The answer is to be sought for in the working of that great moral instinct which is at the root of the belief in transmigration. Though there was no person, no soul to emigrate from the body, though the man perished, there was something which he called the Karma—a word coined by old Brahman sages long before him, though used by them in a different sense—that survived.[195] The aggregate of the good and evil in the life that had come to an end formed the seed of another existence, so that each new individual and generation became the exact and inevitable results of those that had preceded them. It was evidently a theory of continuity as unscientific as it was unphilosophic. It could not be called an evolution in any sense of the word, seeing it meant the appearance in a new individual of the mental and physical acts of another who had ceased to be. The assertion, again, that though there was no “continuing consciousness,” no transience of soul in any sense from one person to the other, the two persons are one, has been very properly stigmatised as a “psychological absurdity.”[196] From the first, though one of their stablest dogmas, this one was a difficulty to the Buddhists themselves. Their learned men never professed to justify it to reason, but accepted it as a mystery, in open contradiction to their principle that everything was to be rejected which could not be comprehended or explained. The common people again simply ignored it, and adhered to the belief of their fathers in continuity of life and personal identity for man in the future. The sages might refine, but the moral sense of the masses could not escape from the conviction that the evil which they had done must follow them, and the good which they would do could not be interred with their bones. Even the speculation of the sages was a telling confirmation of the truth that man cannot get rid of himself. He may make a mock at God, may demand, If a man die can he live again? or how differs the life of a man from the life of a beast? but he cannot refine away his moral sense and the instinct of retribution which is inwoven in his inmost being. Buddha acknowledged no moral government of Deity, discarded the old belief that the same soul must receive the reward of the deeds done in the body; he denied even to the soul a separate existence from the perishable body; but he was haunted by the ghost of personal identity. He felt absolutely certain that there was a real connection of cause and effect between past and present and future, and that each act of the soul must work out its full effect to the bitter end.[197] So it was only by profession that God was mocked; men were witnesses to themselves of a Sovereign Power forcing Himself upon them, even when they tried to forsake Him, compelling them to receive His thoughts when they would not think for themselves. So in primitive Buddhism we have the strange paradox that out of Atheism there arose a