PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON BUDDHISM AND ATHEISM. TN a little volume

of much vigour, freshness, and not a little learning, " The Natural History of Atheism," just published by. Professor Blackie,* the veteran Edinburgh teacher, who, un- like many other teachers, has never ceased to be a student,

enumerates three disturbing causes which he deems the most im- -portant of those which have led to the thoroughly unnatural _phenomenon of a new and cultivated Atheism. These he

considers to be . the causes which foster an unnatural dis- position towards pride and self-confidence in men,—those which foster an unnatural disposition towards democratic .revolt against superior virtue and capacity,—and finally, those which, by imposing on men an unreal dogmatism, drive .them into the reaction of agnosticism or atheism. In much of what. Professor Blackie says on all these heads we agree, though in much, also we differ, but by far the most remarkable and in- structive part of his book—to our minds at least—is his chapter on Buddhism, in which he sketches with great care and ability the religious physiognomy of that strangely popular faith, and .draws out its very curious analogies with the agnosticism of Mr. John Stuart Mill and the other professors of scientific doubt. If Professor Blackie had specially noted the still more remarkable resemblances and differences between Buddhism and Positi-

vism, as the latter has been recently explained to us on what the writer calls its religious side by Mr. Frederic Harrison, he would have added to the value of this valuable chapter. But even as it is, it throws a clearer light on the the genius of Buddhism than any essay which has as yet fallen in our way. And yet, strangely enough, though Professor Blackie gives his readers the means of seeing what it was in Buddhism which was so hostile to all theology, he misses, as it seems to us, the most striking part of his own lesson. The difficulty which, according to

the tradition, hindered Sakya Muni from referring creation to God, is thus given by Professor Blackie Bodhisatwa objects to creation by Isvara, because then there could be no succession of events, no causes of sorrow, no variety of Gods, but all men would regard Isvara as their Father—there could be no disputes about this very subject, whether Isvara exists or not—in short, if Isvara created all things, then all things must have been Good, and there could have been no possibility of eviL" And again, Buddha says :—

"'I seek a system in which questions about the elements shall have no place—in which there shall be no discussion about the senses or their objects—no talk of death or birth, disease or old age—no question- ing about existence (bhnva) or non-existence, about eternity or non- eternity, in which words shall be useless, and the idea of the boundless and illimitable realised, but not talked about.' Then he added this Gatha In the beginning there was neither birth or death, or age or disease, Neither earth or water, fire, wind, or space,

Then -there was no need of a Teacher for the three worlds, But a condition of perfect freedom, lasting, pure, and self-contained."

And thereupon Professor Blackie observes :—" The passage, un- fortunately, affords evidence of a general dislike in Buddha's mind to all theological speculation. As a man who participates in the great mass of evil which exists,' says he, I seek only a physician to give me health :' that is, I am a practical man, my mission is to preach redemption from the curse of sin, by the practice of virtue ; and I do not see that curious speculations about the creation of the world can help me in my work. Nay, rather I do see that many learned Brahmins occupy themselves with speculations about Trimurti and other theological formulas, while the world around them is lying in sin and wretchedness.

* Biddy, Isbister, and Co.

This is somewhat like the tone of our own John Stuart Mill, and men of his school ; and no doubt is amongst the most plausible and pardonable forms that the absurdity of atheism or agnosticism can assume. There are other points in this same discourse which plainly point to an identity of Buddha's negative philosophy with that of the great English Utilitarian. The existence of evil is a stumbling-block to both. If there had been a Creator, all things would have been good ; and there would be no possibility of evil." And again, Professor Blackie adds, when criticising the Buddhist conception that there is a contradiction between the recognition of a universal law of causation and the existence of God :—

" Another of Buddha's difficulties in this passage recalls Mill : ' If there was an Isvara,' says the eon of Suddohana, there could be no suc- cession of events.' Strange ; when God is just the eternal centre from which all successions must necessarily be supposed to proceed : but observe, this is merely an Oriental statement of the famous doctrine of invariable sequence, which Mill and his school uses as a shibboleth to• juggle the idea of a great First Cause out of the world. That all things are connected together by a necessary law of cause and effect, is Buddha's fundamental principle of metaphysics:— 'Whoever, practising the rules of a Brahmana, observes the world around him, Sees at once that these things are produced by mutual relationship ; Perceiving that the world around him is produced by this mutual dependence, He recognises then that all phenomena are but the result of cause and effect.' "

