Hindu Achievements in Exact Science: A Study in the History of Scientific Development c15.4

c15.4

Some hypothesis of nature, i.e., of matter and energy, constituted the positive basis of each of the principal schools of Hindu philosophy, including metaphysics. The idea of a real "natural philosophy" was never absent from the intellectual horizon even of those who believed that "the proper study of mankind is man." There was no system of thought without its own physico-chemical theory of atoms, its own "laws of nature," and so forth. The most idealistic school had thus its own "materialistic" background. And the method of investigation, if not fully that of Baconian "experimental" induction, was not less fruitful and "experiential" than that of Aristotelian speculative logic.