But that Buddhism truly contains a religious formula capable of attracting to it the souls of our Occident, I have difficulty in believing. This India is very far from us, and its confused philosophy is behind us. I do not think that the nations of to-day will return to a by-gone mode; and then, this doctrine of Sakya-Muni has something against it, that I hesitate to say, as it might seem puerile: its god is too fat. Its god or its sage, as you wish. Yes, that breadth of form, that opulence of flesh, taken as a mark of goodness and power, shocks our artistic taste. Do not forget that every religion which claims our will ought to satisfy our æsthetic sentiment: it is one of the essential factors of the religious sentiment, a compound sentiment where all the emotions of a race ought to find their harmony. The opposition of India to us, so striking in the ideal of the beautiful, still continues in metaphysical speculation. We are too moderate, too sober, for the debauches of imagination in which it delights. Buddhism will be to us only a passing excrescence, and I ask myself if it lives well in the souls where it has sincerely penetrated. I should have much to do to speak, in the briefest manner, of all the books or treatises, which in a direct or indirect manner relate either to the war of Aryanism against Semitism, and principally against the Christianism in which certain authors see the most disastrous conquest of Semitic genius; or to the reviving of mystic traditions, strange dreams, and monstrous desires; or to a religious restoration, of which the most ordinary prejudice is to assure the immortality of the soul and to reopen the beyond to man. These works are in general of slight value; they are the multiplication of decays, and we are compelled to consider them as social wastes, of which the abundance betrays unquestionably the bad health of the organism, or at least a difficult crisis of its evolution. * * * * *