Ignoring God, it could only form, or could not emancipate itself from, a false conception of man, as part of a material system of things; but man, though considerably involved in a material system, never can be interpreted by it. On the contrary, nature can only be interpreted or properly understood in man as the lower in the higher. Man is an antagonist of nature; he is for ever condemning its ways, coming into collision with its laws, refusing to live its life. Out of this collision emerges his religion, while his morality originates in the conflict between his own sense of duty and its life of animal instinct.[241] To conform to nature, he must become a brute, but he has in him ideals and capacities transcending it, and by exercising these capacities in pursuit of his ideals he finds his life. Buddha confessed to an ideal, and wrought hard to realise it, but alas for humanity when it finds no higher than self to reverence! Buddha’s theories of self-culture and self-deliverance reduced to practice have proved most miserable failures. It could not be otherwise; no man is likely to move the ship in which he sits by puffing away at the sails, or to lift himself out of the mire by simply pulling away at his boots; and no philosophy of self-culture, self-control, or self-rescue, can succeed, which ignores or refuses to acknowledge man’s instinct of worship. What he most needs is not law, not a system of morality, not even an example or model to copy, but inspiration. He knows already enough to condemn himself, and he has examples which, though far from perfect, quite suffice to confound him. The command to be perfect mocks him as truly as a command to see would mock a man stone-blind. What he does want is a powerful moral energy within him, for lack of which he has to confess that he cannot do the good he would, but is ever doing the evil which he would not. His real wretchedness is not his suffering and death, not even his ignorance, as Buddha thought, but the continual and seemingly ineffectual struggle between the animal and the man, the flesh and the spirit. And Buddhism was powerless to help him here. It lacked the steady support of the sense of duty to the highest and best, the inspiration that comes from the faith that the highest and best is for us, and is with us, and in us. Belief in God, as Bacon reminds us, is “essential to the consciousness of our nobility and dignity, for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body, and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.” So Buddhism in unduly exalting man to the level of deity has in reality degraded him. It has indeed lifted wild races out of barbarism, but it has failed to civilise them. It has certainly not destroyed ignorance, and the worship of intelligence has not tended to its development and diffusion among the peoples whom it has swayed. Judged even by an ordinary standard, the monks of either Southern or Northern Buddhism are