THOUGHTS ON NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 8l 



wisdom and goodness as you can in this life. 

 Trouble not yourself about the gods. Disturb your- 

 self not by curiosities or desires about any future 

 existence. Seek only after the fruit of the noble path 

 of self-culture and self-control. Early Buddhism had 

 no idea, just as early Christianity had not, of the 

 principle underlying the foundation of the higher 

 morality of the future, the duty which we owe, not 

 only to our fellow-men of to-day, but also to those of 

 the morrow to the race as a whole, but in the future 

 even more than now. Buddhists and Christians may 

 both maintain, and perhaps rightly maintain, that the 

 duty of universal love laid down in their Scriptures 

 can be held to involve and include this modern con- 

 ception ; but neither the early Buddhists nor the 

 early Christians looked at the matter quite in this 

 way. The sense of duty to the race has sprung 

 out of a fact only lately become a generally received 

 conception the progressive continuity of human pro- 

 gress. And the corresponding doctrine of Buddhism 

 is not that " the thoughts of men are widened with 

 the process of the suns," but that there are recurring 

 cycles of improvement and decay. It is true that 

 the Buddhist duty of universal love is much more 

 far-reaching as regards the present than the corre- 

 sponding duty as commonly received in any other 

 religion. It enfolds in its ample embrace not only 

 the brethren and sisters of the new faith, not only 

 our neighbours but every being that has life. " As a 

 mother, even at the risk of her own life, protects her 

 son, her only son, so let a man cultivate goodwill 

 without measure toward all beings. Let him culti- 



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