gives the very same reason for agnosticism. Thus
he says: "If the world was made by God (Isvara) there should be no such
thing as sorrow or calamity, nor doing wrong, nor doing right; for all,
both pure and impure, deeds must come from Isvara.... If he makes
without a purpose he is like a suckling child, or with a purpose, he is
not complete. Sorrow and joy spring up in all that lives; these, at
least, are not alike the works of Isvara, for if he causes love and joy
he must himself have love and hate. But if he loves and hates, he is not
rightly called self-existent. 'Twere equal, then, the doing right or
doing wrong. There should be no reward of works; the works themselves
being his, then all things are the same to him, the maker."

This was a Buddhist's answer to the Hindu pantheism, and there follows
a reply also to the Oriental dualism which attempted to solve the
difficulty by assigning two great first causes, one good and the other
evil. "Nay," says this Buddhist philosopher, "if you say there is
another cause beside this Isvara, then he is not the end or sum of all,
and therefore all that lives may, after all, be uncreated, and so you
see the thought of Isvara is overthrown."[202] Thus the same problems of
existence have taxed human speculation in all lands and all ages. The
same perplexities have arisen, and the same cavils and complaints.

There is an important sense in which all forms of materialism are
fatalistic in their relation to moral responsibility. James Buechner
assures us that "what is called man's soul or mind is now almost
universally conceded as equivalent to a function of the substance of the
brain." Walter Bagehot, like Maudsley, suggests that the newly born
child has his destiny inscribed on his nervous tissues.[203] Mr. Buckle
assures us that certain underlying but indefinable laws of society, as
indicated by statistics, control human action irrespective of choice or
moral responsibility. Even accidents, the averages of forgetfulness or
neglect, are the subjects of computation. To support his position he
cites the averages of suicides, or the number of letters deposited
yearly in a given post-office, the superscription of which has been
forgotten. Thus, underlying all human activity there is an unknown
force, a vague something--call it Deity, or call it Fate--which controls
human affairs irresistibly.

It would be amusing, if it were not sad, to see what devices and what
names have been res