[=A]ndhras, south of the God[=a]var[=i] river in the southeast (about the latitude of Bombay and Hayti), only as outer ‘Barbarians.’  It is quite conceivable that a race of hardy mountaineers, in shifting their home through generations from the hills of Georgia and Tennessee to the sub-tropical region of Key West (to Cuba), in the course of many centuries might become morally affected.  But it seems to us, although the miasmatic plains of Bengal may perhaps present even a sharper contrast to the Vedic region than do Key West and Cuba to Georgia, that the climate in effecting a moral degradation (if pessimism be immoral) must have produced also the effect of mental debility.  Now to our mind there is not the slightest proof for the asseveration, which has been repeated so often that it is accepted by many nowadays as a truism, that Buddhism or even post-Buddhistic literature shows any trace of mental decay.[25] There certainly is mental weakness in the Br[=a]hmanas, but these cannot all be accredited to the miasms of Bengal.  They are the bones of a religion already dead, kept for instruction in a cabinet; dry, dusty, lifeless, but awful to the beholder and useful to the owner.  Again, does Buddhism lose in the comparison from an intellectual point of view when set beside the mazy gropings of the Upanishads?  We have shown that dogma was the base of primal pantheism; of real logic there is not a whit.  We admire the spirit of the teachers in the Upanishads, but we have very little respect for the logical ability of any early Hindu teachers; that is to say, there is very little of it to admire.  The doctors of the Upanishad philosophy were poets, not dialecticians.  Poetry indeed waned in the extreme south, and no spirited or powerful literature ever was produced there, unless it was due to foreign influence, such as the religious poetry of Ramaism and the Tamil Sittars.  But in secondary subtlety and in the marking of distinctions, in classifying and analyzing on dogmatic premises, as well as in the acceptance of hearsay truths as ultimate verities—­we do not see any fundamental disparity in these regards between the mind of the Northwest and that of the Southeast; and what superficial difference exists goes to the credit of Buddhism.  For if one must have dogma it is something to have system, and while precedent theosophy was based on the former it knew nothing of the latter.  Moreover, in Buddhism there is a greater intellectual vigor than in any phase of Brahmanism (as distinct from Vedism).  To cast off not only gods but soul, and more, to deny the moral efficacy of asceticism this was a leap into the void, to appreciate the daring of which one has but to read himself into the priestly literature of Buddha’s rivals, both heterodox and orthodox.  We see then in Buddhism neither a debauched moral type, nor a weakened intellectuality.  The pessimism of Buddhism, so far as it concerns earth, is not only the same pessimism that underlies the