178 
and necessarily fragmentary and imperfect survey, wliat is 
likely to be the effect of the substitution of secular for reli- 
gious education, of scientific training for traditional belief. 
Christian philosophy is the only ground on which we can 
rest for the firm inculcation and the steadfast practice of the 
love of truth. And yet, the importance of this state of mind 
cannot be overlooked. Even Buddhism commends “truthful- 
ness of speech, that which avoids the utterance of that which is 
untrue, and seeks to utter the truth, like the husbandman 
who, by the act of winnowing, drives away the chaff while he 
retains the grain.'”* 
But secular philosophy can afford us no guarantee for this 
in its teachers. Even the celebrated Galileo could not find in 
himself the power to adhere to his knowledge, and denied the 
truth that he knew ; though he afterwards could not help 
re-asserting it. Those who have characters to maintain may 
be trusted to show us the truth they discover, at all events 
under ordinary circumstances ; but it is otherwise with those 
who do not come before their fellow-men except as anonymous 
writers ; and who may have the strongest possible interest in 
disguising the truth, in suppressing what is opposed to their 
favourite theories, or in warping and modifying the facts 
which they do present to their readers. 
To separate the chaff from the wheat cannot be expected 
from such teachers, whose passions and prejudices are enlisted 
on the side of retaining the chaff rather than the wheat. Let 
me explain more clearly. It is a common and a fatal mistake 
to confound science with philosophy, to attach importance to 
the hypothesis which we find it necessary to assume equal to 
that of fixed and proven science. The scaffolding we employ 
in rearing a building may be found so defective that it must 
be arranged anew ; and, under any circumstances, it is of 
temporaiy and transitory utility — it is not the building itself. 
The Buddhist philosophers (in comparison with whom our 
modern atheists are but children) declare (on the authority of 
Gotama Buddha) that “ all beings exist from some cause , but the 
cause of being cannot be discovered ” 
We think we know better, and we form hypotheses to 
account for the origin of being by evolution or otherwise. 
These hypotheses, one after another, prove to be founded on 
nothing solid. They disappear, to make room for others in 
endless succession ; but whatever benefit they may meantime 
yield by increasing the activity of research, they are not 
* Hardy’s Buddhism , p. 417. 
