PHILOLOGICAL VARIETIES. 71 



also not yet completely freed from the ancient belief which the 

 Sadducees, besides,, had not abandoned ; they were the faithful 

 preservers of the ancient faith, and the pure tradition of the 

 sons of Israel. "They have the theory that the soul dies 

 with the body/' wrote Josephus,* " and consider that they ought 

 to keep nothing but the law." 



We must be pardoned for insisting so much upon this point ; 

 but it is of importance as regards our thesis to show that the 

 belief in the immortality of the soul, and in a divinity, is not 

 universal on the globe, that one general characteristic of hu- 

 manity could not be formed from it, and that we ought even 

 less to rely upon the existence of such ideas in order to esta- 

 blish a human kingdom . We have only spoken of people who 

 are either entirely savage, or of Jewish opinions, which have 

 long been lost in the past. Even in our own time, there are 

 two hundred million Buddhists on the earth, who have reached 

 a marvellous point of civilisation, who ignore, in the most ab- 

 solute manner, the notion of another life and that of a divinity. 

 Eugene Burnouf, whose ability no one will deny, has already 

 said it; M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, after much hesitation, 

 which will remain as the seal of a firmly established conviction, 

 has decided in the same way, in the last edition of Bouddka et 

 sa Religion.-^ We quote his own words : " There is not the 

 slightest trace of a belief in God in all Buddhism; and to 

 suppose that it admits the absorption of the human soul into a 

 divine or infinite soul, is a gratuitous supposition which cannot 

 even enter into the ideas of the Buddhist. In order to believe 

 that man can lose himself in the God to which he is reunited, 

 this God must first be believed in as a necessary commencement. 

 But we can scarcely say that the Buddhist does -not believe in 

 Him. He ignores God in such a complete manner, that he 

 does not even care about denying His existence ; he does not 

 care about trying to abolish Him ; he neither mentions such a 

 being in order to explain the origin or the anterior existence 

 of man, his present life, nor for the purpose of conjecturing 



* Josephus, Antiquities, xviii, ch. 2, transl. by D. G. Genebrard, Paris, 1639. 

 f Chapter upon the " Nirvana." 



