Collected Works (Vol. II)

248 SCIENCE AND BUDDHISM consciousness to consciousness by its eternity, while it fixes a great gulf between them by its changelessness. He states the knowable, states it accurately, and leaves it there. But there is a practical application of this analysis which I will treat of later. (See VIII. Maha- satipa¢¢hana.) We are told that the memory is a proof of some real “J.” But how treacherous is this ground! Did a past event in my life not happen because I have forgotten it? O the analogy of the river water given above is most valid! I who write this am not I who read it over and correct it. DoTI desire to play with lead soldiers? Am I the doddering old cripple who must be wheeled about and fed on whisky and bread and milk? And is J my difference from them so conspicuously less than from the body lying dead of which those who see it will say, “‘ This was Aleister Crowley”? What rubbish is it to suppose that an eternal substance, sentient or not, omniscient or not, depends: for its information on so absurd a series of bodies as are grouped under that ‘‘ Crowley” ! | Yet the Buddhist meets all arguments of the spiritual order with a simple statement which, if not certain, is at least not improb- able. ‘here is, he will tell you, a “‘ spiritual ” world, or to avoid any (most unjustifiable) misunderstandings, let us say a world of subtler matter than the visible and tangible, which has its own laws (analogous to, if not identical with, those laws of matter with which we are acquainted) and whose inhabi- tants change, and die, and are re-born very much as ordinary mortal beings. But as they are of subtler matter, their cycle is less rapid.! As a nominalist, I hope not to be mis- understood when I compare this to the re- lative mutability of the individual and the species.? We have enough examples free 1 Cf., Huxley, cited supra, ‘* possibly, through modes of being of which we neither have a conception, nor are competentto formany. .. .” 2 Cf, ‘* Evolution and Ethics,” note 1. from such possibility of misinterpretation in our own bodies. Compare the longevity of a bone with that of a corpuscle. But it is this ‘¢ Substratum ” universe, which must not be confounded with the substratum, the argu- ments for whose existence Berkeley so utterly shattered, which may conserve memory for a period greatly exceeding that of one of its particular avatars. Hence the .‘‘ Jataka.” But the doctrine is not very essential; its chief value is to show what serious difficulties coniront us, and to supply a reason for the struggle to some better state. For if nothing 1 Without an elaborate analysis of the ideas involved in the Ding an sich of Kant, and of H. Spencer’s definition of all things as Modes of the Unknowable, I may point out in passing that these hypotheses are as sterile as the ‘vital principle” in biology, or ‘‘ phlogiston ” in chemistry. They lead literally nowhere. That the phenomenal world is an illusion is all very well; one girds up one’s loins to seek reality: but to prove reality unknowable is to shut all avenues to the truth-loving man, to open all to the sensualist. And, if we. accept either of the above philosophies, it does not matter. That we feel it does matter is sufficient refutation, for we must obey the sentence awarded on our own testimony, whether we like it or not. | I am aware that this is a somewhat cowardly way of dealing with the question; I prefer to insist that if we once admit that the unknowable (by reason) to consciousness may be known (by concentration) to super-consciousness, the difficulty vanishes. I think Huxley goes too far in speaking of a man ‘‘ self-hypnotised into cataleptic trances” without medical evidence of a large number of cases. Edward Carpenter, who has met Yogis, and talked long and learnedly with them, tells a different story. Even had we a large body of evidence from Anglo-Indian medical men, the proof. would still be lacking. They might not be the real men. The Indian native would take intense. delight in bringing round the village idiot to be inspected in the character of a holy man by the ‘* Doctor Sahib.”’ ; The Angilo-Indian is a fool; a minimum medical education is in most cases insufficient to abate the symptoms to nil, though perhaps it must always diminish them. The Hindu is the Sphinx of civilisation; nearly all that has been written on him is worthless; those who . know him best know this fact best.—A. C.