Now, while it is obvious enough that Professor Blackie fully understands and sympathises largely,—too largely, we think,-

with this particular objection of Buddha's against theology, that it had a tendency to distract men from the main point of leading a pure life and the best mode of curing human ills, it is equally obvious to us that he misses altogether the Oriental horror which Buddha felt, and which so curiously distinguished his (in other respects) very similar view from that of the modem Positivists, of ascribing to the invariable succession of exter- nal phenomena anything divine. Professor Blackie says very simply that we want an eternal centre for these invariable pheno- mena, these constant processions of night and day, winter and summer, sleep and waking, will and effort, satiety and desire, pain and pleasure ; and that the only adequate centre is God. But that was just what the Oriental thinker—and we take leave to say some of the best and highest even amongst European thinkers— found it most difficult to conceive. To these it would be very much like saying that God is no more than an adequate expla- nation of Circumstance, and that we naturally ascribe the yoke and tyranny of circumstance at once to the will of a spiritual being. Now it is clear enough that this is just what Buddha,— at least, if the tradition be true,—could not do. That which he thirsted for was a spiritual redemption from the power of cir- cumstance,—and he was willing to believe in God, if God could but have been presented to him as one who would set him at liberty from the tyranny exercised by external events over his mind. What rendered him unable to conceive of God was the necessity of ascribing to him the creation of this world, of time and change in which everything seemed restless and mutable, and everything poor ; while what he was thirsting after was spiritual independence of this fret and stir of external life,— serenity, peace, purity, unaffected by the waves and turmoil of time. What Professor Blackie regards as forcing the belief in God on the reasonable mind, the Buddhist prophet regarded as not merely failing to suggest anything of the kind, but even as inconsistent with God. He thought of what was highest even in man as that in him which was able to resist the thrill of the moment, to triumph over the impressions of circumstance, to overcome the temptation of opportunity; and to describe God as the Being who invented and caused—nay, was even ex- pressed by—all this flickering play of life and change, seemed to him to be describing God as a being altogether inferio. even to the highest nature of men, and as rather their evil genius tlu..a their deliverer from evil. Professor Blackie seems to be quite unable to enter for a moment into this view, even though he has so carefully described the physiognomy of the great teacher who popularised it, and drove it into the very heart of millions of his fellow-countrymen. He so far shares the scien- tific, as distinguished from the religious, view of the succession of phenomena, that that succession of phenomena seems to him appar- ently as divine as anything else in the universe, and suggests God as its natural source and spring, rather than as the explana- tion of that in man which protests against the despotism of circumstance and controls the moral friction of events. Sakya Muni evidently regarded the creator of the external world, as the author of that which distracts man from his true self, not as the author of that which brings man to his true self. What

is now called " science," he would have regarded as tending to plunge men deeper and deeper into the whirl of temporary in- terests and utilitarian schemes ; while religion was that which secured our superiority over the moral gambling involved in all such excitements and schemes, and liberated us from the fever they excite.

Nor is this element in Buddhism at all peculiar to the ancient world. Any one who will look into the very curious and in-

teresting " Year-book of the Brahmo Somaj,"* of which the new number has just appeared, will find the most ample proof that tide element in the Eastern religion,—this protest against the notion that man can permit himself to be trained and dis- ciplined by subordinating himself to the laws of events as if he were himself the mere product of phenomenal laws,—is as living and real now to the Hindoo struggling after the highest life as it was in the time of Sakya Muni ; and that Keshub Chunder Sen is at the present moment setting on foot a movement of precisely the same mystic kind as the great Buddhist reformer, to the dismay of some of his European admirers, and the bewilderment of many of them, a movement in- tended to warn them against losing themselves in anything outward, and to revive in them the belief that God is something much above the mere power and will to create the external order of nature,—is, indeed, a power infinitely above nature, and one which requires from man that he should sedulously keep himself above nature too. Undoubtedly there is, and always has been, deep in the Oriental mind this conception of the religious life, as one in some degree antithetical to the eager objective life, whether of science, or of the world which makes use of science for its own pleasure ; and curiously enough, it was so deeply ingrained in Sakya Muni as to lead him to deny, or at least to doubt the existence of, any God worthy of the name to whom it would be possible to ascribe the restless vibrations of the eternal order. More or less, he probably agreed with the old Gnostics, who ascribed the order of Nature to some inferior kind of being, and ascribed to God that infinite serenity which would be incompatible with the generation of life and change and the fitful play of temporal desire.

