sense or reason supplies. The Buddha is no mere man, as other men are, to the countless millions who have believed on him, but a great being who, moved with compassion for mankind, left the glory he had among the gods to redeem the world by his "most excellent law" and his perfect example. It is not the philanthropic philosopher, but the legendary Saviour, who had lived in the hearts of his votaries for so many ages, calling up in them some image, however faint, of himself; some reflection, however dim, of his unearthly majesty.

Schopenhauer's version of Buddhism leaves out this superhuman ideal round which it centres : leaves out, too, its metaphysics, upon which its noble and severe morality depends. For those metaphysics Schopenhauer substitutes speculations still more vain, fantastic, and arbitrary. The doctrines of Karma and Transmigration may be dark and difficult enough; but they are rational and winning beside Schopenhauer's Will theory. His fundamental conception of a púous without a vous involves, theoretically, an absurdity which Aristotle has unanswerably pointed out; while its practical effect would be to overthrow the only bases upon which any ethical system has ever existed in the world as a living power. It is a simple fact that every code of morals by which the unruly wills and affections of men have been

1 See chapters 3 and 4 of the first book of the Metaphysica.

CHAP. I.] THE BUDDHA AND SCHOPENHAUER.

1

35

governed has derived its sanctions from the invisible, the supersensual. And so the corner-stone of the Buddha's teaching is that there rules in the universe a supremely just law, "a power not ourselves, a stream of tendency that makes for righteousness." And it is to man's conscience, free will, and instinct of retribution that he appeals when he preaches the "Five Aversions obligatory on all men," and "the Six Transcendent Virtues whereby a man passes to the other shore.”2 Το Schopenhauer all this is the idlest of verbiage. The more closely the Buddha's system is compared with his, the more radical will their difference be seen to be. The one unfolds the royal law of universal pity, the other proclaims, by way of gospel, the utter despicability of mankind. The one law raised woman to an elevation never before attained by her in the oriental world: the other degrades her to a merely noxious animal. The one is the widest emancipatory movement the human race has ever known: the other issues in the despotism of sheer force. The one teaches that a man is what he does the other that a man is what he eats. "The words of the Buddha are holy words ;"3 the

1 Not to kill, not to steal, not to commit adultery, not to lie, not to become intoxicated.

2 Almsgiving, charity, purity, patience, courage, and wisdom shown in contemplation and science.

3 Chinese translator of the Dhammapada. See Beal's Dhammapada, p. 30.

mouth of the Apostle of modern Pessimism is full of cursing and bitterness: the doctrines of the Gotama are the purest emanations of Aryan religious thought: the speculations of Schopenhauer issue in atheistic materialism. This may seem a hard saying regarding a system in which the idealistic view of the world is made a leading principle, and materialism is refuted—successfully refuted--in so many words. But the fact remains that whoever heartily accepts Schopenhauer will find himself, like Professor Huxley and Professor Tyndall, expressing an universal nescience in terms of materialism. Now it is easy to forget-I had almost said to burke-the nescience, but impossible not to be more and more affected by the materialism. In the great masters, materialism may have its

1 It is matter of much surprise to me that so many accomplished scholars have spoken of Buddhism as atheistic. It seems to me to be clear from the canonical books that Gotama, a Hindu of the Hindus, recognised all the innumerable deities of the Brahminical Pantheon; and his followers have adopted, or at the least have respected, the gods of the countries they have evangelised. I cannot help thinking that when Buddhism is called Atheistic, all that is meant is that it does not possess the conception of the personal creative God of Monotheism. This is undoubtedly true. Buddhism, like all Aryan religions, is Pantheistic, with at the least a tendency to Acosmism, and the notion of creation is foreign to the Aryan mind; there is, I believe, no word, either in Sanskrit or Pâli, which properly expresses it. The conception of emanation takes its place. Fichte maintains that "the arrangement of the moral sentiments and relations, that is, the moral order of the universe, is God," and this seems pretty much to express the Buddhistic view of the Supreme Power ruling over gods and men. Compare Lord Tennyson's verses The Higher Pantheism.

CHAP. I.] SIGNIFICANCE OF SCHOPENHAUERISM. 37

subtleties and graces not its own. In the multitude it speedily sinks to its proper level and becomes a crude disbelief in whatever lies out of the senses' grasp; which disbelief, appearing in a positive form, is the ancient doctrine that ginger is hot in the mouth, or what Mr. Carlyle has called Pig Philosophy.

It is as a sign of the times, then, rather than on account of any intrinsic merits which it possesses, that Schopenhauerism deserves our attention. It is curious and significant that the latest word of Western speculative thought should be of this kind; that it should account of human life, not only as not worth living, but as supremely and irremediably evil; that it should explain the universe as the sport of a malign, irrational power, and hold out annihilation as the only hope of humanity. Still such is the fact. What is its meaning?

One great note of the modern world is its intense self-consciousness. It is a characteristic which specially distinguishes it both from classical antiquity and medieval Christendom. Ancient Greece and Rome hated and proscribed the Ego, and-what is more important for my present purpose the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, although recognising the supreme value of the individual soul, and addressing itself primarily to the individual conscience, yet by no means left men in

introspective subjectivity, a chaos of disconnected atoms, but drawing them together by the strongest principle of cohesion the world has ever known, a belief in a divine fraternity, worked, according to the Evangelical similitude, as leaven upon the mass of humanity. The conception of the family, the gens, which had been the unit of archaic society, remained, although enlarged and spiritualised. The Catholic Church was the Christian family, a gens sancta, and its members were domestici Dei. The great thought by which Christendom was permeated and knit together was the thought of God, the beginning and final end of each soul, but apprehended in the household of faith in which each soul had its fellowship of sacred things. And more than this, participation in religious rites was the great tie, also, of associations whose characters were most distinctly secular, such as military orders, municipal corporations, and trade guilds. This, then, was the organisation of human society in the Middle Ages-an organisation based on the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of Christians as the great objective facts of life. And this organisation remained long after the medieval period had closed. "Dieu seul est le lien de notre société," Malebranche could still write in the seventeenth century. The whole tendency of what is specifically denominated "modern thought," whether as formulated in the eighteenth century or in the nineteenth, has been to eliminate the idea of God.