EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 31 



was folly to continue to exist when an overplus of pain was cer- 

 tain, and the probabilities in favor of the increase of misery with 

 the prolongation of existence were so overwhelming. 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. Prop- 

 erty, 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 de- 

 manded by his predecessors. But he was not satisfied with the 

 practical annihilation involved in merging the individual exist- 

 ence in the unconditioned the Atman in Brahma. It would seem 

 that the admission of the existence of any substance 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 hyposta- 

 tized negation, Brahma was not to be trusted ; so long as entity 

 was there, it might conceivably resume the weary round of evo- 

 lution, 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 phi- 

 losophy, seeing that it supplies the wanting half of Bishop Berke- 

 ley's well-known idealistic argument. 



Granting the premises, I am not aware of any escape from 

 Berkeley's conclusion, that the " substance " of matter is a meta- 

 physical unknown quantity, of the existence of which there is no 

 proof. What Berkeley does not seem to have so clearly perceived 

 is that the non-existence of a substance of mind is equally argu- 

 able ; and that the result of the impartial application of his rea- 

 sonings is the reduction of the All to coexistences and sequences 

 of phenomena, beneath and beyond which there is nothing cog- 

 noscible. It is a remarkable indication of the subtlety of Indian 

 speculation that Gautama should have seen deeper than the great- 

 est of modern idealists ; though it must be admitted that, if some 

 of Berkeley's reasonings respecting the nature of spirit are pushed 

 home, they reach pretty much the same conclusion.* 



* " The distinguishing characteristic of Buddhism was that it started a new line, that it 

 looked upon the deepest questions men have to solve from an entirely different standpoint. 

 It swept away from the field of its vision the whole of the great soul-theory which had 

 hitherto so completely filled and dominated the minds of the superstitious and the thought- 

 ful alike. For the first time in the history of the world, it proclaimed a salvation which 

 each man could gain for himself and by himself, in this world, during this life, without any 

 the least reference to God, or to gods, either great or small. Like the TJpanishads, it placed 



