hat is to say, a grossly materialistic, a nihilistic,
a negative, a vice-breeding religion. Buddhism denies the existence of a
personal God--true: therefore--well, therefore, and notwithstanding all
this, its teaching is neither what may be called properly atheistical,
nihilistic, negative, nor provocative of vice. I will try to make my
meaning clear, and the advancement of modern scientific research helps
in this direction. Science divides the universe for us into two
elements--matter and force; accounting for their phenomena by their
combinations, and making both eternal and obedient to eternal and
immutable law. The speculations of men of science have carried them to
the outermost verge of the physical universe. Behind them lie not only a
thousand brilliant triumphs by which a part of Nature's secrets have
been wrung from her, but also more thousands of failures to fathom her
deep mysteries. They have proved thought material, since it is the
evolution of the gray tissue of the brain, and a recent German
experimentalist, Professor Dr. Jaeger, claims to have proved that man's
soul is "a volatile odoriferous principle, capable of solution in
glycerine". Psychogen is the name he gives to it, and his experiments
show that it is present not merely in the body as a whole, but in every
individual cell, in the ovum, and even in the ultimate elements of
protoplasm. I need hardly say to so intelligent an audience as this,
that these highly interesting experiments of Dr. Jaeger are corroborated
by many facts, both physiological and psychological, that have been
always noticed among all nations; facts which are woven into popular
proverbs, legends, folk-lore fables, mythologies and theologies, the
world over. Now, if thought is matter and soul is matter, then Buddha,
in recognising the impermanence of sensual enjoyment or experience of
any kind, and the instability of every material form, the human soul
included, uttered a profound and scientific truth, And since the very
idea of gratification or suffering is inseparable from that of material
being--absolute SPIRIT alone being regarded by common consent as
perfect, changeless and Eternal--therefore, in teaching the doctrine
that conquest of the material self, with all its lusts, desires, loves,
hopes, ambitions and hates, frees one from pain, and leads to Nirvana,
the state of Perfect Rest, he preached the rest of an untinged,
untainted existence in the Spirit. Though the soul be c