The influence of Science will not be the only factor in the
modification of Western religious beliefs: Oriental philosophy
will certainly furnish another. Sanscrit, Chinese, and Pali
scholarship, and the tireless labor of philologists in all parts
of the East, are rapidly familiarizing Europe and America with
all the great forms of Oriental thought; Buddhism is being
studied with interest throughout the Occident; and the results of
these studies are yearly showing themselves more and more
definitely in the mental products of the highest culture. The
schools of philosophy are not more visibly affected than the
literature of the period. Proof that a reconsideration of the
problem of the Ego is everywhere forcing itself upon Occidental
minds, may be found not only in the thoughtful prose of the time,
but even in its poetry and its romance. Ideas impossible a
generation ago are changing current thought, destroying old
tastes, and developing higher feelings. Creative art, working
under larger inspiration, is telling what absolutely novel and
exquisite sensations, what hitherto unimaginable pathos, what
marvelous deepening of emotional power, may be gained in
literature with the recognition of the idea of pre-existence.
Even in fiction we learn that we have been living in a hemisphere
only; that we have been thinking but half-thoughts; that we need
a new faith to join past with future over the great parallel of
the present, and so to round out our emotional world into a
perfect sphere. The clear conviction that the self is multiple,
however paradoxical the statement seem, is the absolutely
necessary step to the vaster conviction that the many are One,
that life is unity, that there is no finite, but only infinite.
Until that blind pride which imagines Self unique shall have been
broken down, and the feeling of self and of selfishness shall
have been utterly decomposed, the knowledge of the Ego as
infinite,--as the very Cosmos,--never can be reached.
Doubtless the simple emotional conviction that we have been in
the past will be developed long before the intellectual
conviction that the Ego as one is a fiction of selfishness. But
the composite nature of Self must at last be acknowledged, though
its mystery remain. Science postulates a hypothetical
psychological unit as well as a hypothetical physiological unit;
but either postulated entity defies the uttermost power of
mathematical estimate,--seems to resolve itself into pure
ghostliness. The chemist, for working purposes, must imagine an
ultimate atom; but the fact of which the imagined atom is the
symbol may be a force centre only,--nay, a void, a vortex, an
emptiness, as in Buddhist concept. "_Form is emptiness, and
emptiness is form. What is form, that is emptiness; what is
emptiness, that is form. Perception and conception, name and
knowledge,--all these are emptiness._" For science and for
Buddhism alike the cosmos resolves itself into a vast
phantasmagoria,--a mere play of unknown and immeasurable forces.
Buddhist faith, however, answers the questions "Whence?" and
"Whither?" in its own fashion, and predicts in every great cycle
of evolution a period of spiritual expansion in which the memory
of former births returns, and all the future simultaneously opens
before the vision unveiled, even to the heaven of heavens.
Science here remains dumb. But her silence is the Silence of the
Gnostics,--Sige, the Daughter of Depth and the Mother of Spirit.
What we may allow ourselves to believe, with the full consent of
Science, is that marvelous revelations await us. Within recent
time new senses and powers have been developed,--the sense of
music, the ever-growing faculties of the mathematician.
Reasonably it may be expected that still higher unimaginable
faculties will be evolved in our descendants. Again it is known
that certain mental capacities, undoubtedly inherited, develop in
old age only; and the average life of the human race is steadily
lengthening. With increased longevity there surely may come into
sudden being, through the unfolding of the larger future brain,
powers not less wonderful than the ability to remember former
births. The dreams of Buddhism can scarcely be surpassed, because
they touch the infinite; but who can presume to say they never
will be realized?