We admire the spirit of the teachers in the Upanishads, but we have very little respect for the logical ability of any early Hindu teachers; that is to say, there is very little of it to admire. The doctors of the Upanishad philosophy were poets, not dialecticians. Poetry indeed waned in the extreme south, and no spirited or powerful literature ever was produced there, unless it was due to foreign influence, such as the religious poetry of Ramaism and the Tamil _Sittars_. But in secondary subtlety and in the marking of distinctions, in classifying and analyzing on dogmatic premises, as well as in the acceptance of hearsay truths as ultimate verities--we do not see any fundamental disparity in these regards between the mind of the Northwest and that of the Southeast; and what superficial difference exists goes to the credit of Buddhism. For if one must have dogma it is something to have system, and while precedent theosophy was based on the former it knew nothing of the latter. Moreover, in Buddhism there is a greater intellectual vigor than in any phase of Brahmanism (as distinct from Vedism). To cast off not only gods but soul, and more, to deny the moral efficacy of asceticism this was a leap into the void, to appreciate the daring of which one has but to read himself into the priestly literature of Buddha's rivals, both heterodox and orthodox. We see then in Buddhism neither a debauched moral type, nor a weakened intellectuality. The pessimism of Buddhism, so far as it concerns earth, is not only the same pessimism that underlies the religious motive of Brahmanic pantheism, but it is the same pessimism that pervades Christianity and even Hebraism. This world is a sorry place, living is suffering; do thou escape from it. The pleasures of life are vanity; do thou renounce them. "To die is gain," says the apostle; and the Preacher: "I have seen all the works that are done under the sun and behold all is vanity and vexation of spirit. He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. For what hath man of all his labor and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun? For all his days are sorrows and his travail grief. That which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man whether it goeth upward? I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. The dead know not anything, their love and their hatred and their envy is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun. The wandering of the desire, this also is vanity." The Preacher is a fairly good Buddhist.