grasp it. Something of which I cannot directly take cognizance brings
to me the light of sun and stars." These somethings were, in his
conception, forms of matter. He saw the intelligence and the moral worth
of his friend, and then he saw that friend a lifeless body stretched
upon the ground, and he said some _thing_ is gone. This thing was
again to him only another and more subtile form of matter. We, with all
the aids of modern knowledge and thought, are absolutely unable to say
what distinction there is between matter and spirit. The old philosopher
was logical. He could find no point at which to draw his line. Therefore
he drew no line. He recognized only different manifestations of one
substance. In terms of our language, he was a materialist. So is the
modern scientist; yet I cannot help thinking that the Buddhist stands
much nearer to truth than the materialist of to-day. The various
faculties of human sense and human intellect are so many molecules
forming, by their accretion, the animal and the human soul. As, at
death, the molecules of the body separate and are, by-and-by, absorbed
with their inherent vitality into new agglomerations, and become part of
new living forms, so the elements of the human soul may be torn apart,
and some of them, being no longer man, but following the fortunes of the
lower principles, may be lost to us, while other elements, clinging to
the spiritual soul, follow its destiny in the after-life. I know a
thinking man who believes in nothing but matter and motion; add time and
space, and we have the all in all, the Nature, of Buddhism. Yet the
Buddhist believes in a state of being beyond this earthly life: a state
whose conditions are determined absolutely by the use which the human
soul has made of its opportunities in the life that now is, and my
friend says he does not. Truly, Buddhism is better than the materialism
of to-day.

Let me now turn to the history of humanity as revealed to us in our