ady launched into the world. If there is something in a
purely remedial system of morality which seems one-sided and extreme, we
must call to mind the far less excusable one-sidedness of those
moralities of prejudice to which we are accustomed in the Occident--the
ethics of irrational acquisitiveness, irrational faith, and irrational
honour. Buddhistic morality, so reasonable and beautifully persuasive,
rising so willingly to the ideal of sanctity, merits in comparison the
profoundest respect. It is lifted as far above the crudities of
intuitionism as the whisperings of an angel are above a schoolboy's
code.

A certain bias and deviation from strict reason seems, indeed,
inseparable from any moral reform, from any doctrine that is to be
practically and immediately influential. Socratic ethics was too perfect
an expression to be much of a force. Philosophers whose hearts are set
on justice and pure truth often hear reproaches addressed to them by the
fanatic, who contrasts the conspicuous change in this or that direction
accomplished by his preaching with the apparent impotence of reason and
thought. Reason's resources are in fact so limited that it is usually
reduced to guerilla warfare: a general plan of campaign is useless when
only insignificant forces obey our commands. Moral progress is for that
reason often greatest when some nobler passion or more fortunate
prejudice takes the lead and subdues its meaner companions without
needing to rely on the consciousness of ultimate benefits hence accruing
to the whole life. So a pessimistic and merely remedial morality may
accomplish reforms which reason, with its broader and milder suasion,
might have failed in. If certain rare and precious virtues can thus be
inaugurated, under the influence of a zeal exaggerating its own
justification, there will be time later to insist on the complementary
truths and to tack in the other direction after having been carried
forward a certain distance by this oblique advance.

[Sidenote: Absurdities nevertheless involved.]

At the same time neglect of reason is never without its dangers and its
waste. The Buddhistic system itself suffers from a fundamental
contradiction, because its framers did not acknowledge the actual limits
of retribution nor the empirical machinery by which benefits and
injuries are really propagated. It is an onerous condition which
religions must fulfil, if they would prevail in the world, that they
must have th