Now, the question is whether Professor Blackie, and the English thinkers who regard God chiefly as the hidden source of the great procession of cosmical phenomena, are not really playing into the hands of those scientific agnostics who say that, as we can know nothing but phenomena, we cannot know God at all, and that he is even intrinsically unknowable. It seems to us that the Oriental thinkers who have pushed the opposite view to so great an extreme, that they have held it impossible that any Being deserving human worship,—deserving to be called God,— could have marshalled into being that long series of uniform antecedents and consequents which leave the human soul so little peace, so little calm, so little self-possession, have nevertheless hold of a truth which the modern philo- sophy has forgotten. It is, of course, a blunder and an exaggeration, to deny that the external Order has been born in the same infinite mind which impresses so deeply on all spiritual beings that they are something more than circumstance, that it is their highest destiny to make circumstance serve them, and not to serve circumstance; in short, that there is a life in them which no chain of antecedents or consequents will either explain or explain away. But though no thinker who has been trained in the science of the Western world, will be disposed to assert that the order of nature is unworthy of a spiritual cause, he will not learn, we think, what Oriental systems might teach him, if he supposes that anything in the order or plan of external creation, —anything except the mind of a self-conscious being,—can for a moment suggest to him God. The scientific habit of treating the detection of uniform antecedents and consequents as explanations of the order around us, is, as the Buddhist philosophy saw, essen- tially atheistic. Of course it tends to resolve man into a mere bundle of physical, chemical, physiological, and psychological accidents, in the confusion of which his true nature and highest life are completely lost, till he really becomes the mere creature of circumstance which the materialistic philosophy declares him to be. The power in some measure to control circumstances, instead of being moulded absolutely by them, is the most characteristic of all human powers ; and though the Oriental philosophy overleaped the truth, and aimed too high, when it tried to make man altogether independent of circum- stance, yet it did not overleap the truth so much on the one side, as the scientific philosophy which resolves man into a bundle of phenomena, falls short of it on the other side. It seems tons that Atheism is the natural and legitimate result of applying the • Fear-boot of the Brahmo Soma/ for 1877. Edited by Sophia Dobson Collet. London : William and Norgate. scientific method of resolving every question into a question concerning the uniformities of succession, to the explanation of a being who recognises as one of the first and most significant facts affecting him, that he is, in some sense at least, above this order of succession, since he can change and mould it, and can resist its tyranny over his inner nature, and since he is sure that it exists for him, not he for it. If you will find in every problem of life a mere question of scientific order, of course you will end in Atheism, and in denying man (in the sense we attach to the word) as well as God, for neither Man nor God can be expressed in terms of any law of uniform succession of antecedent and consequent, however complex. The true philosophy should retain, we think, at least enough of that Buddhist horror of identifying God with the mere cause of an endless chain of short-lived phenomena,— the mere blower of an inexhaustible series of bubbles rising to the surface of the visible world and then disappearing for ever,—to place the incommensurability between God and circumstance vividly before us. The scientific theism which treats God as the origin of all phenomena is, philosophically at least, inferior to the Buddhist atheism which demanded in God, if he existed at all, a being who could not be thus frittered away, as one may say, in external phenomena. No doubt the truth is that the undeviating external order of the universe is subservient, and intended to be subservient, to the moral training of beings who stand more or less above that order, and who are intended to acquire gradually, in an infinitesimal degree, the divine serenity in the midst of change, and the divine power to elicit moral good out of labour, sacrifice, and loss. But if the Buddhist ideal,—perfect calm and freedom from all stir and emotion,—is above the mark, and renders the highest moral attitude,—that of willing sacrifice, —impossible, surely the philosophical ideal of the modern English philosophy, which sees in man nothing but the product of an inexorable necessity, whose true happiness lies in discovering the line of least resistance to the long heritage of circumstance, and then moving on that line, is below it, and can only aid in teaching us to think of God as nothing more or less than that sum-total of all cosmical circumstances including human life, of which man would form a very insignificant and hardly even an important fragment. Professor Blackie admits that that is Pantheism, but thinks Pantheism so far justifiable and religious. We cannot agree with him. Every system which explains away the independent will of man, ends in explaining away also the personal life of God as distinguished from the im- personal harmony of Nature.