II EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 65 



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 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. 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-hypnotised 

 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 

 involved in merging the individual existence 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 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 immeasur- 

 able miseries. Gautama got rid of even that 

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