It is owing to this content of actuality in Buddhism and its language that so many expressions are found in it for which a fitting translation is scarcely or not at all to be found. In language, also, a gradual stiffening process is taking place amongst us which renders us ever more capable in definition, and ever more incapable in the comprehension of actuality. Here quite evidently we are caught in a vicious circle. We are proud of this our ability in defining, and imagine we have comprehended the thing itself when we have succeeded in decorating it with a definition. In such cases, however, all we have really done is to fling bridges of thought, as it were, high up over things, which permit us to hop from one conceptual “place” to another without once wetting even our toes in actuality. On the Rhine near Bonn there stands hewn in stone these words: “Caesar primus flumini pontem imposuit.” There are not a few minds associated with the lecture-room and laboratory who take themselves for Cæsars when they “impose” new definitions upon things, upon actuality. The riddles of life in this wise are neatly and perfectly resolved in definitions; which, after all, is nothing very much to wonder at with riddles of life that for the most part only exist in the form of definitions. All things in the world are so constituted that with them concept and object are separable: the concept admits of being “manipulated” apart from the object. And all mental life in a certain sense just amounts to the attempt to get concept and object to coincide--an attempt that eternally fails, because eternally losing itself in unending series. One thing only in all the world is so constituted that in regard to it no separation of concept and object is found--I myself! For that which I conceive myself as, that even I myself am; and every attempt to form a concept is just a form of myself. Here the concept of myself is experience, actuality itself. I myself am the unique, to me accessible, pure actuality of the world. _Buddhism is the teaching of actuality._ It starts out with the only pure actuality of the world, and from this point proceeds to suck the entire play of world-events without exception into the whirlpool of its thinking. And with this we find ourselves in the presence of the Buddha-thought itself. V THE DOCTRINE OF THE BUDDHA I begin with the question that concludes the third essay: “How can it be possible for faith and science to possess opposed conceptions when both actually start out from one and the same given thing, the world?” All that exists presents itself on one hand as “something that is,” and on the other as “something that happens”--that is to say, as something found in a state of perpetual change, as processes. Where something happens, there adequate causes must be present. These adequate causes must be forces.