enquiry
after the cause is an enquiry after a more fundamental and
primary form of the truth of a thing than what appears at the
present moment when we wished to know what was the cause of
the jug, what we sought was a simpler form of which the effect
was only a more complex form of manifestation, what is the
ground, the root, out of which the effect has come forth? If
apart from such an enquiry we take the pictorial representation
of the causal phenomena in which some collocations being invariably
present at an antecedent point of time, the effect springs
forth into being, we find that we are just where we were before,
and are unable to penetrate into the logic of the affair. The
Nyaya definition of cause and effect may be of use to us in a
general way in associating certain groups of things of a particular
kind with certain other phenomena happening at a succeeding
moment as being relevant pairs of which one being present the
other also has a probability of being present, but can do nothing
more than this. It does not answer our question as to the nature
of cause. Antecedence in time is regarded in this view as an indispensable
condition for the cause. But time, according to Nyaya,
is one continuous entity; succession of time can only be conceived
as antecedence and consequence of phenomena, and these
again involve succession; thus the notions of succession of time
and of the antecedence and consequence of time being mutually
dependent upon each other (_anyonyas'raya_) neither of these can
be conceived independently. Another important condition is
invariability. But what does that mean? If it means invariable
antecedence, then even an ass which is invariably present as
an antecedent to the smoke rising from the washerman's
house, must be regarded as the cause of the smoke [Footnote ref 1]. If it
means such an antecedence as contributes to the happening of the effect,
it becomes again difficult to understand anything about its contributing

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[Footnote 1: Asses are used in carrying soiled linen in India. Asses are
always present when water is boiled for washing in the laundry.]

467

to the effect, for the only intelligible thing is the antecedence
and nothing more. If invariability means the existence of
that at the presence of which the effect comes into being, then also
it fails, for there may be the seed but no shoot, for the mere presence
of