordinary causes need not be imported by suggesting that, just as in the case of ordinary human beings there must be a body and also instruments by which they can operate and produce the effect, so also in the case of the supreme cause it might be expected that He should have a body and should have instruments by which He could operate. This cannot be; for we know that many effects are wrought by sheer force of will and desire (sankalpa) and neither will nor desire needs a body for its existence, since these are generated not by body, but by mind (manas). The existence of manas also is independent of the existence of body; for the mind continues to exist even when it is dissociated from body. Since limited beings, who are under the sway of virtue and vice, are unable to produce this manifold universe of such wonderful and diverse construction, it has to be admitted that there exists a supreme person who has done it. Moreover, since the material cause is seen in all known examples to be entirely different from the cause as agent or doer, there cannot be a Brahman which is both the material cause (upādāna-kārano and the cause as agent (nimitta-kāraṇa) of this universe.
To this, however, it may be replied that it is admitted that the world is effect and that it is vast, but it is not known that all parts of this vast world originated at one time and from one person. Not all jugs are made at one time and by one person. How can any room be made for an unknown supreme person and the possibility be ruled out that different individual souls, by virtue of special merit and special powers, should at different times create the different parts of the world, which now appear as one unified whole created by one person at one time? It is quite possible that the different parts of the world were created at different times and will similarly be destroyed at different times. To imagine the existence of one such supreme person who could create all this manifold may well be regarded as almost chimerical. From the fact that the world is effect all that can be argued is that it must have been produced by an intelligent being, but there is nothing to infer that it is necessarily the creation of one intelligent being. This infinite universe could not have sprung into being at any one moment, and there is no proof that it did so. And, if it came into being gradually, it may
| SR No. | 007593 |
| Book Title | History of Indian Philosophy |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Surendranath Dasgupta |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication Year | 1922 |
| Total Pages | 2517 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 125 MB |