the reality of the self and of other aggregates, moved onward to the destruction
of all substances and all reals. Nagarjuna attacked the intelligibility of any
kinds of relations in general; taking as the mark of reality the capacity of
causing something, he argued that the endless link of causes makes everything
unreal; causality dissolves substance. The argument was wielded not only by
medieval Buddhists such as Dignaga and Dharmakirti, dissolving substances
into a web of conceptual negations, but also on the Hindu side. Shankara
generalized the critique from causality into a critique of any relations whatso-
ever: any cause-and-effect relation implies that the relation must be linked at
each end to the cause and to the effect, and that in turn implies another relation
between the relation and the relata, and so on infinitely. Shri Harsha and the
other Advaita dialecticians employed similar arguments against the reality of
any concepts. Among the earlier Indian thinkers, the deep trouble was ex-
ploited mainly from the Buddhist side, that is to say, by a militantly atheistic
mysticism.^24 The growth of philosophical theism on the Hindu side was stimu-
lated by antagonism to Buddhism. The point at which the higher levels of the
substance-relation deep trouble are brought out, with Shankara and his Ad-
vaita followers, is the point when theism begins to acquire a presence on the
philosophical field itself. Shankara’s Brahman was not very anthropomorphic,
but it opened the gates to philosophical respectability for more explicitly theist
philosophies. Accordingly, it is in the debates of later Hindu philosophy be-
tween Advaita and the variants of theist metaphysical pluralism that Indian
intellectual life produces the most parallels to European themes.
Occasionalism is the version which the substance-relation deep trouble
takes when religious dogma presents philosophy with an anthropomorphic
God transcending both material and spiritual worlds. Occasionalism does not
arise when there is a graduated hierarchy of matter and spirit (as in Neopla-
tonism), or where spirit is regarded as form immanent within matter. Islamic
occasionalism invokes God to connect the temporal splinters of the material
world together; Christian occasionalism invokes God as a bridge between the
material and spiritual substances, now taken as coeval in their reality. A similar
complex of philosophical side-issues was discussed in the periods when occa-
sionalism was most central. For the Muslims, invoking God as a bridge was
part of a stance that no natural causality occurs among the atomic instants of
the world. Causality and contingency came increasingly to the fore as issues
at the apex of Islamic philosophy between al-AshÀari and al-Ghazali. Al-Baqil-
lani, in the AshÀarite school of the late 900s, held that there are no natural
laws; each atomic instant is uniquely created by God, under no necessity of
repetition. From this lineage three generations later, al-Ghazali produced his
famous Hume-like refutation of causality.
In Europe, the four generations leading up to Hume were energized by
842 •^ Meta-reflections