The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Müller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit’s immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a _state_, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a _part_ of the integral _whole_, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modifications of form; for form pertains to matter, and the state of _Nirvana_ implies a complete purification or a final riddance from even the most sublimated particle of matter. This word, _absorbed_, when it is proved that the Hindus and Buddhists believe in the _immortality_ of the spirit, must necessarily mean intimate union, not annihilation. Let Christians call them idolaters, if they still dare do so, in the face of science and the latest translations of the sacred Sanscrit books; they have no right to present the speculative philosophy of ancient sages as an inconsistency and the philosophers themselves as illogical fools. With far better reason we can accuse the ancient Jews of utter _nihilism_. There is not a word contained in the Books of Moses--or the prophets either--which, taken literally, implies the spirit’s immortality. Yet every devout Jew hopes as well to be “gathered into the bosom of A-Braham.” The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anæsthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the _Doppelganger_, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.