EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 35 



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 marvelous success.* 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 origi- 

 nal purity knew nothing of vows of obedience, abhorred intoler- 

 ance, and never sought the aid of the secular arm ; yet spread 

 over a considerable moiety of the Old World with marvelous 

 rapidity, and is still, with whatever base admixture of foreign 

 superstitions, the dominant creed of a large fraction of mankind. 



[To be concluded.] 



his mind directed itself exclusively to this joyful consummation, and personified the nega- 

 tion of all conceivable existence and of all pain into a positive bliss. This was all the more 

 easy, as Gautama refused to give any dogmatic definition of Nirvana. There is something 

 analogous in the way in which people commonly talk of the "happy release" of a man who 

 has been long suffering from mortal disease. According to their own views, it must always 

 be extremely doubtful whether the man will be any happier after the "release" than before. 

 But they do not choose 10 look at the matter in this light. 



The popular notion that, with practical if not metaphysical annihilation in view, Bud- 

 dhism must needs be a sad and gloomy faith, seems to be inconsistent with fact ; on the con- 

 trary, the prospect of Nirvana fills the true believer, not merely with cheerfulness but with 

 an ecstatic desire to reach it. 



* The influence of the picture of the personal qualities of Gautama afforded by the 

 legendary anecdotes which rapidly grew into a biography of the Buddha, and by the birth 

 stories, which coalesced with the current folk lore and were intelligible to all the world, 

 doubtless played a large part. Further, although Gautama appears not to have meddled 

 with the caste system, he refused to recognize any distinction save that of perfection in the 

 way of salvation among his followers ; and, by such teaching, no less than by the inculca- 

 tion of love and benevolence to all sentient beings, he practically leveled every social, polit- 

 ical, and racial barrier. A third important condition was the organization of the Buddhists 

 into monastic communities for the stricter professors, while the laity were permitted a wide 

 indulgence in practice, and were allowed to hope for accommodation in some of the tem- 

 porary abodes of bliss. With a few hundred thousand years of immediate paradise in 

 sight, the average man could be content to shut his eyes to what might follow. 



