conquest of Space and Time. Wherefore it is written in the Kegon-Kyo (Avatamsaka-Sutra): "Child of Buddha, there is not even one living being that has not the wisdom of the Tathagata. It is only because of their vain thoughts and affections that all beings are not conscious of this. . . . I will teach them the holy Way;--I will make them forsake their foolish thoughts, and cause them to see that the vast and deep intelligence which dwells within them is not different from the wisdom of the very Buddha."

Here we may pause to consider the correspondence between these fundamental Buddhist theories and the concepts of Western science. It will be evident that the Buddhist denial of the reality of the apparitional world is not a denial of the reality of phenomena as phenomena, nor a denial of the forces producing phenomena objectively or subjectively. For the negation of Karma as Karma would involve the negation of the entire Buddhist system. The true declaration is, that what we perceive is never reality in itself, and that even the Ego that perceives is an unstable

plexus of aggregates of feelings which are themselves unstable and in the nature of illusions. This position is scientifically strong,--perhaps impregnable. Of substance in itself we certainly know nothing: we are conscious of the universe as a vast play of forces only; and, even while we discern the general relative meaning of laws expressed in the action of those forces, all that which is Non-Ego is revealed to us merely through the vibrations of a nervous structure never exactly the same in any two human beings. Yet through such varying and imperfect perception we are sufficiently assured of the impermanency of all forms,--of all aggregates objective or subjective.

The test of reality is persistence; and the Buddhist, finding in the visible universe only a perpetual flux of phenomena, declares the material aggregate unreal because non-persistent,--unreal, at least, as a bubble, a cloud, or a mirage. Again, relation is the universal form of thought; but since relation is impermanent, how can thought be persistent? . . . Judged from these points of view, Buddhist doctrine is not Anti-Realism, but a veritable

Transfigured Realism, finding just expression in the exact words of Herbert Spencer:--"Every feeling and thought being but transitory;--an entire life made up of such feelings and thoughts being also but transitory;--nay, the objects amid which life is passed, though less transitory, being severally in the course of losing their individualities, whether quickly or slowly,--we learn that the one thing permanent is the Unknowable Reality hidden under all these changing shapes."