Outlines of Indian Philosophy

Author(s): Paul Deussen
Publisher: Crest Publishing House

Page 62

PSYCHOLOGY
53
been defective, until Kant came to show us that the whole question is inadmissible. You ask for the cause of avidyâ, but it has no cause; for causality goes only so far as this world of the Samsara goes, connecting each link of it with another, but never beyond Samsara and its fundamental characteristic, the avidyâ. In enquiring after a cause of avidyâ and mâyâ, Samsara and Upâdhi's, you abuse, as Kant may teach us, your innate mental organ of causality to penetrate into a region for which it is not made, and where it is no more available. The fact is, that we are here in ignorance, sin and misery, and that we know the way out of them, but the question of a cause for them is senseless.