________________
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY
view that time is of two kinds - eternal (nitya) and fractional (khanda); that eternal time is no more than gunas of Prakrti, the fractional time, on the other hand, is produced from Ether (ākāsa) through various limiting adjuncts.26 Still some others hold that time is nothing over and above the objects spoken of as past, present and future.27 The view found in the Yogasūtra of Patañjali is peculiar and explained clearly in the commentaries thereon. According to this view there is no time except moment. What is called time, rather duration, has no factual existence; it is only mental construction. Moment is real, duration is unreal. This has a striking similarity with the Buddhist view that moment is real, the continuum (santāna) is unreal. Let us . study this view in the words of Sir. B. N. Seal. "Infinite time is a non-entity objectively considered, being only a construction of the understanding (buddhinirmāna) based on the relation of antecedence and sequence, in which the members of the phenomenal series are intuited to stand to one another. These phenomenal changes as intuited by us in the empirical consciousness fall into a series, which the understanding conceives as order in Time. The Time-series, then, is a schema of the understanding for representing the course of Evolution. The schema of the understanding supervenes on the phenomenal world as order in Time, and hence in the empirical consciousness the Time-series appears to have an objective reality, and to form a continuum. As there is an ultimate and irreducible unit of extensive quantity (parimāna) in the Guņas or infinitesimal Reals of Prakrti, which are without constituent parts, so the moment may be conceived as the ultimate and irreducible unit of this Timecontinuum as represented in the empirical cousciousness. A moment, therefore, cannot be thought of as containing any parts standing in the relation of antecedence and sequence. If change is represented by the Time-series, a moment as the unit of time may be supposed to represent the unit of change. Now all physical change may be reduced to the motion of atoms in space, and we may, therefore, define the moment as representing the ultimate unit of such change - viz., the (instantaneous) transit of an atom (or rather a Tanmātrā) from one point in space to the next succeeding point. Even an atom has constituent parts (the Tanmātrās), and hence an atom must take more than one moment to change its position. The motion of that which is absolutely simple and without parts from one point in space to the next must be instantenous, and conceived as the absolute unit of
