ience and
traditional code, would have been perfectly barren. The notion that
every sin must be expiated does not carry with it any information about
what acts are sins.

This indispensable information must still be furnished by common
opinion. Those acts which bring suffering after them, those acts which
arouse the enmity of our fellows and, by a premonition of that enmity,
arouse our own shame--those are assumed and deputed to be sinful; and
the current code of morality being thus borrowed without begging leave,
the law of absolute retribution can be brought in to paint the picture
of moral responsibility in more glaring colours and to extend the vista
of rewards and punishments into a rhetorical infinite. Buddhistic
morality was natural morality intensified by this forced sense of minute
and boundless responsibility. It was coloured also by the negative,
pessimistic justification which this dogma gives to moral endeavour.
Every virtue was to be viewed as merely removing guilt and alleviating
suffering, knowledge itself being precious only as a means to that end.
The ultimate inspiration of right living was to be hope of perfect
peace--a hope generously bestowed by nature on every spirit which, being
linked to the flux of things, is conscious of change and susceptible of
weariness, but a hope which the irresponsible Oriental imagination had
disturbed with bad dreams. A pathetic feminine quality was thereby
imparted to moral feeling; we were to be good for pity's sake, for the
sake of a great distant deliverance from profound sorrows.

[Sidenote: Dignity of post-rational morality.]

The pathetic idiosyncrasy of this religion has probably enabled it to
touch many a heart and to lift into speculation many a life otherwise
doomed to be quite instinctive animal. It has kept morality pure--free
from that admixture of worldly and partisan precepts with which less
pessimistic systems are encumbered. Restraint can be rationally imposed
on a given will only by virtue of evils which would be involved in its
satisfaction, by virtue, in other words, of some actual demand whose
disappointment would ensue upon inconsiderate action. To save, to cure,
to nourish are duties far less conditional than would be a supposed duty
to acquire or to create. There is no harm in merely not being, and
privation is an evil only when, after we exist, it deprives us of
something naturally requisite, the absence of which would defeat
interests alre