18 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS 



to exist when an overplus of pain was certain and the 

 probabilities in favour of the increase of misery, with 

 the prolongation of existence, were so overwhelm- 

 ing. Slaying the body only made matters worse ; 

 there was nothing for it but to slay the soul by 

 the voluntary arrest of all its activities. Property, 

 social ties, family affections, common companionship, 

 must be abandoned ; the most natural appetites,, 

 even that for food, must be suppressed, or at least 

 minimized ; until all that remained of a man was 

 the impassive, extenuated, mendicant monk, self- 

 hypnotized into cataleptic trances, which the deluded 

 mystic took for foretastes of the final union with 

 Brahma. 



The founder of Buddhism accepted the chief 

 postulates demanded by his predecessors. But he 

 was not satisfied with the practical annihilation in- 

 volved in merging the individual existence in the 

 unconditioned the Atman in Brahma. It would 

 seem that the admission of the existence of any sub- 

 stance whatever even of the tenuity of that which 

 has neither quality nor energy and of which no 

 predicate whatever can be asserted appeared to him 

 to be a danger and a snare. Though reduced to a 

 hypostatized negation, Brahma was not to be trusted ; 

 so long as entity was there, it might conceivably 

 resume the weary round of evolution, with all its 

 train of immeasurable miseries. Gautama got rid 

 of even that shade of a shadow of permanent 

 existence by a metaphysical tour de force of great 

 interest to the student of philosophy, seeing that it 



