Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 9.djvu/314

 286

��Esoteric Buddhism. — A Review.

��of the laggard souls whose progress has been too slow. Thus, we are told, although the first and second root- races have now entirely disappeared, there still remain relics of the third and fourth. The proper seat of this third root-race was that lost continent which Wallace told us, long ago, stood where now roll the waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, south and southwest of Asia. Here we have, in the degraded Papuan and Australian, the remainder of the third race. Degraded I call him, because his ancestors, though inferior to the highest races of to-day, were far in advance of him. So it must always be. Destroy the accumulations of the highest race of men now living, and the next generation will be bar- barians ; the second, savages.

The fourth root-race inhabited the famous, but no longer fabulous, Atlantis, now sunk, in greater part, beneath the waters of the Atlantic. Fragments of this race were left in Northern Africa, though perhaps none now remain there, and we are told that there is a remnant in the heart of China. From the relics of the African branch of this root-race, the old Egyptian priests had knowledge regarding the sunken continent, knowl- edge which was no fable, but the traditionary lore and history of the sur- vivors of the lost Atlantis.

Such is, in brief, an outline of the nature, history, and destiny of man, as the Buddhist relates it. How has he obtained his knowledge ? By means which, he says, are within the reach of any one. First, of the history : it is said to be well - authenticated tradition. Of the actual knowledge of former races, the Egyptian priests were the repositories, inheriting their information from the Atlantids. Of human nature and destiny the Bud-

��dhist would say : Here are the facts, look about you and see. From a theory of astronomy, or botany, or chemistry, we find an explanation of facts, and these facts explained, con- firm and establish the theory. So, too, of man, here is the view, once a theory, but now as firmly established as the law of gravitation. Besides, by study and contemplation, the expert has devel- oped, in advance of the age in which he lives, his spiritual soul, and this opens to him sources of information which place him on a higher level in point of knowledge than the rest of mankind, just as the man with seeing eyes has possibilities of information which are absolutely closed to one born blind.

Let me stop here to explain more fully what is the spiritual soul. I should call it, using a term that seems to me more natural to our vocabulary, the transcendental sense. In the reality of such a sense I am a firm believer. It was once fashionable to ridicule whatever was thought, or nicknamed, transcendental. Yet transcendentalism seems to me the only complete bar to modern scepticism. Faith, in the highest Christian sense, is transcend- ental. We know some things for which we can bring no evidence, things the truth of which lies not in logic, nor even in intellect. The intellect never gave man any firm conviction of God's being. Paley's mode of reasoning never brought conviction to any man's mind. At best, it only serves to con- firm belief, to stifle doubt, to silence logic misapplied. Faith is the action of the spiritual sense — or, as the Buddhist says, the spiritual soul. It seems to me that it is a fair statement, that every man who has a conviction of the being of God, has that conviction

�� �