We are told, again, that Schopenhauer was a Buddhist. Did he not have an image of Buddha in his bedroom? But no doctrine perhaps is more remote from the genuine doctrine of Buddha than that of this soured and disillusioned romanticist. The nature of true Buddhism and its opposition to all forms of romanticism is worth dwelling on for a moment. Buddha not only asserted the human law with unusual power but he also did what, in the estimation of some, needs doing in our own day--he put this law, not on a traditional, but on a positive and critical basis. This spiritual positivism of Buddha is, reduced to its simplest terms, a psychology of desire. Not only is the world outside of man in a constant state of flux and change, but there is an element within man that is in constant flux and change also and makes itself felt practically as an element of expansive desire. What is unstable in him longs for what is unstable in the outer world. But he may escape from the element of flux and change, nay he must aspire to do so, if he wishes to be released from sorrow. This is to substitute the noble for the ignoble craving. The permanent or ethical element in himself towards which he should strive to move is known to him practically as a power of inhibition or inner check upon expansive desire. Vital impulse (_élan vital_) may be subjected to vital control (_frein vital_). Here is the Buddhist equivalent of the “civil war in the cave” that the romanticist denies. Buddha does not admit a soul in man in the sense that is often given to the word, but on this opposition between vital impulse and vital control as a psychological fact he puts his supreme emphasis. The man who drifts supinely with the current of desire is guilty according to Buddha of the gravest of all vices--spiritual or moral indolence (_pamāda_). He on the contrary who curbs or reins in his expansive desires is displaying the chief of all the virtues, spiritual vigilance or strenuousness (_appamāda_). The man who is spiritually strenuous has entered upon the “path.” The end of this path and the goal of being cannot be formulated in terms of the finite intellect, any more than the ocean can be put into a cup. But progress on the path may be known by its fruits--negatively by the extinction of the expansive desires (the literal meaning of Nirvâna), positively by an increase in peace, poise, centrality.