orderly series of
transmutations, innumerable universes in periods of inconceivable time
emerging one after another, and creations and extinctions of systems of
worlds taking place according to a primordial law.

[Sidenote: Of the nature of man.]

[Sidenote: Of transmigration and penance,]

[Sidenote: and the passage to nonentity.]

Such are his doctrines of a Supreme Force, and of the origin and
progress of the visible world. With like ability Gotama deals with his
inquiry into the nature of man. With Oriental imagery he bids us
consider what becomes of a grain of salt thrown into the sea; but, lest
we should be deceived herein, he tells us that there is no such thing as
individuality or personality--that the Ego is altogether a nonentity. In
these profound considerations he brings to bear his conception of force,
in the light thereof asserting that all sentient beings are homogeneous.
If we fail to follow him in these exalted thoughts, bound down to
material ideas by the infirmities of the human constitution, and inquire
of him how the spirit of man, which obviously displays so much energy,
can be conceived of as being without form, without a past, without a
future, he demands of us what has become of the flame of a lamp when it
is blown out, or to tell him in what obscure condition it lay before it
was kindled. Was it a nonentity? Has it been annihilated? By the aid of
such imagery he tries to depict the nature of existence, and to convey a
vivid idea of the metamorphoses it undergoes. Outward things are to him
phantasms; the impressions they make on the mind are phantasms too. In
this sense he receives the doctrine of transmigration, conceiving of it
very much as we conceive of the accumulation of heat successively in
different things. In one sense it may be the same heat which occupies
such objects one after another, but in another, since heat is force and
not matter, there can be no such individuality. Viewed, however, in the
less profound way, he is not unwilling to adopt the doctrine of the
transmigration of the soul through various forms, admitting that there
may accumulate upon it the effect of all those influences, whether of
merit or demerit, of good or of evil, to which it has been exposed. The
vital flame is handed down from one generation to another, it is
communicated from one animated form to another. He thinks it may carry
with it in these movements the modifications which may have been
impressed o