68 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS ii 



dream that he willed not to dream, to put an end 

 to all dreaming. 



This end of life's dream is Nirvana. What 

 Nirvana is the learned do not agree. But, since 

 the best original authorities tell us there is neither 

 desire nor activity, nor any possibility of phenom- 

 enal reappearance for the sage who has entered 

 Nirvana, it may be safely said of this acme of 

 Buddhistic philosophy — " the rest is silence."^ 



Thus there is no very great practical disagree- 

 ment 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 uni- 

 versal 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.^^ 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 ; 



