is causing; but before it succeeds, all history must be traversed, all delusions experienced, all follies committed. The new Buddhism is, in this connection, so far as I can see, neither more profound nor more reasonable than the old.

We pass on to consider what pessimism has to teach concerning the chief end or highest good of human life. In the Buddhism of Buddha the series of causes accounting for the continued flow of existence or evil is regarded as of extreme importance. The nature of the salvation must correspond to the nature of the evil, and the method in which the salvation is to be attained must correspond to the causes of what makes it necessary. Hence it is perfectly natural that the discovery of the order and connection of the causes enumerated should seem to the Buddhist to have solved the enigma, to have dispelled the mystery, of the universe. The nature of the evil must, as I have said, determine the nature of the salvation. Now the evil is existence. It is existence in itself-existence in every form and aspect it can assume. This would lead us to infer that the salvation must be the opposite of existence,—must be non-existence, annihilation, complete extinction. And the surmise is too true. The reward which Buddhism holds forth to its votaries as the highest attainable, even by a Buddha, is perfect Nirvana-nothingness, the absolute void, the state in which nothing

remains of that which constitutes existence, the entire absence of sensation and self-consciousness. It is difficult to credit that men should have been able to form such a view of the chief good; and the European students of Buddhism have tried as much as they could to resist the conclusion that this was what it taught, but they have found it vain to resist the evidence any longer. With the exception, perhaps, of Max Müller, all the leading authorities on Buddhism are agreed that what it points to as the ultimate goal of a pious life is not merely a state of repose, of non-agitation, or a state of unconsciousness, as in sleep, but extinction, annihilation, nonentity. This conclusion cannot be affected by any discussion as to the meaning and application of the celebrated word Nirvana. It may be held as proved that the Nirvana on which the Buddhists lavish such superlative praises is, in their oldest writings almost always, and in their later writings very often, not annihilation, but a state of unruffled calm, of blissful freedom from anxiety, desire, sorrow, and sin. This, I think, has been nearly made out by Max Müller and Childers. But Nirvana is itself a state with stages. It may be complete or incomplete. He who enters into it is not at the end of his life. He is only sure that he will arrive there; that he will not be reborn. What is the very end? What is Parinirvana ? There seems to be no doubt that the only answer

is eternal and absolute nothingness. Were it otherwise, Buddhism would stand charged with the most manifest inconsistency. It knows no absolute god, no world-soul, no being into which the perfect man could enter or be absorbed; for every god, every soul, every being, is illusion and vanity. It distinctly condemns as a heresy the notion that man has any true self, any real individuality, or is more than a mere temporary aggregate of qualities. Buddhism, after having pronounced a sentence of condemnation against all existence, was compelled by force of logic to confound perfected salvation with complete extinction.

As to this point, however, we must be on our guard against certain exaggerations which are current. Some authors write as if the terrible negation in which Buddhism ends were one of the chief sources of its strength-as if the void abyss to which it points were full of attractions to the oriental mind-as if hundreds of millions of human beings were so strangely constituted as to hunger after absolute vacuity and thirst for eternal death. There are no grounds for such a view. What the Buddhist laity hope for from obedience to the precepts of their faith is to be born again in some higher and purer state of being than that through which they are at present passing. The Nirvana which is eulogised in the Buddhist Scriptures, and after which the Buddhist saints are represented as

striving, is not the cessation of existence, but cessation from passion and change. All Buddhist thinkers are not orthodox and logical; and doubtless many of them are not nihilists. In the popular legends there are stories of Buddhas who have come back from Nirvana; and although this is in manifest contradiction to the Buddhist creed as a whole, it is a circumstance which ought to be noted, as showing that there is a popular Buddhism which is unconsciously in contradiction to Buddhism as a theory. "In China," we are told by Professor Martin of Pekin, "the Nirvana was found to be too subtle an idea for popular contemplation; and in order to furnish the people with a more attractive object of worship, the Buddhists brought forward a goddess of mercy, whose highest merit was, that having reached the verge of Nirvana, she declined to enter, preferring to remain where she could hear the cries and succour the calamities of those who were struggling with the manifold evils of a world of change." The human heart, we may be assured, is essentially the same all the world

over.

The pessimist philosophers of Germany are very orthodox Buddhists, so far as regards the belief that annihilation is our being's end and aim. According to Schopenhauer, life will gradually be seen to be what it really is—an empty and illusive form. As this knowledge grows, the will to live

must gradually cease. Men will refuse to preserve themselves or propagate their species, and will welcome death as their highest good. Thus at length individuality, personal existence, will pass completely away, and life will be cancelled in the nothingness of eternity. The blunders of the creative power will thus be corrected and effaced. But Schopenhauer fails to give us any assurance that when this has been accomplished that power will not begin again to blunder as foolishly and mischievously as before. All that he seems sure of is that it cannot do any worse than it has done. His hope that it may do nothing at all is far from consistent with his general opinion of its character. So irrational an agent cannot be expected to act rationally. Von Hartmann maintains that after men have passed from deception to deception they will at length recognise the utter vanity of existence, sigh after eternal extinction, and seek and find it in a collective and concerted act of selfdestruction. Reason, he teaches us, will ultimately convince the will that it is better for it not to be, and induce it to annihilate itself. He does not inform us, however, in what way it is possible for the universal will to annihilate itself. Is there any dynamite, asks Dr Ebrard, not irrelevantly, which will serve the purpose? ought to know. He seems to suppose that the human race by annihilating itself can annihilate

Herr von Hartmann