in the background uncognoscible by our senses, to which they bear very much the same relation as the picture thrown upon a white sheet bears to the glass slide hidden away in the recesses of a magic-lantern. Matter, in all its varied shapes, is nothing more than the effect produced upon our consciousness by what is called in metaphysical parlance "substance ' —- the noumenon, reality, or essence which substat, or underlies, the outward appearance or phenomenon. Kant and Spinoza are among the most distinguished advocates of this theory, which dates, indeed, as far back as Anaxagoras, and was distinctly taught by Sextus Empiricus in the second century of our era. Its most distinguished opponent is Bishop Berkeley, who denied the existence of substance' altogether. This led many persons, Dr. Johnson among them, to suppose that Berkeley disbelieved in matter, and the great lexicographer imagined that he could refute the Bishop by simply kicking a stone. But Berkeley was not the imbecile that Johnson took him for. What he denied was not matter, but substance that meta

physical substratum of which matter was believed to be the projection or simulachrum merely. He rejected the substratum theory, and said that substance was a sheer figment, regarding what other metaphysicians called the appearances of things as the very things themselves. An invisible substratum may be inferred or hypothesized, but it is unprovable and unknowable. The qualities of things have no need of an objective substratum, because they have a subjective one; they are the modifications of a sensitive subject, and the synthesis of these sensations is the only substratum required.

Now, one would naturally think that there could be no via media between these two conflicting theories. Lotze, however, suggests a tertium quid, which is most striking in its naïveté, and, we may add, its poetic beauty. He does not deny the existence of an uncognoscible substratum at the back of things, but he does deny that things are no more than the phenomena which metaphysicians of the Kantian school affirm them to be. This excellent writer is, like all Germans, very metaphysical, very

idealistic, and remarkably verbose; and it is no easy matter to condense his laboured dissertations into a few concise sentences. But his view is to the following effect: Instead of external Nature being to the alleged substratum as a reflected picture to its slide, it resembles rather the glorious beauty of a scene upon the stage which results from the unsightly mechanism at work behind it. In short, he reverses the conception of the Realists. "The course of the universe is such a drama; its essential truth is the meaning set forth so as to be intelligible to the spirit; but the other, which we would often so fain know, and in which, deceived by prejudice, we first of all seek the true being of things, is nothing else than the framework on which rests the alone momentous actuality of the fair appearance." Then, after deprecating the complaint that in sensation the real properties of things are not represented, he concludes: "Let us therefore cease to lament as if the reality of things escaped our apprehension. On the contrary, it consists in that as which they appear to us, and all that they are before they are made

manifest to us is the mediating preparation for this final realization of their very being. The beauty of colours and tones, of warmth and fragrance, is what Nature in itself strives to produce and express, but cannot do by herself. For this it needs, as its last and noblest instrument, the sentient mind, which alone can put into words its mute striving, and, in the glory of sentient intuition, set forth in luminous actuality what all the motions and gestures of the external world were vainly endeavouring to express." He does not touch here upon the question we set out with-whether our senses are or are not veracious reporters of the objective (phenomenal) world. What he is thinking of is the controversy between those who hold with Berkeley and those who hold with Kant, and the view he takes goes some way towards reconciling the two. He agrees with Berkeley that things are not simulachra, but realities; while he does not deny the contention of Berkeley's opponents-that there is something which lies behind.

But what, it will naturally be asked, have all

these thrashed-out controversies to do with a man's salvation? How can a man's belief, or theory, or indifference, with regard to such abstruse questions as idealism, noumenalism, and the like, affect the welfare of his soul? The very notion that such may be the case is absurd to a Western mind. Not so, however, to Easterns; certainly not so to Buddhists. Outwardly viewed, Buddhism has its metaphysical side and its religious side, and, as a religion, a religion of countless gods and goddesses, superstitious rites, praying wheels, rosaries, litanies, and the like, cannot be assigned a high intellectual place. But this is only the lowest and most popular phase of Buddhismthe Buddhism of the uneducated masses. the Buddhism of the street and wayside shrine. Buddhism, the system of metaphysics, is generally and rightly-regarded as a thing apart; but what is not so generally recognized is that it is this same metaphysic, taught by, or attributed to, Buddha, this dry, abstruse, transcendental doctrine, in which the true religion of Buddha is to be found, the popular 'religion'