Samayasara

Author(s): A Chakravarti
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

Page 31

INTRODUCTION
as is maintained by Berkeley. But Berkeley's certain assertion about the nature of the spirit is but the result of religious prejudices. Berkeley must have direc. ted his attention towards this nature of spirit. If he had done so he would have obtained a different result. "For whenever I turn my attention inwards”, says Hume, “I stumble upon some idea or other and what they call the Soul I am not able to perceive." Thus when experience is thrown into the crucible of philosophical analysis by Hume not only the external world disappears but also the supposed undoubted entity called the spirit or the self which could not withstand the logical analysis of experience. According to Hume therefore consciousness consists of successive ideas or images, a stream of psychic entities and nothing more. Belief in the spirit or the soul is as unwarranted as belief in the external objects. Belief in these instances is but a psychological habit which could not stand the test of rational analysis. The popular assumptions of the external world and the existence of a self are thus dismissed to be unwarranted social prejudices by Hume, social prejudices which cannot be accepted as philosophical truths. Thus Locke's empiricism ends logically in Hume's Nihilism according to which there is no reality except the stream of conscious ideas. As a result of this nihilistic conclusion Hume is bound to discard even the Law of Causation which is the bedrock of modern science. The belief that events in nature are inevitatably determined by their antecedent causal conditions is also taken to be purely a habit of the mind having no rational foundation. The fact that A precedes B on so many occasions creates in the mind the habit to expect B whenever A occurs and on account of this habit A is called the cause of B. Beyond this mental habit of expecting B whenever A occurs there is no rational connection between A and B. There is no reason why B may not occur after X or Y. There is no fundamental reason to prove that B will occur only after A and not after any other events X or Y. Therefore the Law of Causation which is made so much of by modern science is also converted by Hume's analysis to be a popular prejudice based upon the mental habit having no rational foundation. This nihilistic conclusion of Hume is exactly parallel to the Buddhistic conception of experience in Indian Thought. Buddhism also is a sort of Nihilism for which neither the external world nor the Self or Atmā has any reality. What really exists is a stream of momentary and mental impressions and nothing more. Thus the English empiricism practically ends in the denial of both the self and the external world.
The GERMAN IDEALISM
Hume's sceptical analysis resulted in reducing the Law of Causation only to an empty mental habit but also in rejecting all propositions such as mathematical ones which are considered absolutely certian and unchallengeable. Propositions in mathematics, according to Hume, depend upon the same mental habit which is the foundation of the Law of Causation. We have been accustomed to observe for example the angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles. Merely because of the fact that this proposition has been observed to be true in the past in all cases that we examined, it does not follow that it would