THE SCOLEX SCHOOL 
99 
out a candle which would leave Moses in a much more 
Egyptian darkness than we ever supposed when we were 
children. 
This is not science. This is not business. This is 
American Sunday journalism. The Hindu and the 
American are very much alike in this innocence, this 
"naivete" which demands fairy stories with ever bigger 
giants. They cannot bear the idea of anything being 
complete and done with. So, they are always talking in 
superlatives, and are hard put to it when the facts catch 
up with them, and they have to invent new superlatives. 
Instead of saying that there are bricks of various sizes, 
and specifying those sizes, they have a brick and a 
super-brick, and "one" brick, and "some" brick; and 
when they have got to the end they chase through the 
dictionary for some other epithet to brick, which shall 
excite the sense of wonder at the magnificent progress 
and super-progress-I present the American public with 
this word-which 
is supposed to have been made. 
Probably the whole thing is a bluff without a single fact 
behind it. Almost the whole of the Hindu psychology is 
an example of this kind of journalism. They are not 
content with the supreme God. The other man wishes to 
show off by having a supremer God than that, and when 
a third man comes along and finds them disputing, it is 
up to him to invent a supremest super-God. 
It is simply ridiculous to try to add to the definition 
of Nibbana by this invention of Parinibbana, and only 
talkers 
busy 
themselves 
with 
these 
fantastic 
speculations. 
The serious student minds his own 
business, which is the business in hand. The President of 
a Corporation does not pay his book-keeper to make a 
statement of the countless billions of profit to be made 
in some future year. It requires no great ability to string 
a row of zeros after the significant figure until the ink 
runs out. What is wanted is the actual balance of the 
week.