A man’s rank in the scale of being is, then, according to the Buddhist determined by the quality of his desires; and it is within his power to determine whether he shall let them run wild or else control them to some worthy end. We hear of the fatalistic East, but no doctrine was ever less fatalistic than that of Buddha. No one ever put so squarely upon the individual what the individual is ever seeking to evade--the burden of moral responsibility. “Self is the lord of self. Who else can be the lord? … You yourself must make the effort. The Buddhas are only teachers.”[98] But does not all this emphasis on self, one may ask, tend to hardness and indifference towards others, towards the undermining of that compassion to which the romantic moralist is ready to sacrifice all the other virtues? Buddha may be allowed to speak for himself: “Even as a mother cherishes her child, her only child, so let a man cultivate a boundless love towards all beings.”[99] Buddha thus seems to fulfil Pascal’s requirement for a great man: he unites in himself opposite virtues and occupies all the space between them. Enough has been said to make plain that the infinite indeterminate desire of the romanticist and the Buddhist repression of desire are the most different things conceivable. Chateaubriand it has been said was an “invincibly restless soul,” a soul of desire (_une âme de désir_), but these phrases are scarcely more applicable to him than to many other great romanticists. They are fitly symbolized by the figures that pace to and fro in the Hall of Eblis and whose hearts are seen through their transparent bosoms to be lapped in the flames of unquenchable longing. The romanticist indeed bases, as I have said, on the very intensity of his longing his claims to be an idealist and even a mystic. William Blake, for example, has been proclaimed a true mystic. The same term has also been applied to Buddha. Without pretending to have fathomed completely so unfathomable a being as Buddha or even the far less unfathomable William Blake, one may nevertheless assert with confidence that Buddha and Blake stand for utterly incompatible views of life. If Blake is a mystic then Buddha must be something else. To be assured on this point one needs only to compare the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” with the “Dhammapada,” an anthology of some of the most authentic and authoritative material in early Buddhism. “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. … The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” says Blake. “Even in heavenly pleasures he finds no satisfaction; the disciple who is fully awakened delights only in the destruction of all desires. … Good is restraint in all things,” says Buddha. Buddha would evidently have dismissed Blake as a madman, whereas Blake would have looked on Buddhism as the ultimate abomination. My own conviction is that Buddha was a genuine sage well worthy of the homage rendered him by multitudes of men for more than