suffer oneself to be absorbed, whatever be the degree of solidarity. This difference is profound.

6. Colonies are presented in the invertebrates in all periods from simple assemblages of individuals with scarcely any adhesion up to complete and absolute solidarisation. We may reduce them hypothetically to three periods. In the first, the individuals still remain their own masters, they lead their own life, and the colonial whole is but their numerical sum. In the second, they have lost half of their individuality, and the colonial whole possesses the other half. In the third, the individuals no longer count as such; they are subordinated to the colonial whole, which wields all the power and all the initiative. In which of these three periods would animal societies fall, on the supposition that we are obliged to class them with colonies, and that we admit they will develop like them in the course of time and in the ascending mammalian scale? In the first, with traces of a tendency here and there towards the second.

In fine, the classing of colonies with societies, which the positivists hold as proper, is a pure fiction, although in some points resemblances exist. If certain laws are applicable to like phenomena in the two orders of association, it is because the grand laws of nature are universal in character and relate as well to sociological or biological facts as to physical, chemical, or astronomical. The plain truth is this: the variously graded associations called colonies are morphological; the associations between demes are virtual. The first create new species, the second perfect them, extend and develop all that they can produce. Will this evolution culminate in the greatest intrinsic good of this or of that species, or in its complete annihilation by very excess of vitality? That is the secret of time. It remains to be learned whether man is situated in this regard the same as the other animals, whether his peculiar attri butes do not transform the situation, and whether consequently he will not suggest some modifications of the outlooks gained in the present study.

PARIS.

P. TOPINARD.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BUDDHISM.

ORIGINAL DUALISM.

Buddhism originated, as all religions do, from the desire to escape the transiency of life with its incidental vicissitudes and to attain the permanent and enduring bliss of an undisturbed existence where there is no pain, no disease, no death, no incertitudes of any kind. As soon as the prevalence of suffering was recognised as an inalienable condition of bodily existence the first attempt at obtaining deliverance from evil was naturally made by a mortification of the body for the sake of benefiting the soul. The body was looked upon as the source of all misery, and a purely spiritual existence was the ideal in which religious men set their hope of salvation. The body is doomed to die, and was therefore considered as an animated corpse. Our material existence is a body of death of which man must rid himself before he can obtain the deathless state. Thus we read in the story of Sumedha, which serves as an introduction to the Jatakas:

"Even as a man might rid him of

A horrid corpse bound to his neck,
And then upon his way proceed,
Joyous, and free, and unconstrained;

'So must I likewise rid me of

This body foul, this charnel-house,

And go my way without a care,
Or least regret for things behind.

"As men and women rid them of

Their dung upon the refuse heap,

The ideal of Buddhahood, accordingly, was in its original shape the attainment of a purely spiritual condition which it was hoped would afford a perfect emancipation from suffering. It was the same yearning as that of the early Christians, expressed in St. Paul's words:

"O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

Even Luther, with whom the monistic era of Christianity begins, speaks of his body with the utmost contempt. The term Madensack, i. e., a bag full of food for grubs, is a favorite expression of his.

The religious problem, as it presented itself to the ascetic Gautama before he had attained to Buddhahood, was formulated on dualistic principles, but his final solution rested upon a monistic basis. We know little of his philosophical evolution and the phases through which he passed; but the outcome is unequivocal in all important questions that form decisive test-issues as to the character of his system. He was tolerant and showed extreme patience with all kinds of mythologies, even utilising the supersti

1H. C. Warren, in his Buddhism in Translations, pp. 7-8. See also the passage quoted from Chapter VI. of the Visuddhi-Magga, p. 300.

tions of his age to the enhancement of his religion, but he was merciless in his rejection of metaphysicism and dualism.

ANTI-METAPHYSICAL.

After Buddha had surrendered the old dualism, the traditional formulation of philosophical problems lost their meaning; they became what we now call illegitimate questions; and whenever Buddha was confronted with such illegitimate questions, he either refused to answer them or declared openly: "The question is notrightly put." His refusal to answer such questions, which on his plane of thought had become unmeaning and irrelevant, nay, even misleading, can be interpreted as agnosticism, or as a dodge and attempt at straddling, only by those who utterly misconceive the spirit of Buddha's doctrines. When bored with questions by a wandering ascetic, one of those frivolous wranglers who dispute merely for the sake of discussion, Buddha refuses to answer, but when afterwards Ânanda accosts his master he explains why the wandering ascetic received no reply. The reason is here again. the error involved in the wrong formulation of the question. Thus if he had replied in the negative, saying that the âtman does not survive death, the wandering ascetic would have said "the Buddha teaches that there is no after-life"; and if he had replied in the affirmative, saying that the âtman survives death, the implication would have been that Buddha believed with the Vedanta philosophers in the existence of an âtman.

Buddha's monism is not materialism; he does not identify soul and body, he only denies the separate existence of soul-entities. There is soul and there is body. There are consciousness-forms and bodily-forms, and both are changing and developing, both are subject to growth and decay. The body is dissolved, and consciousness passes away, yet their forms reappear in new incarnations. There is death and rebirth, and there is continuity of life with its special and individual types. If the soul were identical with the body, it would perish with it; if it were a distinct entity and an immutable âtman, it would not be affected by conduct and

1See, for instance, Warren, Buddhism in Translations, pp. 167 and 312.

there would be no use in leading a holy life. In either case there is no need of seeking religion. Buddha's solution is, that there are not two things (1) an âtman and (2) the deeds performed by the âtman, but there is one thing—a soul-activity (karma), which operates by a continuous preservation of its deed-forms or samskâras, which are the dispositions produced by the various functions of karma. There is not a being that is born, acts, enjoys itself, suffers and dies and is reborn to die again; but simply birth, action, enjoyment, suffering, and death take place. The life-activity, the deeds, the karma, the modes of motion in all their peculiar forms, alone are real: they are preserved and nothing else. Man's soul consists of the memory-forms, or dispositions, produced by former karmas. There is no self in itself, no separate âtman; the self consists in the deed-forms, and every creature is the result of deeds.

The disciples propose to the Blessed One in the SamyuttaNikaya this question:

"Reverend Sir, what are old age and death? and what is it has old age and

death?"

The Blessed One replies:

"The question is not rightly put. O priest, to say: 'What are old age and death? and what is it has old age and death?' and to say: 'Old age and death are one thing, but it is another thing which has old age and death,' is to say the same thing in different ways.

"If, O priest, the dogma obtain that the soul and the body are identical, then there is no religious life; or if, O priest, the dogma obtain that the soul is one thing and the body another, then also there is no religious life. Both these extremes, O priest, have been avoided by the Tathâgata, and it is a middle doctrine he teaches: 'On birth depend old age and death.'" (Buddhism in Translations,

p. 167.)

PERSONALITY.

But considering the practical importance of personal effort in moral endeavor, how can the denial of the existence of a separate self as the condition of personality be useful in religion?

The answer is, that the denial of the existence of a separate self, an âtman, is not a denial of the real self such as it actually ex