the doctrine also of modern science: either might be uttered in the words of the other. "Natural knowledge," wrote Huxley in one of his latest and finest essays, "tends more and more to the conclusion that 'all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth' are the transitory forms of parcels of cosmic subtance wending along the road of evolution from nebulous potentiality,--through endless growths of sun and planet and satellite,--through all varieties of matter,--through infinite diversities of life and thought,--possibly through modes of being of which we neither have a conception nor are competent to form any,--back to the indefinable latency from which they arose. Thus the most obvious attribute of the Cosmos is its impermanency."[1]

And, finally, it may be said that Buddhism not only presents remarkable accordance with nineteenth century thought in regard to the instability of all integrations, the ethical signification of heredity, the lesson of mental evolution, the duty of moral progress, but it also agrees with science in repudiating equally

[1. Evolution and Ethics.]

our doctrines of materialism and of spiritual. ism, our theory of a Creator and of special creation, and our belief in the immortality of the soul. Yet, in spite of this repudiation of the very foundations of Occidental religion, it has been able to give us the revelation of larger religious possibilities,--the suggestions of a universal scientific creed nobler than any which has ever existed. Precisely in that period of our own intellectual evolution when faith in a personal God is passing away,--when the belief in an individual soul is becoming impossible,--when the most religious minds shrink from everything that we have been calling religion,--when the universal doubt is an ever-growing weight upon ethical aspiration,--light is offered from the East. There we find ourselves in presence of an older and a vaster faith,--holding no gross anthropomorphic conceptions of the immeasurable Reality, and denying the existence of soul, but nevertheless inculcating a system of morals superior to any other, and maintaining a hope which no possible future form of positive knowledge can destroy. Reinforced by the teaching of science, the teaching of this

more ancient faith is that for thousands of years we have been thinking inside-out and upside-down. The only reality is One;--all that we have taken for Substance is only Shadow;--the physical is the unreal;--and the outer-man is the ghost.

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