From the sixth century onwards new schools (of philosophy) arose in India, some Orthodox, others heterodox. Of these the principal was that founded by Cakya-Muni, surnamed the Buddha (the enlightened, the sage). Buddhism, a doctrine essentially negative and solvent, directed, moreover, to practice rather than to speculation, may be regarded as the corruption and dissolution of the Brahman philosophy.

Substituting for that which is that which passes away, refusing to say that anything does or does not exist, and admitting only a succession of impermanent forms without fixed foundation or absolute principle, in other words subordinating being to what is known as becoming or fieri, it showed, at the very time at which in Greece Heraclitus formulated the philosophy of flux, all the characteristics of a perfect evolutionary system, and, if it declared the existence of God, as of a substantial self and an immortal soul, unknowable (agnosticism), its real tendency was to deny the existence of God (atheism), and to substitute for substance of any kind a stream or flux, regarded indeed as itself real, of forms or phenomena (phenomenalism) ?Everything is empty, everything unsubstantial? was a saying of Buddha. 

Hence for Buddhism metempsychosis (i.e. re-incarnation- Ed.) consists in a continuous chain of thoughts and feelings (a stream of consciousness, as we should term it today) passing from one mode of existence to another in virtue of a sort of urge towards life, due itself to the desire to live: it is desire which is the cause of existence and ?we are what we have thought.?.

At the same time, the teaching of deliverance from suffering, which in Buddhism, even more than in Brahmanism, dominates the entire system, assumes a different and even more radical form. Evil is no longer merely the possession of individual or personal existence; it is existence itself : it is evil to be, and the desire of existence is the root of all suffering. The wise man must therefore destroy in himself man's natural longing for existence and for beatitude, the fullness of being; he must abandon all hope and extinguish every desire. He will thus attain the state of emptiness or total indetermination called nirvana  (literally nakedness, metaphorically immortality, refreshment, the farther bank - the term, in itself indefinite, was never defined by Buddha), which will deliver him from the evil of existence and the yoke of transmigration, and which, in the logical consequence of Buddhist principles, must be regarded as the annihilation of the soul itself. For since the soul is only the chain or current of thoughts and feelings which derive their existence from the desire to be, to extinguish that desire is to extinguish the soul.

This nirvana is the goal for whose attainment Buddhism made use of the ascetic practices which it took over with considerable mitigation from Brahmanism, also of its moral code - which is thus directed, not to God, but to a species of mystical nothingness as its last end. We here understand moral codes in a very wide sense as meaning a code of behaviour. If the expression be taken as implying moral obligation, whose ultimate basis is the Christian doctrine of God, the transcendent Creator, we must conclude that Buddhism, as indeed all the Oriental religions, Indian or Chinese, has no moral code. Moreover, the source and ultimate measure of Buddhist ethics is man, not God. If it rejected the system of castes which exaggerated the demands of social order and divided man almost into distinct species, it was only to dissolve social order of any kind in an absolute equality and individualism. And though it prescribed a universal benevolence (which extended even to prohibiting the slaughter of animals and to a compulsory vegetarianism), almsgiving, pardon of injuries, and non-resistance to the wicked, its motive was not love of one's neighbor as such, whose positive good and (by implication) existence we are bound to will, but to escape suffering to oneself by extinguishing all action and energy in a kind of humanitarian ecstasy. Buddhism is, therefore, a proof that gentleness and pity, when they are not regulated by reason and dictated by love, can deform human nature as much as violence, since they are then manifestations of cowardice, not of charity.  This doctrine of despair is not only a heresy from the point of view of Brahmanism; it is an intellectual plague to humanity, because it proceeds from the negation of reason. It is not, therefore, surprising that we find in it the majority of the fundamental errors by which contemporary attacks on reason are inspired. If at the present day it has found a warm welcome among certain circles in Europe, it is because all those who hope to derive from humanitarianism a moral code of human kindness for the acceptance of an atheistic society are already implicitly Buddhists.

Buddhism is a philosophy, agnostic and atheistic, which nevertheless usurps the social and ritual functions of a religion. It is as a religion that it has won the allegiance of so many millions. However in proportion as it has secured wide acceptance, Buddhism has ceased to be atheistic, only to fall into the most degraded conception of deity. Popular Buddhism as practised today in many parts of Asia where, to adapt itself to existing beliefs, it has assumed the most varied shapes, is nothing more than a form of idolatry, totally different from philosophic Buddhism. In certain other schools to which Brahmanism gave birth schools recognized as "orthodox" we find, on the other hand, a tendency towards the normal distinction between philosophy and religion.