Page:Evolution and Ethics.djvu/56

 Rh quam Deus, et divina ratio, toti mundo et partibus ejus inserta? Quoties voles, tibi licet aliter hunc auctorem rerum nostrarum compellare, et Jovem ilium optimum et maximum rite dices, et tonantem, et statorem: qui non, ut historici tradiderunt, ex eo quod post votum susceptum acies Romanorum fugientum stetit, sed quod stant beneficio ejus omnia, stator, stabilitorque est: hunc eundem et fatum si dixeris, non mentieris, nam quum fatum nihil aliud est, quam series implexa causarum, ille est prima omnium causa, ea qua cæteræ pendent."

It would appear, therefore, that the good Bishop is somewhat hard upon the 'heathen,' of whose words his own might be a paraphrase.

There is yet another direction in which Berkeley's philosophy, I will not say agrees with Gautama's, but at any rate, helps to make a fundamental dogma of Buddhism intelligible.

"I find I can excite ideas in my mind at pleasure, and vary and shift the scene as often as I think fit. It is no more than willing, and straightway this or that idea arises in my fancy: and by the same power, it is obliterated, and makes way for another. This making and unmaking of ideas doth very properly denominate the mind active. Thus much is certain and grounded on experience. . ." (Principles, xxviii.)

A good many of us, I fancy, have reason to think that experience tells them very much the contrary; and are painfully familiar with the obsession of the mind by ideas which cannot be obliterated by any effort of the will and steadily refuse to make way for any others. But what I desire to point out is that if Gautama was equally confident that he could 'make and unmake' ideas—then, since he had resolved self into a group of ideal phantoms—the possibility of abolishing self by volition naturally followed.

Note 9 (p. 20).

According to Buddhism, the relation of one life to the next, is merely that borne by the flame of one lamp to the flame of another lamp which is set alight by it. To the 'Arahat' or adept "no outward form, no compound thing, no creature, no creator, no existence of any kind, must appear to be other than a temporary collocation of its component parts fated