Buddha has taught that there are worlds more perfect and developed, and others less so, than this earth; and that the inhabitants of each world correspond in development with itself.[Z] Mr. Lafcadio Hearn says: "The Buddhist denial of the reality of the apparitional world is not a denial of the reality of phenomena as phenomena, nor a denial of the forces producing phenomena objectively and subjectively.... The true declaration is, that what we perceive is never reality in itself, and that even the ego that perceives is an unstable plexus of feelings which are themselves unstable, and in the nature of illusions. This position is scientifically strong, perhaps impregnable." [Z] _Vide Buddhist Catechism_, by Colonel Olcott. Indian philosophers have attempted, with a fair measure of success, to overcome the perplexity presented by the idea of diversity in unity. They say that, "as an individual can conjure up visions of various phenomena in his waking state without destroying his sense of unity as an individual, so there may be a multiform creation in the One Absolute without any suppression of its unitary nature. To the Unconscious Absolute phenomena stand in the relation of dreams to the individual who is conscious of dreams on awaking. But the Unconscious Absolute does not awake; therefore 'It' remains unconscious of phenomena. The variety of the world is like the variety of a dream." In a commentary on the Essence of the Upanishads the fictitiousness of emanations from unity is thus illustrated:-- "A belated wayfarer mistakes a piece of rope lying on the road for a snake; the delusion disappears, but the rope remains the rope. So with the apparitional world: the delusion passes, and unity remains.[AA] [AA] _Cf._ "Illusions are sensations wrongly interpreted" (D. G. Ritchie). "All the figments of the world-fiction may be made to disappear in such a way that pure thought, or the self, shall alone remain, in the same manner as the fictitious serpent seen in a piece of rope may be made to disappear, and the rope that underlies it may be made to remain. The rope was only the rope all the time it falsely seemed to be a snake. The fictitious world may be made to disappear as the fictitious snake is made to disappear, and this is its sublation."[AB] [AB] _Philosophy of the Upanishads_, by A. E. Gough. Professor Seth, referring in his book, entitled _The Position of Man in the Kosmos_, to Mr. Bradley's _Appearance and Reality_, remarks: "Reality 'must own' and somehow include appearance." In another part of his book he writes: "We are ourselves immersed in the process of the universe. We can only live our own life, and see through our own eyes. If we could do more, that would mean that we ourselves had vanished from the universe; the place which had known us would know us no more; and there would be, as it were, a gap created in the tissue of the world."