directed, not to purify and strengthen and ennoble the personal self for better service, by minding what is pure and lovely, and by striving unceasingly after what is right and true, but by crushing out every feeling into apathy, every thought into vacuity, so as to get rid of personality, identity, and the very faintest germ of life.[235] And this is the goal of a race that has extended not only over the whole range of the present, but over that of many existences; this is the victory which crowns a fight that has continued throughout untold ages. Truly there is something very pathetic in the conception of a struggle after sainthood so prolonged, by one who, now a god, now an animal, now a man, has never lost sight of his mark, and has ever pressed onwards to it.[236] Probably we may have something to learn from it, by way of correcting the idea that true moral and spiritual excellence, perfection, saintliness, is the growth of a single life; but when the goal is understood in its bare reality, as implying not destruction of selfishness, but extinction of being, surely the reproachful question is justified, “To what purpose is this waste?” After millennia of transformation the nebula has formed into a star, and just at the point when it can illumine an immensity, it disappears for ever from the firmament. Unreckonable energy and thought have been expended upon the production of a man, and just when he has reached the highest point of perfection, and is most serviceable to the universe, he becomes of less value than a vapour that vanishes away. Truly “the crown of our life as it closes Is darkness; the fruit thereof dust,” and man walketh in a vain show, he disquieteth himself in vain, if Buddha’s way be the only path of deliverance from evil, and Nirvana his only goal.