again revived and developed it in a striking manner, and after having criticized the most important notions and concepts of our everyday life, which are often backed by the Nyaya system, sought to prove that nothing in the world can be defined, and that we cannot ascertain whether a thing is or is not.  The refutations of all possible definitions that the Nyaya could give necessarily led to the conclusion that the things sought to be defined did not exist though they appeared to do so; the Vedantic contention was that this is exactly as it should be, for the indefinite ajnana produces only appearances which when exposed to reason show that no consistent notions of them can be formed, or in other words the world-appearance, the phenomena of maya or ajnana, are indefinable or anirvacaniya.  This great work of S’rihar@sa was followed by Tattvadipika of Citsukha, in which he generally followed S’rihar@sa and sometimes supplemented him with the addition of criticisms of certain new concepts.  The method of Vedanta thus followed on one side the method of S’unyavada in annulling all the concepts of world-appearance and on the other Vijnanavada Buddhism in proving the self-illuminating character of knowledge and ultimately established the self as the only self-luminous ultimate reality.

The Theory of Causation.

The Vedanta philosophy looked at the constantly changing phenomena of the world-appearance and sought to discover the root whence proceeded the endless series of events and effects.  The theory that effects were altogether new productions caused by the invariable unconditional and immediately preceding antecedents, as well as the theory that it was the cause which evolved

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and by its transformations produced the effect, are considered insufficient to explain the problem which the Vedanta had before it.  Certain collocations invariably and unconditionally preceded certain effects, but this cannot explain how the previous set of phenomena could be regarded as producing the succeeding set.  In fact the concept of causation and production had in it something quite undefinable and inexplicable.  Our 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