Indian Philosophy

Author(s): Sukhlal Sanghavi
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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The Relation of Cause and Effect
The doctrine of causal relation being a doctrine acceptable to all the systems of thought no philosopher can take exception to it. Thus What is the cause of the world of external and internal phenomena ?", "What is the nature of this world ?', 'What is rebirth ?", What is the cause and what the nature of rebirth ?", "What are the means for attaining emancipation ?', What is the nature of emancipation ?-these and similar questions pertaining to matters practical and spiritual have been sought to be answered by every philosopher whatsoever. Certainly, while answering these questions each philosopher employs the principle of causal relation in an identical fashion, and yet the positions or conclusions arrived at are different in different cases. It will not be improper to make clear as to why that happens.
The Generic and the Specific Accounted For
Knowledge or cognitive operation is of the form of comprehending both what is generic and what is specific, No such cognition in possible where in some form or other both the generic and the specific do not make their appearance. Really, it is owing to such an appearance that whatever living beings there are manage to conduct their life-journey. Even such lower species of living beings as beasts and birds have a generic cognition of the class or group to which they themselves belong, a cognition on the basis of which they receive the needed support or help. They also have specific cognition about their food, place of residence, place of shelter, progeny and they live their life. As for the human type of cognition, its grade is much superior to the type in question. It is not guided merely by the instincts of hunger, fear and sex-urge but its curiocity and the possibility of its dev. elopment are so immense that however limited in strength it might be it develops eagerness to bring under its grasp all the three phases of time (i. e, past, present, future) and all the lands far and near. It is this mental eagerness which impels the philosopher to seek an explanation for both the forms-viz. the generic and the specific-that are experienced in an act of cogaition.
The two forms - viz. the generic and the specific - that are experienced in an act of cognition are there due to a corresponding Dature belonging to the concerned object of cognition - this general conclusion is certainly what each and every philosopher arrived at. The philosophers also did proceed to answer one question, viz. 'Of what type ought to be the ultimate cause that has given rise to the manifest multiplicity of effects spread out in space and time, a type which ought to account for the fact that two forms - viz. the generic and the specific - are observable there in this manifest multiplicity ?', but in the course of doing so they, because of each having a tradition of his own, a prepossession of his own, an inclination of his own, gave rise to a number of mutually differing idealogical trends. As to how that hap. pened we now consider in brief.
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