94 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. n 



losophers taught, are absorbed into the Divine Es- 

 sence." (Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 85, 86.) 

 The state after death thus imagined by the Hindu 

 philosophers has a certain analogy to the purgatory 

 of the Roman Church ; except that escape from it is 

 dependent, not on a divine decree modified, it may 

 be, by sacerdotal or saintly intercession, but by the 

 acts of the individual himself; and that while ulti- 

 mate emergence into heavenly bliss of the good, or 

 well-prayed for, Catholic is professedly assured, the 

 chances in favour of the attainment of absorption, 

 or of Nirvana, by any individual Hindu are ex- 

 tremely small. 



Note 6 (p. 62). 



" That part of the then prevalent transmigration 

 theory which could not be proved false seemed to 

 meet a deeply felt necessity, seemed to supply a 

 moral cause which would explain the unequal distri- 

 bution here of happiness or woe, so utterly inconsis- 

 tent with the present characters of men." Gautama 

 " still therefore talked of men's previous existence, 

 but by no means in the way that he is generally 

 represented to have done." What he taught was 

 " the transmigration of character." He held that 

 after the death of any being, whether human or 

 not, there survived nothing at all but that being's 

 " Karma," the result, that is, of its mental and bodily 

 actions. Every individual, whether human or di- 

 vine, was the last inheritor and the last result of the 

 Karma of a long series of past individuals a series 



