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282 OUTLINES OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY become anything and the efficient cause is required only to determine the direction in which it is to exhibit movement by removing the obstacle in that direction. As analogous to this, we may think of water stored up in a reservoir which at every point of its sides is trying to find an outlet and flows out only where the resistance to its effort is removed. Finally, we must point out that this view of causation holds solely within the sphere of praksti and its transformations. The self, in reality, remains untouched by it. It is neither a cause nor an effect of anything.
The most important distinction between the Sankhya and the Yoga is the belief of the latter in God. Some scholars, old as well as new, have tried to maintain that there was no intention on the part of Kapila to deny God and that all that he meant to assert was the impossibility of rationally establishing his existence. But this seems to be contrary to the spirit of classical Sānkhya as already observed; and it may here be added that the attempt to give a theistic.colour to the doctrine appears quite late in its history. Vijñāna Bhiksu is anxious to find a place for God in the Sankhya scheme, but the support for it even in the late Sūtra is slender. We have already indicated how the notion of God or Isvara as he is termed here came to be included in the Yoga; and it is therefore only loosely related to the doctrine. The very sūtras in which it is postulated in Patañjali's work stand disconnected with the rest of the work.3 As conceived here, he is a puruşa like others, though a perfect one. He is omniscient and omnipresent; but, unlike the Vedāntic Isvara, he is external to matter (prakrti) as well as to the individual selves (puruşas). In other words, he is not the Absolute and in this he resembles the Nyāya-Vaiseșika God (p. 242), the chief difference being in the part they play in shaping the world owing to the difference in the conception in the two doctrines of the material out of which it is shaped. The only argument adduced by Patañjali in support of his theistic position is the existence in our experience of a graded scale of knowledge, wisdom, etc., which, he supposes, points to
* YS. iv. 3. See SPB. i. 92-8; v. 2-12; SS. PP. 302-4. 3 YS. i. 23-9. Cf. ERE. vol. xii. p. 831.
