Vedic Law Introspection Of Legal Cause And Effect With Regards To Raw Matter In Legal Application

By Author: Premkumar Nadarajan.
Total Articles: 26
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Matter, so far from constituting the ultimate Reality, cannot reasonably be thought of as
existing at all without intellect; and that we cannot explain the world
without assuming the existence of a Mind in which and for which
everything that is not mind has its being. We are still very far
from having fully cleared up the relation between the divine Mind and
that Nature which exists in it and for it: while we have hardly dealt at
all with the relation between the universal Mind and those lesser minds
which we have treated--so far without much argument--as in some way
derived from, or dependent upon, that Mind. So far as our previous line
of argument goes, we might have to look upon the world as the thought of
God, but not as caused by Him or due to His will. We might speak of God
as 'making Nature,' but only in the sense in which you or I make Nature
when we think it or experience it. For all
that such a theory has to say to the contrary, we might have to suppose
that, though Absolute Supreme is perfect in goodness, the world which He is ...
... compelled to
think is very bad, and going from bad to worse. To think of God merely
as the Mind which eternally contemplates Nature, without having any power
whatever of determining what sort of Nature it is to be, supplies no
foundation for hope or aspiration;much less for worship, adoration,
imitation. I suggested the possibility that from such a point of view
God might be thought of as good, and the world as bad. But that is
really to concede too much. A being without a will could as little be
bad as he could be good: he would be simply a being without a character.
From an intellectual point such a way of looking at the Universe might be
more intelligent or intelligible than that of pure Materialism or pure
Agnosticism; but morally and religiously I don't know that, when its
consequences are fully realized, it is any great improvement upon either
of them.Moreover, even intellectually it fails to satisfy the
demand which most reflecting people feel, that the world shall be
regarded as a Unity of some kind. If the Supreme is thought of as linked by some
inexplicable fate to a Nature over which He has no sort of control--not
so much control as a mere human being who can produce limited changes in
the world,--we can hardly be said to have reduced the world to a Unity.
The notion of duality has broken out again: after all we still have the Absolute and the
world confronting one another; neither of them is in any way explained by
the other. Still less could such a world be supposed to have a purpose
or rational end. For our own mere intellectual satisfaction as well as
for the satisfaction of our religious needs we must go on to ask whether
we are not justified in thinking of God as the Cause of the
world, as well as the origin of Thought of it.

This enquiry introduces us to the whole problem of Causality.
Certain Sanskrit philosophers
waged war against what I will venture to call the kindred superstition of
a mysterious causal nexus between the physical antecedent and the
physical consequent;resolving our knowledge into a succession of 'ideas.' These philosophers no
doubt, fall into the mistake of treating our knowledge as if it were a
mere succession of feelings: ignoring far too much;though not
do so completely in that that other element in our knowledge, the element of
intellectual relation co-exists. Even in the
hesitation of a succession of ideas, in the mere recognition that this
feeling comes after that, there is an element which cannot be explained
by mere feeling. The apprehension that this feeling came after that
feeling is not itself a feeling. But can I detect any relation between
these experiences of mine except that of succession? We commonly speak
of fire as the cause of the melting of the wax, but what do we really
know about the matter? Surely on reflection we must admit that we know
nothing but this--that, so far as our experience goes, the application of
fire is always followed by the melting of the wax. Where this is the
case we do, from the point of view of ordinary life, speak of the
one phenomenon as the cause of the other. Where we don't discover such
an invariable succession, we don't think of the one event as the cause of
the other.

On this view of the nature of Causality we
ought to speak of night as the cause of day. So perhaps we should, if
the result to which we are led by a more limited experience were not
corrected by the results of a larger experience. To say nothing of the
valuable correction afforded by the polar winter and the polar summer, we
have learned by a more comprehensive experience to replace the law that
day follows night by the wider generalisation that the visibility of
objects is invariably coincident upon the presence of some luminous body
and not upon a previous state of darkness. But between cases of what we
call mere succession and what is commonly called causal sequence the
difference lies merely in the observed fact that in some cases the
sequence varies, while in others no exception has ever been discovered.
No matter how frequently we observe that a sensation of red follows the
impact upon the aural nerve of a shock derived from a wave of ether of
such and such a length, we see no reason why it should do so. We may, no
doubt, make a still wider generalization, and say that every event in
Nature is invariably preceded by some definite complex of conditions,
and so arrive at a general law of the Uniformity of Nature. And
such a law is undoubtedly the express or implied basis of all inference
in the Physical Sciences.
But on reflection we
can see no reason why a wave of ether of a certain length should produce
red rather than blue, a colour rather than a sound. There, as always, we
discover nothing but succession, not necessary connexion.

These cases of unvaried succession among phenomena, it should be
observed, are quite different from cases of real and necessary nexus. We
don't want to examine thousands of instances of two added to two to
be quite sure that they always make four, nor in making the inference do
we appeal to any more general law of Uniformity. We simply see that it
is and always must be so. Mill no doubt tells us he has no difficulty in
supposing that in the region of the fixed stars two and two might make
five, but nobody believes him. At all events few of us can pretend to
such feats of intellectual elasticity. No amount of contradictory
testimony from travellers to the fixed stars, no matter whether they were
intellectuals of the highest character or trained as scholars of physical
Science, would induce us to give a moment's credence to such a story. We
simply see that two and two must make four, and that it is inconceivable
they should ever, however exceptionally, make five. It is quite
otherwise with any case of succession among external phenomena, no matter
how unvaried. So long as we confine ourselves to merely physical
phenomena (I put aside for the moment the case of conscious or other
living beings) nowhere can we discover anything but succession; nowhere
do we discover Causality in the sense of a necessary nexus the
reversal of which is inconceivable.

lecturer at a private learning institution ( UTAR).