seeks as its greater good a death so complete as to be
absolute release from the individual's burthen of KARMA. Buddhism seeks
an ESCAPE FROM INDIVIDUAL IMMORTALITY. The deeper one pursues religious
thought the more nearly it approximates to a search for escape from the
self-centred life and over-individuation, and the more it diverges from
Professor Metchnikoff's assertion of its aims. Salvation is indeed to
lose one's self. But Professor Metchnikoff having roundly denied
that this is so, is then left free to take the very essentials of the
religious life as they are here conceived and present them as if
they were the antithesis of the religious life. His book, when it is
analysed, resolves itself into just that research for an escape from the
painful accidents and chagrins of individuation, which is the ultimate
of religion.

At times, indeed, he seems almost wilfully blind to the true solution
round and about which his writing goes. He suggests as his most hopeful
satisfaction for the cravings of the human heart, such a scientific
prolongation of life that the instinct for self-preservation will be at
last extinct. If that is not the very "resignation" he imputes to the
Buddhist I do not know what it is. He believes that an individual which
has lived fully and completely may at last welcome death with the same
instinctive readiness as, in the days of its strength, it shows for the
embraces of its mate. We are to be glutted by living to six score and
ten. We are to rise from the table at last as gladly as we sat down. We
shall go to death as unresistingly as tired children go to bed. Men
are to have a life far beyond the range of what is now considered their
prime, and their last period (won by scientific self-control) will be a
period of ripe wisdom (from seventy to eighty to a hundred and twenty or
thereabouts) and public service!

(But why, one asks, public service? Why not book-collecting or the
simple pleasure of reminiscence so dear to aged egotists? Metchnikoff
never faces that question. And again, what of the man who is challenged
to die for right at the age of thirty? What does the prolongation
of life do for him? And where are the consolations for accidental
misfortune, for the tormenting disease or the lost limb?)

But in his peroration Professor Metchnikoff lapses into pure
religiosity. The prolongation of life gives place to sheer
self-sacrifice as the fundamental "remedy." And indeed what other remedy