The asserted “impersonal” characteristic of Buddhism and of the Orient, therefore, I am not willing to call “impersonality”; for it is a very defective description, a real misnomer.  I think no single term can truly describe the characteristic under consideration.  As regards the general social order, the so-called impersonal characteristic is its communal nature; as regards the popular religious thought, whether of Shintoism or Buddhism, its so-called impersonality is its simple, artless objectivity; as regards philosophic Buddhism its so-called impersonality is its morbid introspective self-consciousness, leading to the desire and effort to annihilate the separateness of the self.  These are different characteristics and cannot be described by any single term.  So far as there are in Japan genuine altruism, real suppression of selfish desires, and real possession of kindly feelings for others and desires to help them, and so far as these qualities arise through a sense of the essential unity of the human race and of the unity of the human with the divine soul, this is not “impersonality”—­but a form of highly developed personality—­not infra-personality, but true personality.

We have noted that although esoteric Buddhism developed a highly accentuated consciousness of self, it attributed no value to that self.  This failure will not appear strange if we consider the historical reasons for it.  Indeed, the failure was inevitable.  Neither the social order nor the method of introspective thought suggested it.  Both served, on the contrary, absolutely to preclude the idea.

When introspective thought began in India the social order was already far beyond the undifferentiated communal life of the tribal stage.  Castes were universal and fixed.  The warp and woof of daily life and of thought were filled with the distinctions of castes and ranks.  Man’s worth was conceived to be not in himself, but in his rank or caste.  The actual life of the people, therefore, did not furnish to speculative thought the slightest suggestion of the worth of man as man.  It was a positive hindrance to the rise of such an idea.

Equally opposed to the rise of this idea was the method of that introspective thought which discovered the fact of the self.  It was a method of abstraction; it denied as part of the real self everything that could be thought of as separate; every changing phase or expression of the self could not be the real self, it was argued, because, if a part of the real self, how could it sometimes be and again not be?  Feeling cannot be a part of the real self, for sometimes I feel and sometimes I do not.  Any particular desire cannot be a part of my real self, for sometimes I have it and sometimes I do not.  A similar argument was applied to every objective thing.  In the famous “Questions of King Melinda,” the argument as to the real chariot is expanded at length; the wheels are not the chariot; the spokes are not the