out one not of a corporeal,
but of an impersonal kind. Its trinity is the Past, the Present, the
Future. For the sake of aiding our thoughts, it images the Past with his
hands folded, since he has attained to rest, but the others with their
right hands extended in token of activity. Since he has no God, the
Buddhist cannot expect absorption; the pantheistic Brahmin looks forward
to the return of his soul to the Supreme Being as a drop of rain returns
to the sea. The Buddhist has no religion, but only a ceremonial. How can
there be a religion where there is no God?

[Sidenote: nor a providential government,]

[Sidenote: but refers all events to resistless law.]

[Sidenote: Doubts the actual existence of the visible world.]

In all this it is plain that the impersonal and immaterial predominates,
and that Gotama is contemplating the existence of pure Force without any
association of Substance. He necessarily denies the immediate
interposition of any such agency as Providence, maintaining that the
system of nature, once arising, must proceed irresistibly according to
the laws which brought it into being, and that from this point of view
the universe is merely a gigantic engine. To the Brahman priesthood such
ideas were particularly obnoxious; they were hostile to any
philosophical system founded on the principle that the world is governed
by law, for they suspected that its tendency would be to leave them
without any mediatory functions, and therefore without any claims on the
faithful. Equally does Gotama deny the existence of chance, saying that
that which we call chance is nothing but the effect of an unknown,
unavoidable cause. As to the external world, we cannot tell how far it
is a phantasm, how far a reality, for our senses possess no trustworthy
criterion of truth. They convey to the mind representations of what we
consider to be external things, by which it is furnished with materials
for its various operations; but, unless it acts in conjunction with the
senses, the operation is lost, as in that absence which takes place in
deep contemplation. It is owing to our inability to determine what share
these internal and external conditions take in producing a result that
the absolute or actual state of nature is incomprehensible by us.
Nevertheless, conceding to our mental infirmity the idea of a real
existence of visible nature, we may consider it as offering a succession
of impermanent forms, and as exhibiting an