iii. ch. 28:
Acquisition de la Delivrance, ch. 31.

Marche de l'ame individuelle. "Highest nature wills the capture;
'Light to light!' the instinct cries; And in agonizing rapture
falls the moth, and bravely dies. Think not what thou art,
Believer; think but what thou mayst become For the World is thy
deceiver, and the Light thy only home." 49

The Western mind approaches the subject of death negatively,
stripping off the attributes of finite being; the Eastern mind,
positively, putting on the attributes of infinite being. Negative
acts, denying function, are antipathetic, and lower the sense of
life; positive acts, affirming function, are sympathetic, and
raise the sense of life. Therefore the end to which those look,
annihilation, is dreaded; that to which these look, Nirwana, is
desired. To become nothing, is measureless horror; to become all,
is boundless ecstasy.

49 Milnes, Palm Leaves.

CHAPTER VII.

PERSIAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.

THE name of Zoroaster is connected, either as author or as
reviser, with that remarkable system of rites and doctrines which
constituted the religion of the ancient Iranians, and which yet
finds adherents in the Ghebers of Persia and the Parsees of India.
Pliny, following the affirmation of Aristotle, asserts that he
flourished six thousand years before Plato. Moyle, Gibbon, Volney,
Rhode, concur in throwing him back into this vast antiquity.
Foucher, Holty, Heeren, Tychsen, Guizot, assign his birth to the
beginning of the seventh century before Christ. Hyde, Prideaux, Du
Perron, Kleuker, Herder, Klaproth, and others, bring him down to
about a hundred and fifty years later. Meanwhile, several weighty
names press the scale in favor of the hypothesis of two or three
Zoroasters, living at separate epochs. So the learned men differ,
and the genuine date in question cannot, at present at least, be
decided. It is comparatively certain that, if he was the author of
the work attributed to him, he must have flourished as early as
the sixth century before Christ. The probabilities seem, upon the
whole, that he lived four or five centuries earlier than that,
even, "in the pre historic time," as Spiegel says. However, the
settlement of the era of Zoroaster is not a necessary condition of
discovering the era when the religion commonly traced to him was
in full prevalence as the established faith of the Persian empire.
The latter may be conclusively fixed without clearing up the
fo