I have spoken hitherto of those peoples only whose history more or less directly has affected ours.  But there is a vast portion of the human race with which, roughly speaking, our progress has had no connection; and the religions of these races, which are now for the first time beginning to be accurately studied, are constantly being appealed to in support of the positive doctrines.  Thus it is urged by Mr. Leslie Stephen that ’the briefest outline of the religious history of mankind shows that creeds which can count more adherents than Christianity, and have flourished through a longer period, have omitted all that makes the Christian doctrine of a future state ’valuable in the eyes of the supporters;’ and Dr. Tyndall points with the same delighted confidence to the gospel of Buddhism, as one of ’pure human ethics, divorced not only from Brahma and the Brahminic Trinity, but even from the existence of God.’[6] Many other such appeals are made to what are somewhat vaguely called ‘the multitudinous creeds of the East;’ but it is to Buddhism, in its various forms, that they would all seem to apply.  Let us now consider the real result of them.  Our positivists have appealed to Buddhism, and to Buddhism they shall certainly go.  It is one of the vastest and most significant of all human facts.  But its significance is somewhat different from what it is popularly supposed to be.

That the Buddhist religion has had a wide hold on the world is true.  Indeed, forty per cent. of the whole human race at this moment profess it.  Except the Judaic, it is the oldest of existing creeds; and beyond all comparison it numbers most adherents.  And it is quite true also that it does not, in its pure state, base its teaching on the belief in any personal God, or offer as an end of action any happiness in any immortal life.  But it does not for this reason bear any real resemblance to our modern Western positivism, nor give it any reason to be sanguine.  On the contrary, it is most absolutely opposed to it; and its success is due to doctrines which Western positivism most emphatically repudiates.  In the first place, so far from being based on exact thought, Buddhism takes for its very foundation four great mysteries, that are explicitly beyond the reach either of proof or reason; and of these the foremost and most intelligible is the transmigration and renewal of the existence of the individual.  It is by this mystical doctrine, and by this alone, that Buddhism gains a hold on the common heart of man.  This is the great fulcrum of its lever.  Then further—­and this is more important still—­whereas the doctrine of Western positivism is that human life is good, or may be made good; and that in the possibility of the enjoyment of it consists the great stimulus to action; the doctrine of Buddhism is that human life is evil, and that man’s right aim is not to gratify, but to extinguish, his desire for it.  Love, for instance, as I have said before, is by most