Collected Works (Vol. II)

260 SCIENCE AND BUDDHISM I take my refuge in the Sangha. These are not isolated efforts on my part ; although in one sense isolation is eternally perfect and can never be overcome,! in another sense associates are possible and desirable. One third of humanity are Buddhists ; add men of Science and we form an absolute majority; among Buddhists a very large proportion have deliberately gone out from social life of any kind to tread these paths of Research. Is the Way very hard? Is the brain tired? The results slow to come ? Others are work- ing, failing, struggling, crowned here and there with rare garlands of success. Success for ourselves, success for others; is it not Compassion that binds us closer than all earthlier ties? Ay, in joy and in sorrow, in weakness and in strength, do I take my refuge in the Sangha. XITT. CONCLUSION. Let me give a rapid resumé of what we have gone through. (a) We have stripped Science and Bud- dhism of their accidental garments, and administered a rebuke to those who so swathe them. (4) We have shown the identity of Science and Buddhism in respect of : (1) Their fact. (2) Their theory. (3) Their method. (4) Their enemies. (c) While thus admitting Buddhism to be merely a branch of Science, we have shown it to be a most important branch, since its promise is to break down the wall at which all Science stops. When Professor Ray Lankester has to write, ‘‘ The whole order of nature, including living and lifeless matter—man, animal, and 1 ¢.e, on normal planes, gas—is a network of mechanism, the main features and many details of which have been made more or less obvious to the wondering intelligence of mankind by the labour and ingenuity of scientific investi- gators. But no sane man has ever pre- tended, since science became a definite body of doctrine, that we know or ever can hope to know or conceive of the possibility of knowing, whence this mechanism has come, why it is there, whither it is going, and what there may or may not be beyond and beside it which our senses are incapable of appreciating. These things are not ‘explained’ by science, and never can be,”’ he gives a curious example of that quaint scientific pride which knows the limits of its powers, and refuses to entertain the hope of transcending them. Unfortunately, he is as one who, a hundred years ago, should have declared any knowledge of the chemistry of the fixed stars impossible. To invent new methads, and to revolutionise the functions of the senses by training or other- wise is the routine work of to-morrow.! But, alas ! he goes even further. ‘‘Similarly we seek by the study of cerebral disease to trace the genesis of the phenomena which are supposed by some physicists who have strayed into biological fields to justify them in announcing the ‘discovery’ of ‘Telepathy’ and a belief in ghosts.” To talk of cerebral disease as the char- acteristic of one who merely differs from you {and that because he has more know- ledge than yourself) is itself a symptom familiar to alienists. (I may say I hold no brief for Professor Lodge, here attacked. I am not even interested in any of his re- sults, as such of them as I am acquainted with deal with objective and trivial pheno- mena.) Of course, as long as what Darwin called variation is called disease by Professor Ray Lankester, we shall (if we accept his views, 1 See note p. 258.