arly understanding the true nature of the point at
issue. Stripped of all accessories and embellishments, the question
resolves itself into this: Which shall we choose for our portion, Life
or Death? There can be no accommodation between the two; and whichever
we select as our guiding principle must produce results of a kind proper
to itself.

The whole of this momentous question turns on the place that we assign
to desire in our system of thought. Is it the Tree of Life in the midst
of the Garden of the Soul? or is it the Upas Tree creating a wilderness
of death all around? This is the issue on which we have to form a
judgment, and this judgment must colour all our conception of life and
determine the entire range of our possibilities. Let us, then, try to
picture to ourselves the ideal proposed by the systems to which I have
alluded--a man who has succeeded in entirely annihilating all desire. To
him all things must be alike. The good and the evil must be as one, for
nothing has any longer the power to raise any desire in him; he has no
longer any feeling which shall prompt him to say, "This is good,
therefore I choose it; that is evil, therefore I reject it"; for all
choice implies the perception of something more desirable in what is
chosen than in what is rejected, and consequently the existence of that
feeling of desire which has been entirely eliminated from the ideal we
are contemplating.

Then, if the perception of all that makes one thing preferable to
another has been obliterated, there can be no motive for any sort of
action whatever. Endue a being who has thus extinguished his faculty of
desire with the power to create a universe, and he has no motive for
employing it. Endue him with all knowledge, and it will be useless to
him; for, since desire has no place in him, he is without any purpose
for which to turn his knowledge to account. And with Love we cannot
endue him, for that is desire in its supreme degree. But if all this be
excluded, what is left of the man? Nothing, except the mere outward
form. If he has actually obtained this ideal, he has practically ceased
to be. Nothing can by any means interest him, for there is nothing to
attract or repel in one thing more than in another. He must be dead
alike to all feeling and to all motive of action, for both feeling and
action imply the preference for one condition rather than another; and
where desire is utterly extinguished, no such preference can exis