Are there things which are fixedly and everlastingly the same, upon which no change, no vicissitude can ever act? There is the law, there is the state of Neibban. The law is the expression of truth, which is reality, in contradistinction to the unreality of the visible world. The essence of the law is contained in the four sublime truths, which are emphatically called the Law of the Wheel. They are the declaration of the true state and condition of all beings; they proclaim the necessity of putting an end to such a miserable state of things, and point out the sure means of freeing oneself from the miseries attending existence. These truths are eternal, insomuch that what they proclaim has ever been true in all the worlds that have preceded the present one, since they always resemble each other, and will ever be equally true during the endless series of worlds that will follow. In this sense the law, in the opinion of Buddhists, being the declaration of truth, or of what is, must be eternal, as truth itself is everlasting. The state of Neibban, in contradistinction to that of existence such as we comprehend it, is likewise a thing which never changes, since it is the end of changes. It remains always the same; it is the opposite of existence. What is then called here everlasting, or eternal, is, in the opinion of Buddhists, but the things that are conceived as subsisting abstractively _per se_, and never affected by the great principle of mutability that pervades all beings. To sum up the whole in a few words, the science which points out the means of coming out of the whirlpool of existences, and the being out of that circle, such are the two things which are always the same, never undergo any change, and are eternal. [46] In the definition of man which is given by the Buddhist author, we find the words intelligence, capacity for reflecting, comparing and drawing inferences, &c. He who is not familiar with the revolting materialist doctrines of Buddhism would be tempted to believe that they admit of a soul or spiritual principle subsisting in man. But such is not the case. The faculty for performing all the functions which we rightly attribute to the soul resides in the sixth sense, called _mano_, or the heart, or the knowing principle. But this sense, in their opinion, is as material as the eye, the ear, and the other senses. It is delightful to the Christian reader to find in the midst of a heap of rubbish and fables a few fragments of the primitive revelation. We see man coming from a noble origin, appearing in this world with the most glorious privileges, which he forfeits by eating the rice called Tsale, which produced on his being the same destructive effects which the eating of the forbidden fruit caused on our first parents in the garden of Eden.