174 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



certain to the natural unregenerate man, that Buddha 

 taught his one and only sure way to escape it into the 

 blissful unconsciousness of Nirvana. 



And if we grant to Schopenhauer and Buddha that 

 consciousness is necessarily an evil, still, after our extinc- 

 tion here, after having thrown off this mortal coil of 

 individual life, this painful Nessus' shirt of earthly con- 

 sciousness, which for ever frets and stings us, may we 

 not awaken no more into it, or into any individual con- 

 sciousness, but only into the grand general consciousness 

 where the torment and desires of individual life no more 

 will follow us ? May not our little single ray of reason 

 remerge into the general light ; our little rill flow back 

 into the great ocean of being ; our single soul become 

 swallowed up in the mighty universal one ; and may not 

 we ourselves, an emanation of Deity, return to its parent 

 source, as the great Averroes taught, and as Plotinus and 

 the great mystics thought certain? Nay, does not 

 Christianity itself, with its pessimist foundation, teach 

 that somehow we shall leave behind this grievous weight 

 of clay, and that with it our painful and weary earthly 

 consciousness shall drop off; that we shall forget our 

 past being and our terrible earthly experience ; and that 

 when we wake up after His likeness, it shall be, if not 

 in union and absorption, at least in closer relation and 

 more intimate communion, with Deity ? 



Thus argues the mystic, whose type is not extinct, as 

 some suppose ; and to him Science answers 



Something conscious, as you say in the beginning of 

 your argument, may indeed awaken, that is, come into 

 existence ; but not you. Moreover, even if an actual 

 transmigration of your soul into some other being some- 

 where else were even conceivable or possible, unless you 

 add memory there is no possible bridge of communication 



