The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. No one can read these lines without feeling that the Buddhist conception is as far as possible from being a trivial or vulgar one, and that the triviality and vulgarity are rather with those who cannot, up to a certain point, understand and sympathise with it. The religions of the East are very philosophical, and have kept very clearly in view this fundamental distinction between the knowable and the unknowable. In the ‘Century Magazine’ of July 1886, there is an interesting account of a conversation between an American missionary and the Bozu or chief priest of the great temple of the Shin Sect of Buddhists at Kioto in Japan. The priest was an intelligent and highly educated gentleman who spoke English, and was well versed in the speculations of modern philosophy. The conversation turned on theological questions, and when pressed by the argument for a Divine Creator, from design shown in the universe implying intelligence, he replied:— ‘No; God cannot _make_ matter. Only artificial things show design, only things which can be made. What do you mean by saying a thing shows design? You only mean that by trying a man could make it.’ And he proceeded to illustrate it thus:— ‘You show me a gold ring; the ring shows design, but not the gold; gold is an ultimate element, which can neither be made nor destroyed. When men can make a world, then they can prove that this one shows design, for the only way they know of design is by what they make.’ He went on to argue for the immortality of the soul, and as a consequence for its pre-existence and the transmigration of souls, from the conservation of energy; and concluded his argument against the creation and government of the world by a comprehensible, anthropomorphic Creator, by adducing the existence of evil. ‘There is a sickness,’ he said, ‘called fever and ague; what do you call the medicine to cure that?’ ‘Quinine.’ ‘Yes; now we have not found that long; a good God would not have let so many people suffer if He could have given them that. A man found it by chance. The sickness and suffering in this life are for wrong done in another life.’ We may not accept this unproved theory of the cause of sickness and suffering, but it is very interesting to find that candid and intelligent minds, brought up in a society and religious beliefs so widely different from our own, have arrived practically at the same conclusions as John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and other leaders of advanced thought in modern Europe, and drawn almost identically the same line between that which is knowable and that which is unknowable by the human mind.