ternal existence. He therefore established a new
identity between the individuals in the chain of existence, which he,
like his forerunners, acknowledged, by the new assertion that that
which made two beings to be the same being was--not soul, but--karma"
(_ib._, pp. 93, 94). Thus once more it appears that there can be no
eventual communion between the human soul, at the end of its chain of
existence, and the divine, for the reason, not that the human soul
ultimately ceases to be, but that it never is or was, and therefore
neither transmigrates from one body to another, nor is eventually
absorbed in the _atman_.

Logically consistent though this train of argument be, it leaves
unanswered the simple question, How can the result of my actions have
any interest for me--not hereafter, but at the present moment--if I not
only shall not exist hereafter but do not exist at the present moment?
It is not impossible for a man who believes that his existence will
absolutely {66} cease at death to take some interest in and labour for
the good of others who will come after him; but it is impossible for a
man who does not exist now to believe in anything whatever. And it is
on that fundamental absurdity that Buddhism is built: it is directed to
the conversion of those who do not exist to be converted, and it is
directed to the object of relieving from existence those who have no
existence from which to be relieved.

Where then lies the strength of Buddhism, if as a logical structure it
is rent from top to bottom by glaring inconsistency? It lies in its
appeal to the spirit of self-sacrifice. What it denounces, from
beginning to end, is the will to live. The reason why it denounces the
will to live is that that will manifests itself exclusively in the
desires of the individual; and it is to the desires of man that all the
misery in the world are directly due. Destroy those desires by
annihilating the will to live--and in no other way can they be
destroyed--and the misery of the world will cease. The only
termination to the misery of the world which Buddhism can imagine is
the voluntary cessation of life which will ultimately ensue on the
cessation of the will to live. And the means by which that is to be
brought about is {67} the uprooting and destruction of the
self-regarding desires by means of the higher morality of
self-sacrifice. What the Buddhist overlooks is that the uprooting and
destruction of the self-regarding d