202 THE GOSPEL, AND THE SOCIAL CREED OF SCIENCE. 



here, until, by entering hereafter on the path of escape 

 pointed out by the great deliverer, they also soon or late 

 (and it may be never) escape from the pains and penalties 

 of conscious being into the happy and silent shores of 

 Nirvana. 



The pessimism of our modern teachers, then, the 

 " occidental Buddhism," as it has been justly styled, of 

 Schopenhauer and Hartmann is not new ; and it is even 

 remarkable how much of the system of its modern 

 founder, including the proffered remedy for life's ills of 

 quietism, or " the denial of the will to live," is contained 

 in the metaphysical and moral teaching of Buddha.* 

 But it is certainly new to find such a pessimist system 

 emerging in the nineteenth century, and offered by its 

 modern founder as the last result of philosophy, logically 

 filiated to the Kantian metaphysics, and offered again by 

 his chief disciple, Hartmann, as the only philosophy 

 which accords at once with the highest inductions of 

 science as well as with sound metaphysical principles. 

 And it is a new and very noteworthy phenomenon to- 

 find this despairing philosophy appearing and finding 

 a sympathetic response in the hearts of men of the 

 advanced and cultured and conquering races of Western 

 Europe, and just at the moment when the triumphs of 

 modern progress were being chanted in full chorus and 

 were ringing loudest in all men's ears. Just when the 

 jubilant chorus was loudest, the note of desolation and 

 despair has broken in as a discord, and rings sufficiently 

 loud and clear to make the optimists of progress pause 

 and ponder. Contemporaneously with the great dis- 



* For an account of the Buddhist system, see The Legend of Gau- 

 dam&, the Buddha of the Burmese, by Bigandet, pp. 430-480; alsa 

 Buddhism by T. W. Ehys Davids, in the series of "Non-Christian Ke- 

 ligious Systems," published by the Society for Promoting Christian 

 Knowledge. 



