explain their mode of life to themselves. The absolutely pure expression of this truth is to be found only in philosophy; but of the religions Buddhism comes nearest to expressing it without admixture. For the Buddhist saint asks aid from no god. True Christianity, however,--the Christianity of the New Testament and of the Christian mystics,--agrees both with Buddhism and with Brahmanism in ultimate aim. What spoils it for Schopenhauer is the Judaic element. This, on one side, infects it with the optimism of the Biblical story of creation, in which God 'saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.' On the other side, it contaminates the myth of original sin, which bears in itself a profound philosophical truth, by this same doctrine of a creative God; from which follows all the injustice and irrationality necessarily involved in the Augustinian theology, and not to be expelled except with its theism. Nevertheless, the story of the Fall of Man, of which that theology, in its fundamentally true part, is a reasoned expression, is the one thing, Schopenhauer avows, that reconciles him to the Old Testament. The truth that it clothes he finds also among the Greeks; Empedocles, after the Orphics and Pythagoreans, having taught that the soul had been doomed to wander because of some antenatal sin. And the mysticism that accompanies all these more or less pure expressions of one metaphysical truth he finds represented by the Sufis even in optimistic Islam; so that he can claim for his philosophy a world-wide consent. Religion, if we take this to include mysticism, at once rises above philosophy and falls below it. As 'metaphysics of the people,' it is a mythological expression of philosophical truth: as mysticism, it is a kind of 'epi-philosophy.' Beyond pure philosophy Schopenhauer does not profess to go; but he accepts what the mystics say as the description of a positive experience which becomes accessible when supreme insight is attained intuitively. For the philosopher as such, insight into that which is beyond the forms of our knowledge and even beyond the will itself, remains only conceptual; though it is within the province of philosophy to mark out the place for this. The 'something else' that is left when the will has been denied, is indicated by the 'ecstasy,' 'illumination,' 'union with God,' spoken of by the mystics. Paradoxically, some of the mystics themselves even have identified it with 'nothing'; but the result of the denial of the will to live is to be called nothing only in relation to the world as we know it. 'On the other hand, to those in whom the will has turned back and denied itself, this so very real world of ours with all its suns and milky ways is--nothing.'