Indian Philosophy v2.c24.s33.2

v2.c24.s33.2

The student of the history of philosophic thought finds a constant recurrence of the fundamental problems, however varied their statements and however widely separated in time and place their authors may be. The problems do not alter, nor even the answers, so much in themselves as in their application. When the scientific theory of evolution discovers an orderly process of development from the crudest germ of life to the fullest flower of man, it is not the hypothesis that is new, for that is as old as the Upaniṣads in India or Anaximander, Heraclitus and Empedocles in Greece; but what is new is the experimental study of details and verification of the theory by modern science. The Sāṃkhya theory, which offers some satisfaction to a need which the mind of man experiences, is a philosophical conception arrived at more under the moulding influence of metaphysical tendencies than under the scientific impulse of the observation of objective existence. But the philosophical view of the Sāṃkhya, with its dualism of puruṣa and prakṛti and a plurality of infinite puruṣas, each unlimited and yet not interfering with the unlimitedness of the others, though existing out of and independent of them, cannot be regarded as a satisfactory solution of the main problem of philosophy. The dualistic realism is the result of a false metaphysics. It will be well for us to understand at the outset that the puruṣa and the prakṛti are not facts of experience, but abstractions set up beyond experience to account for it.