ating before the rise of knowledge, and these are only inferred
later on in accordance with the nature and characteristic
of knowledge. We always have our first start in knowledge
which is directly experienced from which we may proceed later
on to the operation and nature of objective facts in relation to it.
Thus it is that though contact of the senses with the objects
may later on be imagined to be the conditioning factor, yet the
rise of knowledge as well as our notion of its validity strikes us
as original, underived, immediate, and first-hand.

Prabhakara gives us a sketch as to how the existence of
the senses may be inferred. Thus our cognitions of objects are
phenomena which are not all the same, and do not happen always
in the same manner, for these vary differently at different moments;
the cognitions of course take place in the soul which may thus
be regarded as the material cause (_samavayikara@na_); but there
must be some such movements or other specific associations
(_asamavayikara@na_) which render the production of this or
that specific cognition possible. The immaterial causes subsist
either in the cause of the material cause (e.g. in the case of the
colouring of a white piece of cloth, the colour of the yarns which

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is the cause of the colour in the cloth subsists in the yarns which
form the material cause of the cloth) or in the material cause itself
(e.g. in the case of a new form of smell being produced in a
substance by fire-contact, this contact, which is the immaterial
cause of the smell, subsists in that substance itself which is put
in the fire and in which the smell is produced). The soul is
eternal and has no other cause, and it has to be assumed that
the immaterial cause required for the rise of a cognition must
inhere in the soul, and hence must be a quality. Then again
accepting the Nyaya conclusions we know that the rise of qualities
in an eternal thing can only take place by contact with some
other substances. Now cognition being a quality which the soul
acquires would naturally require the contact of such substances.
Since there is nothing to show that such substances inhere in
other substances they are also to be taken as eternal. There are
three eternal substances, time, space, and atoms. But time and
space being all-pervasive the soul is always in contact with them.
Contact with these therefore cannot explain the occasional rise
of different cognitions. This contact must the