The following is the conclusion of an eloquent address made by Sir Edwin Arnold on Sunday, the 15th ulto., tothe Japanese Educational Society Why, then, have I told you, gentlemen, or endeavoured to tell you, how an edu-leated Englishman of the Victorian Age looks round the horizons of the scientific and philosophic departments laid open to him, and returns to his own studies glad of the present, and confident in the future? Why have £ tried to show to you the Western sehvlar reflecting upon that newly revealed boundlessness of the starry universe; those subtle secrets of the microscope; the "chemist's brilliant analysis of nature's atomic architecture; the electrician's magic, utilised everywhere but nowhere as yet understood; the large generalizations' of Darwin; the settled reign of order and of law, seen even among such lowly communi= ties'as those of the ants and the bees; the enchanted world of botany, where the flowers, for special reasons' of their own, put in practice a thousand exquisite strata gems in order to grow yearly more beautiful? Te is partly because these imperfect sentences express my own established persuasion of the divine purpose manifest in every corner of the world, and partly because this fair and civilised and gentle land is already in possession not only of the spirit to appreciate the purport of such words, but has furthermore inherited special and lofty ideas from the neighbouring East to which these things belong, and by which they may be vastly illu: inated. T have often ale, und 1 shall say again and again, that between Buddhis and modern ' science there exists close intellectual bond. When Tyndall tells us of sounds we cannot hear, and Norman Lockyer of colours we cannot when Sir William Thomson and Mr, Sylvester push mathematical investigation to regions almost beyond the Calculus, and others, still bolder, imagine and try to grapple with, though they cannot actually grasp, a space of four dimensions, what is all this except the Buddhist Maya, " pracical recognition of the illusions of the enses? And when Darwin shows us life passing onward and upward though a series of constantly improving forms towards the Better and the Best, each individual in new existence with the records of bygone good and evil stamped deep and inffaceably from the old ones, what is this again but the Buddhist doctrine of Dharma and of Karma? And when the Victorian poet and preacher and moralist rightly discern and worthily teach, as the last and truest wisdom, that Justice, Duty, {and Right control events, and that the eternal Equity and Compassion of the universe overlooks and forgives no wren, and no disobedience, but also neglects an forgets no good deed or thought, what is this except the teaching of the Buddha? Finally, if we gather up all the results of modern research and look away from the best literature to the largest. discovery in hysies and the latest word in biology, what is the conelusion—the glad and happy conclusion—forced upon the mind except that which renders true Buddhism so glad and hopeful? Surely is is that the Descent of man from low beginnings implies his Ascent to supreme and glorious develop. ments; that **the Conservation of Matter and of Energy," a laet absolutely demonstrated, points to the kindred fact of the con-
of matter is but the apparent vehicle and servation and continuity of all Life, where-expression; that death is probably nothing but a passage and a promotion; that the destiny of man has been, and must be, and will he worked out by himself under eternal and benign laws which never vary and creature the path thus lies open, by com: never interfere; and that for every living pliance, by effort, by insight, by aspiration,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.