is by most Western positivists held to be a high blessing.
Buddhism tells us we should avoid it '_as though it were a pit of
burning coals_.' The most influential positive writer in England[7] has
said: '_I desire no future that will break the ties of the past_.'
Buddhism says that we should desire no present that will create any ties
for the future. The beginning of the Buddhist teaching is the intense
misery of life; the reward of Buddhist holiness is to, at last, live no
longer. If we die in our sins, we shall be obliged to live again on the
earth; and it will not be, perhaps, till after many lives that the
necessity for fresh births will be exhausted. But when we have attained
perfection, the evil spell is broken; and '_then the wise man_,' it is
said, '_is extinguished as this lamp_.' The highest life was one of
seclusion and asceticism. The founder of Buddhism was met, during his
first preaching, with the objection that his system, if carried out
fully, would be the ruin and the extermination of humanity. And he did
not deny the charge; but said that what his questioners called ruin, was
in reality the highest good.

It is then hard to conceive an appeal more singularly infelicitous than
that which our modern positivists make to Buddhism. It is the appeal of
optimists to inveterate pessimists, and of exact thinkers to inveterate
mystics. If the consideration of it tells us anything of importance, it
tells us this--that by far the largest mass of mankind that has ever
been united by a single creed has explicitly denied every chief point
that our Western teachers assert. So far then from helping to close the
question we are to deal with--the question as to the positive worth of
life, the testimony of Buddhism, if it be of any weight at all, can only
go to convince us that the question is at once new and open--new,
because it has never yet been asked so fully; and open, because in so
far as it has been asked, nearly half mankind has repudiated the answer
that we are so desirous of giving it. Mr. Leslie Stephen calls Buddhism
'a stupendous fact,' and I quite agree with him that it is so; but taken
in connection with the present philosophy of Europe, it is hardly a fact
to strengthen our confidence in the essential dignity of man, or the
worth of man's life.

In short, the more we consider the matter, and the more various the
points from which we do so, the more plain will it become to us that the
problem the present