ATHEISM AND THE CHURCH. 625 



imagination as wave-lengths, and tee shall find it difficult to thinh clearly upon 

 the subject without the aid of this wave-theory." * 



In short, it is obvious that without the help of this mythologic, poetic, 

 image-forming faculty, all our pursuit of truth were in vain. And there- 

 fore, starting from the common basis of a confession that "something 

 is," we are more than justified, we are obeying a necessary law of our 

 nature, in asking what that eternal substratum of existence is, and with 

 what morphologic aid the imagination may best present it for our con- 

 templation. 



But here the pure logician may perhaps retort : " You forget that 

 the conceptions men form of things are, at their very best, nothing 

 more than human, and therefore relative conceptions. A fly or a fish 

 probably sees things differently. And an inliabitant of Mercury or 

 Saturn might form a conception of the universe bearing little resem- 

 blance to yours." ^ Quite true ; but logicians there, too, would proba- 

 bly be heard to complain that, colored by Saturnian or Mercurian rela- 

 tivities, truth was sadly impure, and was, in fact, attained by no one 

 but themselves. Nay, in those other worlds priests of Logic might be 

 found so wrapped in superstition as to launch epithets of contempt on 

 all who approached to puncture their inflated fallacies, and who devout- 

 ly believed that a syllogism did not contain a petitio principii * neatly 

 wrapped up in its own premises, and an induction was not an applica- 

 tion of a preexisting general idea, but a downright discovery of abso- 

 lute truth. If from such afflictions we on earth are free, it is because 

 the common sense of mankind declares itself serenely content with the 

 relative and the human ; because, while fully aware (from our schoolboy 

 daj's) that all our faculties — reason among the rest — are limited and 

 earthly, we have faith that " all is well " in mind, as it certainly is in 

 matter ; and because we smile at the simplicity of our modern wran- 

 glers, who can only analyze down as far as " Something," when their 

 Buddhist masters two thousand years ago had dug far deeper, viz., to 

 N0TH12JG : 



The mind of the supreme Buddha is swift, quick, piercing, because he is in- 

 finitely " pure." Nirwana is the destruction of all the elements of existence. The 

 being who is "purified" knows there is no Ego, no self; aU the afflictions con- 

 nected with existence are overcome, all the principles of existence are annihi- 

 lated, and that annihilation is Nu-wana.* 



The Churchman, therefore, holds himself so far justified in claiming 



1 Coolce, "Tlie New Cfiemistvy " (fourth edition, 1878), p. 22. 



2 " Physicus " (p. 143) rides this logical bobby far beyond the confines of the sublime. 

 He demands of the tlieist to show that his " God is something more than a mere causal 

 agent which is ' absolute ' in the grotesquely restricted sense of being independent of one 

 petty race of creatures with an ephemeral experience of what is going on in one tiny cor- 

 ner of the universe." 



* Begging the question. 



* Hardy, "Eastern Monachism," p. 291. 



