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who has no proper self, is not logically distinguishable from what is not reason, from what is not God. But in describing a system we have no right to represent it as being what we hold it ought logically to have been. Pantheism may, like polytheism, be logically bound either to rise to theism or to sink to atheism, but it is, for all that, neither theism nor atheism.

Hence I maintain that although Buddhism should be logically resolvable into atheism, although its fundamental principles should be shown logically to involve atheism, Buddhists are not to be described as atheists. Even millions of men may stultify themselves and accept a creed the fundamental principles of which involve monstrous consequences which few, if any, of its adherents deduce from them. It is clear and certain that the adherents of Buddhism are, as a rule, not atheists in any sense which shows that the human heart can dispense with belief in Divine agency. Their Buddhism does not prevent their believing in many gods, and this at once puts them on a level with polytheists. Besides, Buddha is regarded by them as a god. When Saint-Hilaire denies that they have deified Buddha, he maintains a position which is contradicted by every Buddhist writing and by every Buddhist believer in the world, unless he means that they have not invested him with all the attributes of the true

God, which is what no one, of course, ever thought of asserting that they had done. It is incontestable, indeed, that they suppose Buddha to have been once, or rather to have been often, a man, and even to have been a rat, a frog, a crow, a hare, and many other creatures; but it is as incontestable that they suppose him not only to have been four times Mahu-Brahma, the supreme god of the Hindus, but in becoming Buddha, to have raised himself higher than the highest gods, and to have attained omnipotence, omniscience, and other divine attributes. We cannot say that they do not believe him to have been a god because they believe him to have been born, while we admit that the Greeks believed Jupiter to have been a god, although they also believed him to have been born; we cannot say that they did not believe him to have been a god, because they believe him to have gone into Nirvana, even granting Nirvana to be non-existence, while we admit that the ancient Germans believed Odin to be a god, although they also believed that he would be devoured by the wolf Fenris.

An impartial examination of the relevant facts, it appears to me, shows that religion is virtually universal. The world has been so framed, and the mind so constituted, that man, even in his lowest estate, and over all the world, gives evidence of possessing religious perceptions and emotions.

However beclouded with ignorance, sensuousness, and passion his nature may be, certain rays from a higher world reach his soul. However degraded and perverted it may be, there remains a something within it which the material and the sensuous cannot satisfy, and which testifies that God is the true home of the Spirit.1

1 See Appendix XXXII.

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LECTURE VIII.

PESSIMISM.

IN the concluding portion of last lecture I argued that the millions of persons who profess the doctrine of Buddha were not to be summarily described as atheists and denied to have any religious beliefs or aspirations. I did not, however, argue that Buddhism was not logically resolvable into atheism, or maintain that it did not very distinctly involve atheism. In all heathen religions there are atheistical tendencies. In every form of pantheism and of polytheism unbelief is interwoven with faith. But there is probably no religion which comes so near atheism, or which to the same extent involves atheism, as Buddhism. It originated in the essentially

atheistical conviction that the existence of the universe is an illusion, and the existence of sentient and rational beings an incalculable evil,-in the settled contempt for nature and life, which was

the logical outcome of Brahminical pantheism, and a result at which all Hindu philosophy arrived. The atheism and the pessimism which came to light in Buddhism were latent in Brahminism from the first, and became prominent and conspicuous in various forms in the course of its development. Instead of looking at the phenomena of the world, history, and mind, as manifestations of the power, wisdom, and goodness of an infinite Creator and Father, who by means of them discloses Himself to His children, and educates and disciplines them for a good and gracious issue, the thinkers of India, even when pronouncing these phenomena to be intimately connected with the substance of Divinity, the sole existence, irreligiously viewed them as mischievous mockeries, fitted only to deceive and enslave all that was noble in human nature. The atheism and pessimism of Buddhism were the ripened fruits of that root of bitterness.

In quite recent times a system very similar to Buddhism has appeared in Germany, and been advocated by Schopenhauer, Von Hartmann, and numerous other writers. Like Buddhism, it has sprung from a scepticism which was itself the product of pantheism. It is the atheism of pantheism evolved into a rival doctrine. It has already been presented to the German people in various forms, and has acquired a somewhat startling popularity among them. There can be no doubt that many

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