of this world, which is but a mass of sorrows, takes place." And by an inverse process he went on to reflect that if ignorance did not exist, neither would the concepts, and so on through every link of the chain. Until at length, "from the annihilation of birth results the annihilation of decrepitude, of death, of sufferings, of lamentations, of sorrow, of regret, of despair. It is thus that the annihilation of this world, which is but a mass of sorrows, takes place" (H. B. I., p. 487).
This speculation is by no means easy to understand. Apparently it means that ignorance, in the sense of a mistaken notion of the reality of the material world, leads to a whole series of blunders, ending inevitably in birth. From this fundamental error or belief in the existence of sensible objects spring certain other false conceptions. Knowledge, which next ensues, may mean not merely cognition but consciousness, knowledge of our existence; and in this sense, or in something like it, it must be taken in order to explain the apparent paradox of a deduction of the pedigree of knowledge directly from ignorance. Hence name and form, a still further distinction of the individual—a specialization of the vague knowledge of himself which the last stage brought him to. The next step carries us on to the six seats of sensible qualities; a phrase expressing the organs by which sensible qualities are perceived—the five senses, and Manâs, the heart, which the Indians considered as a sixth sense. It appears also from Burnouf's remarks that the Sanskrit term includes along with the organs the qualities they perceive, the Law being assigned to the heart or internal sense as the object of its perception. The six seats being given, contact follows; contact implies sensation, and sensation naturally leads to desire. Conception is represented as the effect of desire, but another translation of this term by attachment, fondness for material things, renders the sequence easier to understand. Attachment to anything but the three gems—the Buddha, the Law, and the Church—is, however, a fatal error, and leads to the melancholy result of existence. Evidently, however, the being whose downward progress has thus been described must have existed before, and the event here alluded to must probably be the passage into the definite condition of the human embryo. And this is rather
