The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c12.18

c12.18

On the means of proof the later text gives little new light: the appeal to the evidence of scripture is far more frequent than might be expected in a system which lays such great stress on reasoning, but this appeal is accepted in the *Kārikā*, and there is not the slightest reason to assume* that the term Āptavacana, which is the normal designation of this branch of proof, ever meant merely skilled instruction. But a real advance is made on the *Kārikā* in the assigning of a definite character to space and time, which are made to be qualities of nature regarded as a unity, and to be eternal and all-present. In the empiric world both appear as limited, and are explained in a quite inconsistent way by origination from the ether through its conditioning by the masses of corporeal nature, on the one hand, in the case of space, and by the movement of the heavenly bodies in the case of time. The first conception is no doubt superior to that of the Vedānta, which produces space from the Ātman, but it is not much superior to the view of the Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika, which call space and time substances,† nor in any of the cases is the real problem of either space or time seriously faced or realized.