History of Chemistry in Ancient and Medieval India, Incorporating the History of Hindu Chemistry by Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray c39.s2.1

c39.s2.1

The Samkhya view of causation follows at once as a corollary from this doctrine of the conservation and transformation of Energy. As the total Energy remains the same, while the world is constantly evolving, cause and effect are only more or less evolved forms of the same ultimate Energy. The sum of effects exists in the sum of causes in a potential (or unevolved) form. The grouping or collocation alone changes, and this brings on the manifestation of the latent powers of the *gunas* but without creation of anything new. What is called the (material) cause, or sum of material causes, is only the power, which is efficient in the production, or rather the vehicle of the power. This power is the unmanifested (potential) form of the Energy set free in the effect. But the concomitant conditions are necessary to call forth the so-called material cause into activity. When the favourable combination or co-operation of concomitants is wanting, there is no manifestation of the effect The question is—what is the aid which the concomitant conditions render in the determination (and production) of the effect, existing in potency in the material cause ? First, there is the merely mechanical view as illustrated by some commonplace examples, e.g., the manifestation of the figure of the statue in the marble block by the causal efficiency of the sculptor's art, or of the oil in the sesamum by pressing, or of the grain of rice out of the paddy by the process of husking. In these cases the manifestation of an effect is only its passage from potentiality to actuality, a stadium in the process of evolution from possible (future) existence to actual (present) existence; and the concomitant condition or efficient cause, the sculptor's chiselling, the pressing, the husking, is a sort of mechanical or instrumental help to this passage or transition.