mposed of sanctioned by their promised deliverance. If they could not
rise to a positive conception of natural life, this inability but marks
the well-known limitations of Oriental fancy, which has never been able
to distinguish steadily that imagination which rests on and expresses
material life from that which, in its import, breaks loose from the
given conditions of life altogether, and is therefore monstrous and
dreamful. But at least Buddhism knew how to sound the heart and pierce
to the genuine principles of happiness and misery. If it did not venture
to interpret reason positively, it at least forbore to usurp its inward
and autonomous authority, and did not set up, in the name of salvation,
some new partiality, some new principle of distress and illusion. In
destroying worldliness this religion avoided imposture. The clearing it
made in the soul was soon overgrown again by the inexorable Indian
jungle; but had a virile intellect been at hand, it would have been free
to raise something solid and rational in the space so happily swept
clean of all accumulated rubbish.

[Sidenote: Apparent division of the spiritual and the natural.]

Against avarice, lust, and rancour, against cruel and vain national
ambitions, tenderer and more recollected minds have always sought some
asylum: but they have the seldom possessed enough knowledge of nature
and of human life to distinguish clearly the genuine and innocent goods
which they longed for, and their protest against "the world" has too
often taken on a mystical and irrational accent. Charity, for instance,
in its profounder deliverances, has become a protest against the
illusion of personality; whereby existence and action seem to be wholly
condemned after their principle has been identified with selfishness. An
artificial puzzle is thus created, the same concept, selfishness or an
irrational partiality and injustice in the will, being applied to two
principles of action, the one wrong and the other necessary. Every man
is necessarily the seat of his own desires, which, if truly fulfilled,
would bring him satisfaction; but the objects in which that satisfaction
may be found, and the forces that must co-operate to secure it, lie far
afield, and his life will remain cramped and self-destructive so long as
he does not envisage its whole basis and co-operate with all his
potential allies.

The rationality which would then be attained is so immensely exalted
above the microsco