relation between the human personality and the divine falls to the ground, according to the Buddha, because, whether there be gods or not, at any rate there is no human personality.  As in a conflagration—­and according to the Buddha the whole world, burning with desire, is in a state of conflagration—­the flames leap from one house that is burning to the next, so in its transmigrations the self, or rather the character, Karman, like a flame, leaps from one form of existence to another.  The flame indeed appears to be there all the time the fire is burning; but the flame has no permanence, it is changing all the time the process of combustion is going on; and ‘I’ have no more permanence than the flame.  ‘I’ only appear to be there as long as the process of life goes on.  And as the flame only continues so long as there is something for it to feed on, so the process of transmigration or re-birth continues only so long as the thirst for being continues:  the escape from re-birth is conditional on the extinction of that thirst or desire; and the disciple who has succeeded in putting off lust and desire has attained to deliverance from death and re-birth, has attained to rest, to Nirvana.

Thus, on the ‘dispersive’ view of the evolution of religion, Buddhism is a radiation from the common centre, from the heart of man, though it radiates in a direction very different from that followed by any other religion.  The direction is indeed one which, as the history of religion shows, it has been impossible for man long to follow, for, wherever Buddhism has been established, it has relapsed; and the Buddha, who strove to divert man from prayer and from the worship of gods, has himself become a god to whom prayer and worship are addressed.  Whether in the future the direction may be pursued more permanently than it has been by Buddhism up to now lies with the future to show.

Buddhism, however, on the ‘dispersive’ view of the evolution of religion, is not the only radiation from the common centre, of which we have to take account, in addition to fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism.  From the human heart also proceeds ’the religion of humanity’, the Positivist Church.  Here, as originally in Buddhism, the conception of a divine personality plays no part; but here the human personality, the very existence of which is denied by the Buddha, is raised to a high, indeed to the highest, level.  There is no such thing as an individual, if by ‘individual’ is meant a man existing solely by himself, for a man can neither come into existence nor continue in existence by himself alone.  It is an essential part of the conception of personality that it includes fellowship:  a person to be a person must stand in some relation to other persons.  They are presented to him, the subject, as objects of his awareness; and he, the subject, is also an object of their awareness.  Humanity is thus a complex, in which alone persons are found and apart from which they have in fact no existence.  Humanity thus plays in Positivism, as a religion, the part of ’the great Being’, le grand Etre, which in other religions is fulfilled by God, but with this difference, that humanity is human always and never divine.