on the emancipation of humanity by knowledge. I could not help contrasting the different idea of Christianity, which teaches freedom by virtue and moral practice. The latter, it appears to me, is an infinitely more wholesome doctrine for the bulk of humanity. TREVOR. Your contrast is not well grounded. On the one hand, moral duty is enjoined in most schemes of Hindu thought quite as much as intellectual advance. On the other hand, you must not forget those passages in the New Testament in which the liberating power of knowledge is affirmed with no small emphasis. Take, e.g. the words of Christ. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,' and several passages with like implication in the Epistles. Moreover, the freedom obtainable by knowledge was a primary doctrine in Alexandrian and Neo-Platonic Christianity. Indeed, there are few general principles in Hindu thought which seem to me truer than this emancipation by knowledge. It is an assertion of the spiritual concentration, the sturdy self-reliance and mental independence which are some of the noblest fruits of knowledge. The self-enthroned need fear no rival king. ... HARRINGTON. For a professed Skeptic, Doctor, your encomium of knowledge is sufficiently enthusiastic. . . . But we have not yet discussed the most preposterous of the fruits of Hindu knowledge, as well as the most remarkable of all the products of Eastern speculation. I mean the Buddhist Nirvana. Nothingness as a future possible contingency and in the sense of infinite vacuum I can with some effort understand, but what I feel unable to comprehend is the positing nothingness as a condition attainable during a man's life. TREVOR. The stages by which Nirvana was attained seem, roughly speaking, to have been the following: 1. We must remember that in Hindu as in every other philosophy existence begins in sensation, and thence arises or originates the phenomenal world. 2. Sensation matured and rarefied by intellect and imagination becomes an idealism which supplants and destroys its parent, the result being the gradual disappearance of the phenomenal world. 3. The sole remaining subjective world of ideas is lastly submitted to other destructive agencies, and by devotion, contemplation, austerity, the sense of individuality is reduced to a hardly conscious mental vacuity. Both the outer and inner worlds have thus disappeared, and nothing is left but nothingness, or Nirvana. HARRINGTON. But what a striking satire on knowledge and intellectual research is this reduction of a reasoning being to its lowest rational denomination, bringing it down in reality to the level of the most elementary forms of life; and what a Skeptical comment on the efficacy of knowledge to assume that its last phase is intellectual inanition and scarcely conscious life! Notwithstanding your remarks, I should be inclined to regard it as quite a hallucination. TREVOR. So doing you would not be acting with your customary justice towards abnormal convictions. The object of the Buddhist, we must remember, was to attain a sort of spiritual and mental anæsthesia, and this object he pursued by all available means during the greater part of his life. With a knowledge of human, at least Oriental, nature that has never been surpassed, he deliberately and perpetually drugged himself with every species of intellectual anesthetic, philosophical, religious, ascetic, volitional, he could possibly procure. The natural result was the attainment of a minimum of sensibility, which Europeans could hardly procure except by the aid of material anaesthetics-a stage of consciousness, e.g., that might be temporarily induced by a dose of chloroform, so low that a received impression remains in consciousness unclassed; there is a passive reception of it, and an absence of the activity required to know it as such. or such1;' or-employing an illustration more familiar to most of us-Nirvana may be likened to that sweetly passive state of confused and waning consciousness, the gradually increasing perception of torpor which announces to the tired man the approach of healthy and welcome repose. 6 Comp. Report of Consciousness under Chloroform,' in Mind, for October 1878, p. 558. ARUNDEL. Miss Leycester has suggested a comparison of Buddhism and Darwinianism. Why not suppose that the forcible suppression of consciousness implied in Nirvana is a form of Atavism-the instinctive retrogression of our race to its primordial jelly-fish condition. . . . But perhaps I ought not to speak harshly of Nirvana in my own present semisomnolent condition, for whether it be association with Buddhists or the three hours' length of our sitting, or else our long walk on the down, I feel the approach of that confused and waning consciousness which Dr. Trevor has so eloquently described as the harbinger of sleep. So I propose we close our discussion and incontinently adjourn. APPENDICES. APPENDIX A. (Page 29.) The chief technical terms and definitions of Greek Skepticism. It would seem that Dr. Trevor in casual conversation greatly underestimated the number of technical terms pertaining to Greek Skepticism. The following are the amended tables contained in his common-place book, and even these he considers as far from exhaustive. |