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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, 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!
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