The continuance of an individual's Karma, conceived as the effects of a man's character upon individuals whom he influences, is a perfectly thinkable process, and a generally accepted fact. But, when we are called upon to consider how it comes about that, on the death of a sentient being, a new sentient being is at once produced, to take up the effects of the deceased one's Karma, then we seem to be launched into a mystery that can only be explained by another mystery. If such a doctrine is to be interpreted literally, it would seem to necessitate a numerical equality of births and deaths; a new-born babe would have to be ready at each death to receive the Karma-effects of the deceased. It might, however, be made faintly thinkable by including available births in other solar systems, and by allowing for a certain number of Karmas coming to an end by the attainment of Nirvana. This planet is held by Buddhists to be in sympathetic relationship with the other worlds, and there are countless millions of beings who change places. A number of men die somewhere on this earth, and they may not be re-born here at all; a number of beings die in some other planet, and may be re-born here at the same time. This particular phase of the doctrine of Karma has been so distinctly enunciated in Buddhist writings that it becomes a question for the interpreter of Buddhism to decide whether it should be retained as a literal statement, and so dismissed as an unthinkable, or whether it should be given the chance of being classified as rational by expansive treatment. Buddhism is so systematically and eminently rationalistic throughout its teaching that one feels impelled to a supreme effort to sustain its reputation in this one respect. In any case it would seem just to assume that it had a rationalistic basis in the mind of Gotama, however difficult it may be for us to discover the foundation of Rationalism on which it rests. An apparently irrational theory should not be rejected as irrational as long as it is within the bounds of possibility that the apparent irrationality is due to the limitations of our reason, or the absence of data, that have not come under our experience and knowledge of Cosmic laws. Everything may be contrary to what we think it to be; and everything may be opinion only. As some beautiful poems cannot be thought out in connection with one's immediate environment without a loss of poetic value, but require mental transposition to a distant and different scene for their beauty to be fully and poetically realized, so, unless we remove our imagination from its every-day associations to an entirely different "scenery" of thought, we cannot expect to intelligently appreciate the complete significance of Buddhistic conceptions. As Professor Oldenberg puts it, we must, when approaching the study of Buddhism, divest ourselves wholly of all customary modes of thinking.