The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus c10.38

c10.38

But even the Pañchakaraní is no sufficient answer to the question with which we started. The Pañchakáraṇí is only a method; it shows only how in a particular case the relation of cause and effect is to be established (प्रतिबन्धग्रहोपाय). But we want more than this—we require a warrant for the process. The Buddhists therefore supply the following proof of the Method: Doubt is legitimate, but there is a limit to doubt. When doubt lands you in an unsettlement of a fundamental ground of practice, and would thus annul all practical exercise of the will, the doubt must cease; else the doubt would be suicidal or sophistical. In this particular case, when the Pañchakáraní is satisfied, the antecedent in question must be the cause, for there is no other antecedent to serve as cause; the proof is indirect but rigid. If this be not the cause, there is no cause of the phenomenon. It was not, and it begins to be, without a cause; which would be a contradiction of the rational ground of all practice, for all volitional activity proceeds by implication on the principle of causality. If things could happen without a cause, all our motives to action would be baffled. The link between a presentation and the instinctive volitional reaction would snap, and the circuit of consciousness would be left incomplete. In fact, the Buddhists go farther; they hold causal efficiency (अर्थक्रिया) to be of the essence of empirical (relative) Reality. The proof of the Joint Method of Difference, then, lies in a strict application of the principle of causality in its negative form (viz., there can be no phenomenon without a cause), and the truth of this last is guaranteed by the same ultimate criterion of empirical (relative) Reality as the truth of Perception itself, viz. the correspondence between the rational and the practical activity of the self.