Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/451

Rh Buddha himself has come like Confucius to be an object of religion. Every founder of a religion is almost inevitably deified by his followers. But Buddha did not deify himself. He taught men to regard even the soul itself as a transient and illusory experience. Suffering is the universal law of existence. Existence is the penalty of desire, a rebirth owing to Karma, the dispositions and desert which are the precipitate of a previous existence. There is a fatal recurrence of existence, for life tends ever to create the conditions of its own reincarnation and continuance. Salvation means not successful existence, the realization of actual desires, but escape from existence, through the conquering of desire. In such a religion there is no god, for there is no ulterior power in or through which man is to fulfill his positive longings. But it is nevertheless religion, in that it is a release of man from his predicament. Nirvana is perhaps from all other points of view equivalent to annihilation; but from the point of view of man, conscious of his helplessness and failure, it means salvation. It is a philosophy of life, an accord between man and his world by which he wins the greatest good that he can conceive.

In order to understand the general scope of religious literature it is not sufficient that one should grasp the general principle of religion. One must know something of the forms which religion assumes in human life; and especially important is it to know something of its relations to science on the one hand, and to art and poetry on the other hand.

RELIGION AND SCIENCE

By science let us understand knowledge founded on fact or rigorous reasoning. How far is one to construe religious literature as science, that is, as the work of man's theorizing and cognizing faculties? There is probably more confusion in this matter at the present time than there has ever been in the past. The increase of doubt, the scientific refutation of beliefs once authorized by religion, have led to various attempts to retain these beliefs by a sheer act of "faith," or on account of their subjective and imaginative values. Since the ascendancy of Catholic orthodoxy in the fourteenth century there has been a steady tendency to regard one Christian teaching after another, the story of Jonah and the whale, the account of