HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN INDIA 61 law-makers who insist on abject surrender to the fundamentals of regimented religion—an assorted heap of religious and quasi-religious ideas and attitudes with no scientific significance whatsoever" (p209). D P Chattopadhyaya's interpretation of the facts consists in asserting that "anything found in the medical campilation in its present form, therefore, cannot be taken on its face value", and "alien elements" are in the nature of "ransom offered to the counter-ideology" to evade the censorship of law-givers. Counter-ideology is denned to mean the "ideological requirement of regimented religions going bluntly against that of science". So strong is the idea of there being a "pure science" that he considers all that is alien as "super-imposed". This is the theme that he had earlier argued in Science and Society in Ancient India. He had asserted that medicine in ancient India was "the only discipline that promises to be fully secular and contains clear potentials of the modern understanding of natural science (pp 3-4, emphasis added). Ascribing to medicine in ancient India "full status of science", he suggested that the physicians of ancient India were following the methodology of modern science. "Discarding scripture-orientation, they insist on the supreme importance of direct observation of natural phenomena and on the technique of a rational processing of the empirical data. They go even to the extent of claiming that the truth of any conclusion thus arrived at is to be tested ultimately by the criterion of practice" {Science and Society, p 7). This kind of explanation, in our veiw, overstates the case for pure science or materialism in ancient India because it does not give adequate attention to the fact that congnition both scientific and philosophical is a social activity that historically has witnessed qualitatively distinct levels of maturity and achievement. The entire 'super-imposition5 approach treats the growth of materialist thinking and the development of natural science, to which it is closely related, as a simple process and attempts to read in antiquity an awareness of science that is specifically a product of modern times, of a level of development of social and practical life that enormously enriched conceptualisation. Naive or spontaneous materialism, reflected in the science of antiquity, tried to answer questions, both social and natural, in terms of fragmentary knowledge and observation in opposition to blind faith, but the fact that speculation held it together cannot be overlooked. As such, while its important contribution in providing prerequisites for later forms of materialism cannot be denied, it has to be demarcated from the latter. It is the process of evolution of knowledge through an interaction of naive materialism and speculation that gives rise to contradictory elements present in the early history of social thought—the contradiction between faith and knowledge (in some measure it persists till today). That is why involuntary admissions of the truth of materialism are found in a number of idealist thinkers of the rime just as involuntary