The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus c10.98.2

c10.98.2

What is characteristic of the Hindu scientific mind is that, without being content with the general concepts of Science and a general Methodology, it elaborated the fundamental categories and concepts of such of the special sciences as it cultivated with assiduity, and systematically adapted the general principles of Scientific Method to the requirements of the subject-matter in each case. The most signal example of applied logic (or Scientific Method) worked out with systematic carefulness is the Logic of Therapeutics in Charaka, a Logic which adapts the general concepts of cause, effect, energy, operation, etc., and the general methodology of science, to the special problems presented in the study of diseases, their causes, symptoms, and remedies (*vide* Charaka, Vimánasthána, Chap. IV.; also Sutrasthána; *vide* my Paper on Hindu Logic). Here I will give an illustration of Applied Methodology from the science of Analytical and Descriptive Grammar. Patañjali, in the Mahábháshya (*circa* 150 B.C.), is very careful as regards Methodology. I take no note now of the philosophical presuppositions of his philology (*vide* my Paper on the Hindu Science of Language), but will confine myself to his presentation of the Applied Logic of Descriptive and Analytical Grammar. The sentence is the unit of speech, as every Hindu philologer contends, but the first business of Analytical Grammar is to analyse the sentence into its significant parts and their coherent relations to one another.