To unite in passion, to contrive clever arrangements that insure the success of the business of propagation and the rearing of the young generation, these the animals also can do; their arrangements for living together in herds are by far more ingenious than those of men; but the capacity to doubt, to question, to seek--of these even the most highly developed animals possess only faint suggestions. To doubt is the duty of man, and the Buddha is the representative type of humanity, because _the_ doubter. We common men, we do indeed doubt of this and of that, and pique ourselves in no small measure upon our powers of judgment; but we none of us get any further than the symptoms. He alone seized at one grasp the entire, ever-changing host of doubts and questions by the root, with the daring of genius demanding to know the right to exist of life itself. This the reader ought well to bear in mind, otherwise for him the Buddha-thought must always retain something strange and forbidding, even as for the honest townsman we all know, a man who dares go up to High Authority Itself--whether established in heaven or on earth--and ask for its identification papers, ever remains in some sort a fear-inspiring figure. I now pass on to a point more external, but one, none the less, that has its own importance in an introduction to the thought-world of the Buddha. Buddhism is not only the oldest of the three world-religions, but also the only one of the three that is of Aryan origin. The significance of this fact lies for me not in the racial question, but in the matter of language. The tongue in which the Buddha preached, taught, and thought, whether it was the Pāḷi itself or some dialect related to it, belongs to the Indo-Germanic stem. The root-words, the grammatical constructions, are akin to those found in European languages. Without any more said, we see how deep is the tie that binds us to the Buddha. Mental life can mix and blend with mental life only through the medium of language. If no congruity exists between one language and another, neither can there be any congruity of thought. We know what enormous difficulties block the way of any European scholar who would force an entrance into the thought-world of the Chinese. So much so, that even at this late day it is still possible to argue the point as to whether the Chinese have any conception of deity at all. To this day it remains open to every translator to interpret Lao Tse, for example, either as a “god-inspired man”--to quote a good Christian translator--or as a free-lance in the fields of thought.