The second point of interest is not more easily disposed of. What to the Buddhist is the spirit, the soul of man? It certainly is not an eternal spirit, such as was the spirit of Brahmanic philosophy, or that of the Jain. But, on the other hand, it is clear that something survived after death till one was reborn for the last time, and then entered Nirv[=a]na. The part that animates the material complex is to the Buddhist an individuality which depends on the nature of its former complex, home, and is destined to project itself upon futurity till the house which it has built ceases to exist, a home rebuilt no more to be its tabernacle. When a man dies the component parts of his material personality fall apart, and a new complex is formed, of which the individuality is the effect of the _karma_ of the preceding complex. The new person is one's karmic self, but it is not one's identical ego. There appears, therefore, even in the doctrine of Nirv[=a]na, to lie something of that altruism so conspicuous in the insistence on kindness and conversion of others. It is to save from sorrow this son of one's acts that one should seek to find the end. But there is no soul to save. We cannot insist too often on the fact that the religion of Buddha was not less practical than human. He practiced, as he taught, that the more one worked for others, was devoted to others, the less he cared for himself, the less was he the victim of desire. Hence he says that a true Nirv[=a]na may come even in one's own lifetime--the utter surrender of one's self is Nirv[=a]na,[30] while the act of dying only draws the curtain after the tragedy has ended. "Except," Buddha says, "for birth, age, and death, there would be no need of Buddha." A review of Buddha's system of metaphysics is, therefore, doubly unnecessary for our present purpose.[31] In the first place we believe that most of the categories and metaphysical niceties of Buddhism, as handed down, are of secondary origin; and, were this not so, it is still evident that they were but the unimportant, intellectual appendage of a religion that was based on anything but metaphysical subtleties. Buddha, like every other teacher of his time, had to have a 'system,' though whether the system handed down as his reverts to him it is impossible to say. But Buddha's recondite doctrine was only for the wise. "It is hard to learn for an ordinary person," says Buddha himself. But it was the ordinary person that Buddhism took to its bosom. The reason can be only the one we have given. For the last stage before Arhat-ship Buddha had ready a complicate system. But he did not inflict it on the ordinary person.[32] It was not an essential but the completing of his teaching; in his own eyes truth as represented by the Four Great Truths was the real doctrine.