Brought up in these common views, probably not one of us modern Europeans has perused, for the first time, a philosophical statement of the pessimist principles which underlie the vast religions of the farther East, without a shock of astonishment. Individually, we may have found our particular share of existence painful rather than pleasurable. Disease, poverty, disappointment, bereavement, may have embittered our years. But that any order of men, outside of lunatic asylums, should lay down as a postulate, whereon to build religion and morality, that Life is _per se_ an evil, and that, “whatever we have been, ’tis something better not to be,” and proceed benevolently to point out how we may, by much diligence, shake off not only this mortal coil, but the entire burden of being, and arrive at the consummation of nonentity,--this is an idea revolutionizing the order of our conceptions, and as nearly incredible as any assertion dealing with the vagaries of the human mind may be. Even yet, perhaps, some doubts may legitimately linger as to whether the Buddhist creed, elsewhere than in Nepaul (where it certainly does _not_ teach annihilation), really intends by “Nirvana” to set forth the emptiness, rather than the plenitude, of being. But that both Brahmin and Buddhist teachers have systematically dealt with life as an evil rather than as a good, there is, I apprehend, no question among competent inquirers. Here, then, are two absolutely contrasted, fundamental conceptions of the totality of human existence,--the Western, that life is a blessing; the Eastern, that it is a curse. The European cries,-- “’Tis life, not death, for which we pant,-- More life, and fuller, that we want.” He “shudders at destruction,” and better endures to face even the tremendous threat of an eternal hell than to relax the tenacity of his belief in an immortal consciousness. The Indian, on the contrary, devoutly hopes that a life (or several lives) of self-abnegation, may bring him to the bourne whence the traveller leaps into the gulf of nothingness. Marvellous to add, as climax, there seems more likelihood that a certain number of highly educated Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen, may learn to sigh for Nirvana than that our missionaries will induce an equal number of intelligent Singalese, Chinese, or natives of Siam, to exchange their dreary anticipations for the hope of heaven.