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 age is confronted by is an altogether unanswered one; and that the closest seeming parallels to be found amongst other times and races, have far less really of parallelism in them than of contrast.  The path of thought, as it were, has taken a sudden turn round a mountain; and our bewildered eyes are staring on an undreamed-of prospect.  The leaders of progress thus far have greeted the sight with acclamation, and have confidently declared that we are looking on the promised land.  But to the more thoughtful, and to the less impulsive, it is plain that a mist hangs over it, and that we have no right to be sure whether it is the promised land or no.  They see grave reasons for making a closer scrutiny, and for asking if, when the mist lifts, what we see will be not splendour, but desolation.