EVOLUTION AND THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 299 



to about the fourteenth century before Christ lived. 

 Their objects of worship at first are numerous invisible 

 beings that actuate the things of the world, as in Greek 

 theology, but later one of them assumes preeminence as the 

 all-pervading essence of things , Brahma. The precepts 

 of Brahmanism enjoined adoration of the unseen powers 

 and of their works, as well as practical rules of human 

 conduct, such as those which divided a man's life into 

 the four periods when he should be successively a student, 

 the head of a family, a counselor, and a religious men- 

 dicant who should renounce the world of social activities 

 and human desires. In earlier writings, the immortal 

 state is a kind of heaven, but later it meant simply an 

 absorption into Brahma, the eternal impersonal being. 

 Buddha was an orthodox Brahman reformer of the 

 sixth century before our present era, just as Jesus was an 

 orthodox Hebrew reformer. The essential creed of 

 Buddha made his religion far more ethical than earlier 

 forms, and placed it on a plane even above Christianity 

 of later, centuries. This creed relates to the element of 

 human responsibility particularly, the other two remain- 

 ing much as they were found by Buddha. According 

 to his teachings, a man rested under an obligation to live 

 nobly in the truest sense, and he acquired merit 

 karma or lost it, in proportion to his deserts. At 

 death a human soul is reincarnated, in a lower form of 

 animal or even in a being residing in one of a series of un- 

 seen hells, if punishment is due ; if a higher state is mer- 

 ited, progress is made through thousands of existences 

 until perfection is rewarded by an eternal fusion with 

 the essence of Brahma. It is because there is no escape 

 from just punishment that Buddhism in its original form 



