“Further, one may entertain the notion: ‘This identical self of mine, I maintain, is veritably to be found now here, now there, reaping the fruits of its good and of its evil deeds; and this my self is a thing permanent, constant, eternal, not subject to change, and so abides for ever.’ But this, monks, is a walking in mere opinion, a resorting to mere notions, a barren waste of views, an empty display of views; this is merely to writhe, caught in the toils of views”; runs a passage in the second Sutta of the _Majjhima Nikāya_. While we find Buddhaghosa’s great commentary, the _Visuddhi Magga_, saying: “There is no entity, no living principle, no elements of being, transmigrated from the last existence into the present one.” * * * * * I sum up in brief what has gone before. The Buddha teaches:-- All actual processes are combustion processes. They burn in virtue of purely individual _in-forces_ (Kammas). As such they are self-sustaining processes. As such they are beginningless. They have sustained themselves from beginninglessness down to the present by volitional activities. With the Kamma-teaching the significance of Buddhism for a world-conception is given in all its amplitude. To possess a world-conception means to comprehend the play of world-events. To comprehend means to comprehend adequate causes. Adequate causes must be forces. Forces of necessity must be something imperceptible to sense. As such they must lie beyond the reach of all comprehension. An exception to this is constituted by one single process--the _I_, the individual himself; inasmuch as the _in-force_, in virtue of which I have my being, _becomes_ perceptible to sense in consciousness. This given, the whole problem here focuses itself, as it were automatically, into one point, forth from which every genuine view of the world must necessarily proceed--_one’s own I_. Whilst faith conceives of the _I_ from a transcendental standpoint, _i.e._ believes; whilst science strains itself to conceive of the _I_ from the standpoint of the material world, _i.e._ inductively; _the Buddha conceives of it from the standpoint of itself_, i.e. _intuitively_. Along with my comprehension of myself is comprehended the entire residue of the world. If I myself have being in virtue of a purely individual _in-force_, then all remaining actual processes also have being in virtue of purely individual _in-forces_, and I comprehend them all--_i.e._ the world--as thereby beyond being comprehended; not as being incomprehensible in themselves--that were a self-evident contradiction--but as so fashioned that each of them can only comprehend itself. Here it may be objected:-- A world-conception that teaches me to comprehend the world as being incomprehensible--is it not just as much of the nature of a paradox as the world-conception of faith? To this the answer is:--