EVOLUTION IN GREECE 21 



Thus there is no very great practical disagreement 

 between Gautama and his predecessors with respect 

 to the end of action ; but it is otherwise as regards 

 the means to that end. With just insight into 

 human nature, Gautama declared extreme ascetic 

 practices to be useless and indeed harmful. The 

 appetites and the passions are not to be abolished by 

 mere mortification of the body ; they must, in addition, 

 be attacked on their own ground and conquered by 

 steady cultivation of the mental habits which oppose 

 them ; by universal benevolence ; by the return of 

 good for evil ; by humility ; by abstinence from evil 

 thought ; in short by total renunciation of that self- 

 assertion which is the essence of the cosmic process. 



Doubtless, it is to these ethical qualities that 

 Buddhism owes its marvellous success. ( 10 ) A system 

 which knows no God in the western sense ; which 

 denies a soul to man ; which counts the belief in 

 immortality a blunder and the hope of it a sin ; 

 which refuses any efficacy to prayer and sacrifice ; 

 which bids men look to nothing but their own efforts 

 for salvation ; which, in its original purity, knew no- 

 thing of vows of obedience, abhorred intolerance and 

 never sought the aid of the secular arm ; yet spread 

 over a considerable moiety of the Old World with 

 marvellous rapidity, and is still, with whatever base 

 admixture of foreign superstitions, the dominant 

 creed of a large fraction of mankind. 



Let us now set our faces westwards, towards Asia 

 Minor and Greece and Italy, to view the rise and 



