as ever tended to destroy personality; it has
made men hermits and pessimists; it has drawn them out of the great
current of active life, and thus has severed them from their
fellow-men. But a prime condition of developed personalities is
largeness and intensity of life, and constant intercourse with
mankind. Personality is developed in the society of persons, not in
the company of trees and stones. Buddhism, which runs either to gross
and superstitious polytheism on its popular side or to pessimistic
introspection on its philosophical side, may possibly, by a stretch of
the term, be called "impersonal" in the sense that it does not help in
the production of strong, rounded personality among its votaries, but
not in the sense that it does not produce self-consciousness.
Buddhism, therefore, cannot be accurately described in terms of
personality or impersonality.

We would do well in this connection to ponder the fact that although
Buddhism in its higher forms does certainly develop consciousness of
self, it does not attribute to that self any worth. In consequence of
this, it never has modified, and however long it might be allowed to
run its course, never could modify, the general social order in the
direction of individualism. This is one reason why the whole Orient
has maintained to modern times its communal nature, in spite of its
high development in so many ways, even in introspection and
self-consciousness.

This failure of Buddhism is all the more striking when we stop to
consider how easy and, to us, natural an inference it would have been
to pass from the perception of the essential unity between the
separate self and the universal soul, to the assertion of the supreme
worth of that separate soul because of the fact of that unity. But
Buddhism never seems to have made that inference. Its compassion on
animals and even insects depended on its doctrine of the
transmigration of souls, not on its doctrine of universal soul unity.
Its mercy was shown to animals in certain whimsical ways, but the
universal lack of sympathy for suffering man, man who could suffer the
most exquisite pains, exposed the shallowness of its solicitude about
destroying life. The whole influence of Buddhism on the social order
was not conducive to the development of personality in the Orient. The
so-called impersonal influence of Buddhism upon the Eastern peoples,
then, is not due to its failure to recognize the separateness of the
human