n it, and require opportunity for shaking them off and
regaining its original state. At this point the doctrine of Gotama is
assuming the aspect of a moral system, and is beginning to suggest means
of deliverance from the accumulated evil and consequent demerit to which
the spirit has been exposed. He will not, however, recognize any
vicarious action. Each one must work out for himself his own salvation,
remembering that death is not necessarily a deliverance from worldly
ills, it may be only a passage to new miseries. But yet, as the light of
the taper must come at last to an end, so there is at length, though it
may be after many transmigrations, an end of life. That end he calls
Nirwana, a word that has been for nearly three thousand years of solemn
import to countless millions of men;--Nirwana, the end of successive
existences, that state which has no relation to matter, or space, or
time, to which the departing flame of the extinguished taper has gone.
It is the supreme end, Nonentity. The attaining of this is the object to
which we ought to aspire, and for that purpose we should seek to destroy
within ourselves all cleaving to existence, weaning ourselves from every
earthly object, from every earthly pursuit. We should resort to monastic
life, to penance, to self-denial, self-mortification, and so gradually
learn to sink into perfect quietude or apathy, in imitation of that
state to which we must come at last, and to which, by such preparation,
we may all the more rapidly approach. The pantheistic Brahman expects
absorption in God; the Buddhist, having no God, expects extinction.

[Sidenote: Philosophical estimate of Buddhism.]

India has thus given to the world two distinct philosophical systems:
Vedaism, which takes as its resting-point the existence of matter, and
Buddhism, of which the resting-point is force. The philosophical ability
displayed in the latter is very great; indeed it may be doubted whether
Europe has produced its metaphysical equivalent. And yet, if I have
correctly presented its principles, it will probably appear that its
primary conception is not altogether consistently carried out in the
development of the details. Great as was the intellectual ability of its
author--so great as to extort our profoundest, though it may be
reluctant admiration--there are nevertheless moments in which it appears
that his movement is becoming wavering and unsteady--that he is failing
to handle his ponderous we