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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cernecl, the terms have no mefxning or 

 application. A very well-disposed per- 

 son, Ileitirich Hensoldt, Ph. D., has 

 given in the columns of a popular maga- 

 zine, The Arena, an account of an inter- 

 view with which he was favored with 

 the Dalai Lama, the supreme object of 

 religious veneration in that country. 

 This august person is supposed to be a 

 reincarnation of the original Buddha. 

 He is chosen by the priests at the age 

 of five or six, and dies gently of his own 

 accord when he reaches the age of 

 twelve. Meantime he is filled with all 

 grace and, wisdom, and the writer of 

 the article tells how powerfully he him- 

 self was impressed with what he heard 

 from the lips of the present Dalai, a 

 youth of about eight. In the first place, 

 the Dalai spoke to his interviewer, who 

 was a German, in the most fluent and 

 idiomatic German, and in the very dia- 

 lect to which the latter was native. 

 "How," asks the writer, "could the 

 mysterious youth have acquired a 

 knowledge of the German language, 

 and moreover of a dialect which is lim- 

 ited to a small district of the father- 

 land ? " If, instead of asking us that 

 question, the interviewer had seized his 

 chance and asked the Dalai himself, he 

 might have got some information. He 

 contented himself, however, after the 

 manner of the faithful, with " ponder- 

 ing a great deal over the problem," and 

 finally arrived at the satisfactory con- 

 clusion that it was a kind of mind-read- 

 ing. The Dalai, launching out thus in 

 German, proceeded to display "an 

 amount of wisdom which I have never 

 since seen equaled in the most famous 

 Oriental or Western thinkers," The 

 samples given us, unfortunately, hardly 

 bear out this eulogium. Tlie learned 

 interviewer was "astonished beyond ex- 

 pression by his detailed knowledge of 

 mineralogy, botany, microscopy, etc.," 

 but he passed by all that to repeat a few 

 sophistical and worn - out arguments 

 which the Dalai worked off on him in 

 regard to the illusoriness of time and 



space. The idea of time is illusory be- 

 cause degrees of longitude converge 

 toward the pole, and therefore con- 

 tiguous points near the pole would have 

 the same difference of time as points 

 widely separated at the equator ! The 

 interviewer says he " was compelled to 

 admit the force of this logic," but he 

 required further proof before he could 

 accept the Dalai"s dictum that " the 

 most stable of our sciences, mathemat- 

 ics," is also wholly based on illusion. 

 The mysterious youth then trotted out 

 the old Greek sophism known to logi- 

 cians as that of Achilles and the tor- 

 toise. If a man had a certain sum of 

 money to pay, and on a certain date paid 

 half of it, then on a later date half 

 the remainder, and then on succeeding 

 dates half of whatever might still be 

 due, he might go on to all eternity pay- 

 ing, but would never have the debt 

 fully discharged. " Does not this," the 

 youth asked triumphantly and yet sad- 

 ly, " prove the rottenness of the entire 

 fabric, and that your wonderfully exact 

 science is Maya or illusion?" Again 

 the learned but well-disposed inter- 

 viewer bowed in acquiescence. Of 

 course, we might feel delicate about 

 arguing with a reincarnated Buddiia; 

 but we feel as if the suggestion might 

 properly have been made that the argu- 

 ment in question, which simply affirmed 

 that, unless you pay a debt in full, a 

 portion will remain unpaid, was emi- 

 nently in harmony with the whole the- 

 ory of mathematics, which has always 

 required us to believe that a pint will 

 not fill a quart pot, 



" We do not reason out things," 

 said the Dalai, " but see them." And 

 then he proceeded to use the identical 

 ineffectual argument used by Mr. Sin- 

 nett to which we referred a month or 

 two ago, claiming that the adepts in 

 occult science were substantially in pos- 

 session of an extra sense, and that that 

 was why the unenlightened world did 

 not believe in them. The slightest re- 

 flection, however, as we pointed out, 



