- > If you look at a forest from far enough away, it can appear to be a single, unified whole. But this is a misperception, and in fact there is nothing more there than the
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- > the analogy is a false one, because atoms, unlike the trees that make up a forest, are not observable. In the case of the forest, it makes sense to say that we are really perceiving trees, and simply mistaking them for some larger whole. We do, after all, really see the trees. But in the case of an object like a pot, it does not make sense to say that we are really perceiving atoms, and simply mistake them for a pot.
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- > wholes have causal powers and properties that are irreducible to the sum of the powers and properties of the parts.
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- > Uddyotakara illustrates this idea by noting that “yarn is different from the cloth made from it, since the two have different causal capacities” (p. 107).
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- > He also argues that yarn must be different from the cloth made from it insofar as the former is a cause of the latter (Ibid.). And he distinguishes this cause from the cloth’s “other causes,” such as “the weaver’s loom.”
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- > Here we might seem to have an implicit distinction between what Aristotelians call material cause (the yarn) and efficient cause (the weaver’s loom). But Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika speaks of a thing’s “inherence cause” rather than material cause, i.e. that in which the qualities of the composite inhere. And the notion of an inherence cause is broader than that of material cause, since it can include things other than matter (e.g. a location).
