If I have the temerity to prefer my own definition of the spirit of
Buḍḍha's doctrine, it is because I think that all the
misconceptions of it have arisen from a failure to understand his idea
of what is real and what is unreal, what worth longing and striving
for and what not. From this misconception have come all the unfounded
charges that Buḍḍhism is an "atheistical," that is to say, a
grossly materialistic, a nihilistic, a negative, a vice-breeding
religion. Buḍḍhism denies the existence of a personal
God--true: therefore--well, therefore, and notwithstanding all this,
its teaching is neither what may be called properly atheistical,
nihilistic, negative, nor provocative of vice. I will try to make my
meaning clear, and the advancement of modern scientific research helps
in this direction. Science divides the universe for us into two
elements--matter and force; accounting for their phenomena by their
combinations, and making both eternal and obedient to eternal and
immutable law. The speculations of men of science have carried them to
the outermost verge of the physical universe. Behind them lie not only
a thousand brilliant triumphs by which a part of Nature's secrets have
been wrung from her, but also more thousands of failures to fathom her
deep mysteries. They have proved thought material, since it is the
evolution of the gray tissue of the brain, and a recent German
experimentalist, Professor Dr. Jäger, claims to have proved that
man's soul is "a volatile odoriferous principle, capable of solution
in glycerine". Psychogen is the name he gives to it, and his
experiments show that it is present not merely in the body as a whole,
but in every individual cell, in the ovum, and even in the ultimate
elements of protoplasm. I need hardly say to so intelligent an
audience as this, that these highly interesting experiments of Dr.
Jäger are corroborated by many facts, both physiological and
psychological, that have been always noticed among all nations; facts