Page:A History of Hindu Chemistry Vol 1.djvu/168

18 place of the Tanmātrās in the Sāmkhya philosophy. Though the idea of an atom is not unknown in the Nyāya-philosophy (Nyāya Sūtras, IV. 2, 4-25), it is nowhere so fully worked out as in the Vaiseshika. Kanāda argued that there must be somewhere a smallest thing that excludes further analysis. Without this admission, we should have a regressus ad infinitum, a most objectionable process in the eyes of all Indian philosophers. A mountain, he says, would not be larger than a mustard seed. These smallest and invisible particles are held by Kanāda to be eternal in themselves, but non-eternal as aggregates. As aggregates again they may be organised organs, and inorganic. Thus the human body is earth organised, the power of smelling is the earthly organ, stones are inorganic.

"It is, no doubt, very tempting to ascribe a Greek origin to Kanāda's theory of atoms. But suppose that the atomic theory had really been borrowed from a Greek source, would it not be strange that Kanāda's atoms are supposed never to assume visible dimensions till there is a combination of three double atoms (Tryanuka), neither the simple nor the double atoms being supposed to be visible by themselves. I do not