Asiatic psychological views.  While these opinions have universally found popular acceptance in Europe, others of a very different nature have prevailed extensively in Asia, and indeed very generally in the higher regions of thought.  Ecclesiastical authority succeeded in repressing them in the sixteenth century, but they never altogether disappeared.  In our own times so silently and extensively have they been diffused in Europe, that it was found expedient in the papal Syllabus to draw them in a very conspicuous manner into the open light; and the Vatican Council, agreeing in that view of their obnoxious tendency and secret spread, has in an equally prominent and signal manner among its first canons anathematized all persons who hold them.  “Let him be anathema who says that spiritual things are emanations of the divine substance, or that the divine essence by manifestation or development becomes all things.”  In view of this authoritative action, it is necessary now to consider the character and history of these opinions.

Ideas respecting the nature of God necessarily influence ideas respecting the nature of the soul.  The eastern Asiatics had adopted the conception of an impersonal God, and, as regards the soul, its necessary consequence, the doctrine of emanation and absorption.

Emanation and absorption.  Thus the Vedic theology is based on the acknowledgment of a universal spirit pervading all things.  “There is in truth but one Deity, the supreme Spirit; he is of the same nature as the soul of man.”  Both the Vedas and the Institutes of Menu affirm that the soul is an emanation of the all-pervading Intellect, and that it is necessarily destined to be reabsorbed.  They consider it to be without form, and that visible Nature, with all its beauties and harmonies, is only the shadow of God.

Vedaism developed itself into Buddhism, which has become the faith of a majority of the human race.  This system acknowledges that there is a supreme Power, but denies that there is a supreme Being.  It contemplates the existence of Force, giving rise as its manifestation to matter.  It adopts the theory of emanation and absorption.  In a burning taper it sees an effigy of man—­an embodiment of matter, and an evolution of force.  If we interrogate it respecting the destiny of the soul, it demands of us what has become of the flame when it is blown out, and in what condition it was before the taper was lighted.  Was it a nonentity?  Has it been annihilated?  It admits that the idea of personality which has deluded us through life may not be instantaneously extinguished at death, but may be lost by slow degrees.  On this is founded the doctrine of transmigration.  But at length reunion with the universal Intellect takes place, Nirwana is reached, oblivion is attained, a state that has no relation to matter, space, or time, the state into which the departed flame of the extinguished taper has gone, the state in which we were before we were born.  This is the end that we ought to hope for; it is reabsorption in the universal Force—­ supreme bliss, eternal rest.