380 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



of experience has a father whose teachings are grave, 

 peremptory, and august; and an earthborn rule may 

 be as stringent as any derived from a celestial source. 

 It does not even follow that a belief in the material 

 origin of spiritual existence, accompanied by a corre- 

 sponding decay of belief in immortality, must neces- 

 sarily lead to a relaxation of the moral fibre of the race. 

 It is certain that it has often done so.* But it is equally 

 certain that there have been individuals, and great his- 

 torical communities, in which the absence of the latter 

 belief has neither weakened moral earnestness, nor pre- 

 vented devotional fervour.' I have elsewhere stated 

 that some of the best men of my acquaintance men 

 lofty in thought and beneficent in act belong to a class 

 who assiduously let the belief referred to alone. They 

 derive from it neither stimulus nor inspiration, while 

 I say it with regret were I in quest of persons who, 

 in regard to the finer endowments of human character, 

 are to be ranked with the unendowed, I should find some 

 characteristic samples among the noisier defenders of 

 the orthodox belief. These, however, are but ' hand- 

 specimens ' on both sides; the wider data referred to by 

 Professor Knight constitute, therefore, a welcome cor- 

 roboration of my experience. Again, my excellent 

 critic, Professor Blackie, describes Buddha as being ' a 

 great deal more than a prophet; a rare, exceptional, and 

 altogether transcendental incarnation of moral perfec- 

 tion.' f And yet, ' what Buddha preached was a gospel 

 of pure human ethics, divorced not only from Brahma 

 and the Brahminic Trinity, but even from the exist- 



* Is this really certain ? Instead of standing in the relation 

 of cause and effect, may not the 'decay' and 'relaxation' be 

 merely coexistent, both, perhaps, flowing from common historic 

 antecedents f 



t ' Natural History of Atheism,' p. 186. 



