Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/134

Rh one among many, lost in the eternal strife, at war with all the rest, and never able to prove its right to supremacy in the world. From life to life you pass, now a Brahman, now a king, now a worm, now a tiger, now a beggar, now in hell, now among the demons of the air; your aims alter everlastingly with each new birth, and nowhere do you find life anything but a succession of aims, no one of which is intrinsically more significant than the others. The world of aims is a world of strife, and no life has any real significance. No desire is of any essential worth. Therefore, seeing all this, give up desire. Have it as your one aim to have no aim. Such is the outcome of the insight into the eternal warfare of aims. The Buddhist parables try to make plain this insignificance of life both by dwelling on the fact that men must finally fail to get their aims, and by insisting that, if men temporarily succeed, their condition is no less insignificant than it is when they fail. The failure is used to show a man not so much the difficulty of getting his aim in this bad world, as the worthlessness of his aim. The success when it comes is embittered for the successful man by reminding him that all desire is transient, and that what he now loves will come to seem hateful to him. In both cases the lesson, whether of the success or of the failure, is, not that the order of things is diabolical, and therefore an enemy of mankind, but that the desires themselves are hopelessly confused and worthless. If Buddhism dwelt only on the hopelessness of our efforts to get the good things that we want, the doctrine would result in a