Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/175

Rh and Rome. The tyranny of the many, he says, is worse than the tyranny of one; and the passion for reforming one's neighbours seldom goes with the reform of oneself. He considers the modern state as godless and immoral, and modern kings he holds little better than sworn captains of banditti. He pours contempt on the smug self-satisfaction of the mid-Victorian era; and he ridicules Bagehot's defence of constitutional monarchy as camouflage for a Whig oligarchy. In brief he expects no salvation from the present trend of social evolution.

The work falls into two rather loosely connected parts. The first three hundred pages, one third of the whole, are devoted to India and to the spread of Buddhism in Central Asia and the Far East. India has at one time or another given expression to almost every mood of religious thought; nowhere else has the sacrificial system, or asceticism, or the divinity of a sacred caste been carried to such extravagant lengths. Its intellectual quest in search of religious truth is more noticeable still. This quest was dominated by a single idea and a single passion—the thought of transmigration, the moral causality of this life determining our future existence, was the impelling notion, the desire to escape from the unmeaning and endless cycle of being the lesson drawn. The quest culminated in the famous monist idealism of the Vedanta. The philosopher puts aside all passion, action, desire, and rises by virtue of inward contemplation to the knowledge of the identity of himself with the divine Atman. Autotheism Dr. Bussell calls it. Beside the Atman there is nothing; only ignorance and illusion, the fleeting stuff of the dreams of the unchanging spirit.

Buddhism is the second great contribution of India to religious history. Beginning as a religion of ascetics, it developed, especially among the Indo-Scyths, and partly under Christian influences, into a universal religion. Its metaphysic is hard to understand, and its ethics though noble are limited; but it has an altruistic ideal above that of any non-Christian religion. Dr. Bussell has interested himself greatly in India; his knowledge of it is considerable; and both Indian monism and Buddhist altruism have attracted his very special attention. Although he usually follows Deussen in his account of Indian philosophy,