to the laws of association or social heredity.  Intrinsic personality can be inherited only by lineal offspring, passing from father to son.  Extrinsic personality may fail to be inherited by lineal descendants and may be inherited by others than lineal descendants.  It is transmitted and determined by social inheritance.  Yet it is through personality that the individual may break away from the dominant currents of the social order, and become thus the means for the transformation of that order.  The secret of social progress lies in personality.  In proportion as the social order is fitted, accordingly, widely to develop high-grade personality,[DC] is its own progress rapid and safe.

Does acquired personality react on intrinsic personality?  This is the problem of “the inheritance of acquired characteristics.”  Into this problem I do not enter further than to note that in so far as newly developed personal traits produce transformations of body and brain transmittable from parent to offspring by the bare fact of parentage, in that degree does acquired pass over into intrinsic personality and thereby become intrinsic.  In regard to the degree in which acquired has passed over into intrinsic personality, thus differentiating the leading races of mankind, we contend that it is practically non-existent.  The phenomena of personality characterizing the chief races of men are due, not to intrinsic, but to acquired personality; in other words they are the products of the respective social orders and are transmitted from generation to generation by social rather than by biological heredity.

XXXIV

THE BUDDHIST WORLD-VIEW

Fully to comprehend the genius and history of Japan and her social order, we need to gain a still more thorough insight into the various conceptions of the universe that have influenced the people.  What have been their views as to the nature of the ultimate reality lying behind all phenomena?  What as to the relation of mankind to that Ultimate Reality?  And what has been the relation of these world-views to the social order?  To prepare the way for our final answer to these questions, we confine ourselves in this chapter to a study of the inner nature of the Buddhist world-view.

Since the Buddhist conception of the Ultimate Reality and of the universe is one of the three important types of world-views dominating the human mind, a type too that is hardly known in Western lands, in order to set it forth in terms intelligible to the Occidental and the Christian, it will be necessary in expounding it to contrast it with the two remaining types; namely, the Greek and the Christian.  As already pointed out, according to the Buddhistic conception, the Ultimate is a thoroughgoing Abstraction.  All the elements of personality are denied.  It is perfectly passionless, perfectly thoughtless, and perfectly motionless.  It has neither feeling,