The Buddhist Nirvana resembles the Brahma in being accounted the ultimate principle of the world. When in the sixth century B. C. the royal Hermit of the Cakyas revolted against the cruel despotism of the priesthood, the legend relates that the sight of suffering in the forms of sickness, old age and death, roused him from a life of indolent pleasure, and impelled him to seek a remedy for the ills of human life. His counsels were sweet and kindly; he taught self-control and wise moderation in the indulgence of the passions, and brotherly help and sympathy to lessen the evils which foresight cannot avert. He lifted the degraded masses of the Indian land from out their dull despair; he warred against the distinctions of caste, he took women and slaves for his companions, he was a prophet of the people, whom the people loved. But even to him the ills of this mortal condition seemed little when compared with the endless possibilities of future ill that awaited the soul in the course of its ceaseless transmigrations. He yearned to shorten its weary path to the goal; and the mystic methods by which he sought to enter Nirvana were a means adapted to this end. Nirvana is the beginning and the end of things. Nirvana in which there is neither action nor feeling; in which intelligence and consciousness are submerged, appeared to this pessimist preacher the last, the only reality. Life is a delusion, real only in its pains: the entire cessation of conscious existence, is the solution he offers to human suffering. Nirvana is the universal--its conception is vast and dim; it hovers in the distance before the pilgrim of the earth; there will he find rest. Unlike the Western nations, the Hindoos regarded the idea of immortality with dread and terror, rather than pleased anticipation. The highest promises of their religion, were intended to assure them that they would cease to continue as individual beings or cease to continue altogether. Peace in the tomb when this present toil is over seemed to them the most desirable of goods, and a dreamless sleep from which no angel trump should ever wake the sleeper. "Two things," says Kant, "fill the soul with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence; the star-lit heavens above me, and the moral law within me."* * Kant's Works (Rosenkranz edition) vol. viii. p. 312.