ate of being, which he, in his metaphysical
and theosophie soarings, apprehends as the grandest and most
ecstatic of all.

The etymological force of the word Nirwana is extinction, as when
the sun has set, a fire has burned out, or a lamp is extinguished.
The fair laws of interpretation do not compel us, in cases like
this, to receive the severest literal significance of a word as
conveying the meaning which a popular doctrine holds in the minds
of its believers. There is almost always looseness, vagueness,
metaphor, accommodation. But take the term before us in its
strictest sense, and mark the result. When a fire is extinguished,
it is obvious that, while the flame has disappeared, the substance
of the flame, whatever it was, has not ceased to be, has not been

45 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology, ch. xxv.

actually annihilated. It has only ceased to be in a certain
visible form in which it existed before; but it still survives
under altered conditions. Now, to compare the putting out of a
lamp to the death of a man, extinction is not actual destruction,
but a transition of the flame into another state of being. That
other state, in the case of the soul, is Nirwana.

There is a final consideration, possibly of some worth in dealing
with this obscure theme. We will approach it through a preliminary
query and quotation. That nothing can extend beyond its limits is
an identical proposition. How vast, then, must be the soul of man
in form or in power!

"If souls be substances corporeal, Be they as big just as the body
is? Or shoot they out to the height ethereal? Doth it not seem the
impression of a seal Can be no larger than the wax? The soul with
that vast latitude must move Which measures the objects that it
doth descry. So must it be upstretch'd unto the sky And rub
against the stars."

Cousin asserts that man is conscious of infinity, that "the
unconditional, the absolute, the infinite, is immediately known in
consciousness by difference, plurality, and relation." Now, does
not the consciousness of infinity imply the infinity of
consciousness? If not, we are compelled into the contradiction
that a certain entity or force reaches outside of its outermost
boundary. The Buddhist ideal is not self annihilation, but self
universalization. It is not the absorption of a drop into the sea,
but the dilatation of a drop to the sea. Each drop swells to the
whole ocean, each soul becomes the Boundless One, ea