History of Indian Philosophy

SR No.: 007593
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

Page 364

VIII]
Invariable Unconditional Concomitance
347
tance, or of cause and effect between the ass and the smoke. It may be that one might never have observed smoke without an antecedent ass, or an ass without the smoke following it, but even that is not enough. If it were such that we had so experienced in a very large number of cases that the introduction of the ass produced the smoke, and that even when all the antecedents remained the same, the disappearance of the ass was immediately followed by the disappearance of smoke (yasmin sati bhavanam yato vina na bhavanam iti bhūyodarśanam, Nyāyamañjarī, p. 122), then only could we say that there was any relation of concomitance (vyāpti) between the ass and the smoke1. But of course it might be that what we concluded to be the hetu by the above observations of anvaya-vyatireka might not be a real hetu, and there might be some other condition (upadhi) associated with the hetu which was the real hetu. Thus we know that fire in green wood (ardrendhana) produced smoke, but one might doubt that it was not the fire in the green wood that produced smoke, but there was some hidden demon who did it. But there would be no end of such doubts, and if we indulged in them, all our work endeavour and practical activities would have to be dispensed with (vyāghāta). Thus such doubts as lead us to the suspension of all work should not disturb or unsettle the notion of vyāpti or concomitance at which we had arrived by careful observation and consideration. The Buddhists and the naiyāyikas generally agreed as to the method of forming the notion of concomitance or vyāpti (vyāptigraha), but the former tried to assert that the validity of such a concomitance always depended on a relation of cause and effect or of identity of essence, whereas Nyaya held that neither the relations of cause and effect, nor that of essential identity of genus and species, exhausted the field of inference, and there was quite a number of other types of inference which could not be brought under either of them (e.g. the rise of the moon and the tide of the ocean). A natural fixed order that certain things happening other things would happen could certainly exist, even without the supposition of an identity of essence.
But sometimes it happens that different kinds of causes often have the same kind of effect, and in such cases it is difficult to
1 See Tātparyaṭīkā on anumāna and vyaptigraha.
2 Tatparyaṭīkā on vyaptigraha, and Tattvacintamani of Gangesa on vyāptigraha.