So another prediction of Schopenhauer’s, uttered in the beginning of the century, seems to be repeated in many publications at its close. “In India,” he affirmed, “our religion will never strike root; the primitive wisdom of the human race will never be pushed aside by any incidents in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom will flow back upon Europe, and produce a thorough change in our knowing and thinking.”[18] He certainly laboured hard to bring about the fulfilment of his prophecy, preaching Nirvana as the goal of moral effort, though confessing that his own animal propensities allowed him no hope of attaining it. In his lifetime his strenuous endeavours were unsuccessful, and he died in 1860 in comparative neglect. Since then, and especially since the publication of his book _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, the doctrine painfully planted, has taken root in the congenial soil prepared for it by Comte and his disciples. Spiritualism again—which, though originating only in 1848, in circumstances almost ludicrous, has spread so rapidly and extensively that it now claims to count its converts by millions all over the world—has obviously contributed to the dissemination and growth of pseudo-Buddhist ideas. With a literature of over five hundred psychological works—many of them voluminous and very costly—and with forty-six periodicals regularly published in Europe and America, it not only assails Christianity, but supports the doctrine that “the Reign of Law has supplanted the Reign of God; that just as we have ceased to embody the conception of the State in a person, it is time we should cease similarly to embody the conception of the universe, for loyalty to a personal ruler is an anachronism in the nineteenth century, and will some day become extinct.”[19] Its apostles profess to find in the Christian faith many signs of disintegration, and they look “to the bloodless and innocent record of Buddhism for the reconstruction of true religious faith upon a permanent basis.”[20] This they expound in a so-called theosophy in phraseology largely borrowed from the New Testament, but descriptive of a curious amalgam of later Buddhist and Hindu doctrines utterly contradictory to the essential teaching of Christianity.