Secondly, although Gotama preached a kind of quietism, it was not the quietism of inertion and apathy. He exhorted his followers to vigorous activity in the acquisition of knowledge: "He who does not rouse himself when it is time to rise, who, though young and strong, is full of sloth, whose will and thought are weak, that lazy and idle man will never find the way to knowledge (enlightenment). If anything is to be done, let a man do it; let him attack it vigorously."[U] [U] _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xvii., pp. 68 and 75. Mr. Gough says that to gain this extinction the sage must loose himself from every tie and turn his back upon the world. This is very much akin to the way in which a Christian must act, according to the teaching of the New Testament, if he would gain heaven, union with God, with Love, with a quality. But it would be doing injustice to the spirit of Christianity and Buddhism to describe their ultimate goals as annihilation, aboriginal nothingness, and extinction, and the path to it as one of inertion, apathy, and vacuity, in the ordinary sense of these terms. The expression "annihilation" has much to answer for. It has been flaunted scornfully in the face of Buddhism by Vedantists of bygone ages and by Christians of this century; it has been hurled from pulpits with tremendous vehemence into the ears of bewildered congregations, and it has formed a text for delighted and triumphant denunciation in innumerable articles--in fact, with annihilation inscribed on its banners, the whole host of Buddha's army has been depicted as marching inevitably to utter and irretrievable ruin. At this juncture let us turn to a later authority, Mr. Lafcadio Hearn, who, in answer to the question, What remains to rise above all forms and the total disintegration of body and final dissolution of the mind? sets forth the Buddhist conception in the following manner: "Unconsciously dwelling behind the false consciousness of imperfect man--beyond sensation, perception, thought--wrapped in the envelope of what we call soul (which, in truth, is only a thickly-woven veil of illusion), is the eternal and divine, the absolute Reality; not a soul, not a personality, but the All-self without selfishness--the _Muga no Taiga_--the Buddha enwombed in Karma. Within every phantom-self dwells this divine; yet the innumerable are but one. Within every creature incarnate sleeps the Infinite Intelligence, unevolved, hidden, unfelt, unknown, yet destined from all the eternities to waken at last, to rend away the ghostly web of sensuous mind, to break for ever its chrysalis of flesh, and pass to the supreme conquest of Space and Time."[V] [V] Lafcadio Hearn's _Gleanings in Buddha Fields_.