The contrast of the individual life and this specific life may be stated plainly and compactly as follows.  A little while ago we current individuals, we who are alive now, were each of us distributed between two parents, then between four grandparents, and so on backward, we are temporarily assembled, as it were, out of an ancestral diffusion; we stand our trial, and presently our individuality is dispersed and mixed again with other individualities in an uncertain multitude of descendants.  But the species is not like this; it goes on steadily from newness to newness, remaining still a unity.  The drama of the individual life is a mere episode, beneficial or abandoned, in this continuing adventure of the species.  And Metchnikoff finds most of the trouble of life and the distresses of life in the fact that the species is still very painfully adjusting itself to the fluctuating conditions under which it lives.  The conflict of life is a continual pursuit of adjustment, and the “ills of life,” of the individual life that is, are due to its “disharmonies.”  Man, acutely aware of himself as an individual adventure and unawakened to himself as a species, finds life jangling and distressful, finds death frustration.  He fails and falls as a person in what may be the success and triumph of his kind.  He does not apprehend the struggle or the nature of victory, but only his own gravitation to death and personal extinction.

Now Professor Metchnikoff is anti-religious, and he is anti-religious because to him as to so many Europeans religion is confused with priest-craft and dogmas, is associated with disagreeable early impressions of irrational repression and misguidance.  How completely he misconceives the quality of religion, how completely he sees it as an individual’s affair, his own words may witness: 

“Religion is still occupied with the problem of death.  The solutions which as yet it has offered cannot be regarded as satisfactory.  A future life has no single argument to support it, and the non-existence of life after death is in consonance with the whole range of human knowledge.  On the other hand, resignation as preached by Buddha will fail to satisfy humanity, which has a longing for life, and is overcome by the thought of the inevitability of death.”

Now here it is clear that by death he means the individual death, and by a future life the prolongation of individuality.  But Buddhism does not in truth appear ever to have been concerned with that, and modern religious developments are certainly not under that preoccupation with the narrower self.  Buddhism indeed so far from “preaching resignation” to death, seeks as its greater good a death so complete as to be absolute release from the individual’s burthen of Karma.  Buddhism seeks an escape from individual immortality.  The deeper one pursues religious thought the more nearly it approximates to a search for escape from the self-centred life and over-individuation,