ributed between
two parents, then between four grandparents, and so on backward, we are
temporarily assembled, as it were, out of an ancestral diffusion; we
stand our trial, and presently our individuality is dispersed and
mixed again with other individualities in an uncertain multitude of
descendants. But the species is not like this; it goes on steadily from
newness to newness, remaining still a unity. The drama of the individual
life is a mere episode, beneficial or abandoned, in this continuing
adventure of the species. And Metchnikoff finds most of the trouble of
life and the distresses of life in the fact that the species is still
very painfully adjusting itself to the fluctuating conditions under
which it lives. The conflict of life is a continual pursuit of
adjustment, and the "ills of life," of the individual life that is,
are due to its "disharmonies." Man, acutely aware of himself as an
individual adventure and unawakened to himself as a species, finds life
jangling and distressful, finds death frustration. He fails and falls as
a person in what may be the success and triumph of his kind. He does
not apprehend the struggle or the nature of victory, but only his own
gravitation to death and personal extinction.

Now Professor Metchnikoff is anti-religious, and he is anti-religious
because to him as to so many Europeans religion is confused with
priest-craft and dogmas, is associated with disagreeable early
impressions of irrational repression and misguidance. How completely he
misconceives the quality of religion, how completely he sees it as an
individual's affair, his own words may witness:

"Religion is still occupied with the problem of death. The solutions
which as yet it has offered cannot be regarded as satisfactory. A future
life has no single argument to support it, and the non-existence of life
after death is in consonance with the whole range of human knowledge. On
the other hand, resignation as preached by Buddha will fail to satisfy
humanity, which has a longing for life, and is overcome by the thought
of the inevitability of death."

Now here it is clear that by death he means the individual death, and by
a future life the prolongation of individuality. But Buddhism does
not in truth appear ever to have been concerned with that, and modern
religious developments are certainly not under that preoccupation with
the narrower self. Buddhism indeed so far from "preaching resignation"
to death,