Page:History of India Vol 1.djvu/320

264 bodies. Pain is the primary evil, and there are twenty-one varieties of evil which are causes of pain. The soul attains its emancipation by knowledge and not by action.

The specialty of Nyaya is its development of inference by the construction of a true syllogism, which, in its Hindu form consists of five parts, which are called the proposition, the reason, the instance, the application of the reason, and the conclusion, as may be illustrated by the following example:— The hill is fiery. For it smokes. Whatever smokes is fiery. The hill is smoking. Therefore it is fiery. Logic has always been a favourite study with learned Hindus, and neither the Ancient Greeks, nor the Mediaeval Arabs, nor the European schoolmen of the Middle Ages displayed more acuteness and subtlety in reasoning, or more rigid and scientific strictness in their discussions, than is witnessed in the numerous works of the Hindus on logic.

Kanada's atomic philosophy is supplementary to Gautama's logic, as the Yoga is supplementary to the Sankhya, and therefore need not detain us long. The cardinal principle of Kanada is that all material substances are aggregates of atoms, whence the name kanāda, "atom-eater," by which he is known. The atoms are eternal, the aggregates only are perishable by disintegration.