260
SCIENCE AND BUDDHISM
I take my refuge in the Sangha.
These are not isolated efforts on my part ;
although in one sense isolation is eternally
perfect and can never be overcome,! in
another sense associates are possible and
desirable. One third of humanity are
Buddhists ; add men of Science and we form
an absolute majority; among Buddhists a
very large proportion have deliberately gone
out from social life of any kind to tread these
paths of Research.
Is the Way very hard? Is the brain tired?
The results slow to come ? Others are work-
ing, failing, struggling, crowned here and
there with rare garlands of success. Success
for ourselves, success for others; is it not
Compassion that binds us closer than all
earthlier ties? Ay, in joy and in sorrow,
in weakness and in strength, do I take my
refuge in the Sangha.
XITT.
CONCLUSION.
Let me give a rapid resumé of what we
have gone through.
(a) We have stripped Science and Bud-
dhism of their accidental garments, and
administered a rebuke to those who so
swathe them.
(4) We have shown the identity of Science
and Buddhism in respect of :
(1) Their fact.
(2) Their theory.
(3) Their method.
(4) Their enemies.
(c) While thus admitting Buddhism to
be merely a branch of Science, we have
shown it to be a most important branch,
since its promise is to break down the wall
at which all Science stops.
When Professor Ray Lankester has to
write, ‘‘ The whole order of nature, including
living and lifeless matter—man, animal, and
1 ¢.e, on normal planes,
gas—is a network of mechanism, the main
features and many details of which have
been made more or less obvious to the
wondering intelligence of mankind by the
labour and ingenuity of scientific investi-
gators. But no sane man has ever pre-
tended, since science became a definite body
of doctrine, that we know or ever can hope
to know or conceive of the possibility of
knowing, whence this mechanism has come,
why it is there, whither it is going, and
what there may or may not be beyond and
beside it which our senses are incapable
of appreciating. These things are not
‘explained’ by science, and never can be,”’
he gives a curious example of that quaint
scientific pride which knows the limits of
its powers, and refuses to entertain the hope
of transcending them. Unfortunately, he
is as one who, a hundred years ago, should
have declared any knowledge of the chemistry
of the fixed stars impossible. To invent
new methads, and to revolutionise the
functions of the senses by training or other-
wise is the routine work of to-morrow.!
But, alas ! he goes even further.
‘‘Similarly we seek by the study of
cerebral disease to trace the genesis of the
phenomena which are supposed by some
physicists who have strayed into biological
fields to justify them in announcing the
‘discovery’ of ‘Telepathy’ and a belief
in ghosts.”
To talk of cerebral disease as the char-
acteristic of one who merely differs from
you {and that because he has more know-
ledge than yourself) is itself a symptom
familiar to alienists. (I may say I hold
no brief for Professor Lodge, here attacked.
I am not even interested in any of his re-
sults, as such of them as I am acquainted
with deal with objective and trivial pheno-
mena.)
Of course, as long as what Darwin called
variation is called disease by Professor Ray
Lankester, we shall (if we accept his views,
1 See note p. 258.