arance, for the sage who has entered Nirvana, it may be safely
said of this acme of Buddhist philosophy--'the rest is silence!'"

It is plain, therefore, that the two points of contact upon which Hearn,
in his attempted reconciliation between Buddhism and modern science laid
most stress, were disproved by leading scientists even before he had
read Spencer's "First Principles" at New Orleans in 1886, and it is
disconcerting to find him using his deftness in the manipulation of
words, to reconcile statements of Huxley's and Darwin's with his own
wishes. His statement, indeed, that the right of a faith to live is only
to be proved by its possible reconciliation with natural and scientific
facts, proves how little fitted he was to expound natural science.

Long before he went to Japan, he had been interested in oriental
religion and ethics. But his Buddhism was really only a vague, poetical
theory, as was his Christianity. "When I write God, of course I mean
only the World-Soul, the mighty and sweetest life of Nature, the great
Blue Ghost, the Holy Ghost which fills planets and hearts with beauty."
The deeper Buddhism, he affirmed, was only the divine in man.

Bruised and buffeted in the struggle for existence, it is easy to
imagine the attraction that the Buddhist ideal of discipline and
self-effacement would exercise over a mind such as his. Shortly after
his arrival in Japan, standing opposite the great Dai Batsu with its
picturesque surroundings in the garden at Kamakura, he was carried away
by the ideal of calm, of selflessness that it embodied.

It has generally been taken for granted that he died a Buddhist; he
emphatically declared, during the last year of his life, that he
subscribed to no Buddhistical tenets.

Invariably the best critic of his own nature--"Truly we have no
permanent opinions," he writes, "until our mental growth is done. The
opinions we have are simply lent us for awhile by the gods--at compound
interest!"

There is a characteristic anecdote told of him by a cousin who went to
visit him when a boy at Ushaw. He asked her to bow to the figure of the
Virgin Mary, which stood upon the stairway. She refused, upon which he
earnestly repeated his request. Shortly after this incident he
volunteered the statement to one of the college tutors, who found him
lying on his back in the grass, looking up at the sky, that he was a
pantheist.

After he had been reading some of the Russian novelists, though