The Sword of Song

SCIENCE AND BUDDHISM 118 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, 1 in another s ense as sociates are pos sible 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 t hese paths of Research. Is the Way very hard? Is the brain tired? The results slow to com e? Others are working, failing, struggling, crowned here and there with rare garlands of success. Success for ourse lves, success for othe rs; is it not Compassion that binds us closer than all earthly ties? Ay, in joy and in sorrow, in weakness and in strength, do I take my refuge in the Sangha. XIII CONCLUSION Let me give a rapid resumé of what we have gone through. (a) We have stripped Science and Buddhism of their accidental garm ents, and administered a rebuke to those who so swathe them. (b) 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 adm itting 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 walls at which Science stops. When Professor Ray Lankester has to write, “The whole order of nature, i ncluding living and l ifeless matter—man, animal, and 1 i.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 m ankind 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 bey ond and beside it which our s enses 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 y ears ago, should have declared any knowledge of the c hemistry of the fixed stars impossible. To invent new methods, and to revolutionise the functions of the senses by training or other-wise is the routine work of to-morrow.1 But, alas ! he goes even further. “Similarly we seek by the study of cerebral disease to trace the genes is 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 dis ease as the char- acteristic of one who merely differs from you (and that because he has m ore know- ledge than y ourself) is itself a symptom familiar to alienists. (I m ay say I hold no brief for Professor Lodge, here attacked. I am not even interes ted in any of his results, 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. 116