{247} men of that time will find it just as intolerable and revolting
as we do now, to believe that past generations toiled and suffered for
no other reason, for no other end, and to no other purpose than that
their successors should enter into the fruits of their labour. In a
word, the theory that in the evolution of man as an ethical
consciousness, as a moral being, religion is to be superseded by
humanitarianism, is only possible so long as we deny or ignore the fact
that the individual is an end and not merely a means. We will
therefore now go on to consider the evolution of religion from the
point of view that the individual is in himself an end as well as a
means. If, of the world religions, we take that which is the greatest,
as measured by the number of its adherents, viz. Buddhism, we shall see
that, tried by this test, it is at once found wanting. The object at
which Buddhism proclaims that man should aim is not the development,
the perfection, and the realisation of the individual to the fullest
extent: it is, on the contrary, the utter and complete effacement of
the individual, so that he is not merely absorbed, but absolutely wiped
out, in _nirvana_. In the _atman_, with which it is the duty of man to
seek to identify himself, the individuality of man does not survive:
{248} it simply ceases to be. Now this obliteration of his existence
may seem to a man in a certain mood desirable; and that mood may be
cultivated, as indeed Buddhism seeks to cultivate it, systematically.
But here it is that the inner inconsistency, the self-contradictoriness
of Buddhism, becomes patent. The individual, to do anything, must
exist. If he is to desire nothing save to cease to exist, he must
exist to do that. But the teaching of Buddhism is that this world and
this life is illusion--and further, that the existence of the
individual self is precisely the most mischievous illusion, that
illusion above all others from which it is incumbent on us to free
ourselves. We are here for no other end than to free ourselves from
that illusion. Thus, then, by the teaching of Buddhism there is an
end, it may be said, for the individual to aim at. Yes! but by the
same teaching there is no individual to aim at it--individual existence
is the most pernicious of all illusions. And further, by the teaching,
the final end and object of religion is to get rid of an individual
existence, which does not exist to be got rid of, and which