death.  Nothing less.  We are each of us a complex of desires, passions, interests, modes of thinking and feeling, opinions, prejudices, judgment of others, likings and dislikings, affections, aims public and private.  These things, and whatever else constitutes, the recognizable content of our present temporal individuality, are all in derogation of our ideal of impersonal being—­saving consciousness, the manifestation of being.  In some minute, imperfect, relative, and almost worthless sense we may do right in many of our judgments, and be amiable in many of our sympathies and affections.  We cannot be sure even of this.  Only people unhabituated to introspection and self-analysis are quite sure of it.  These are ever those who are loudest in their censures, and most dogmatic in their opinionative utterances.  In some coarse, rude fashion they are useful, it may be indispensable, to the world’s work, which is not ours, save in a transcendental sense and operation.  We have to strip ourselves of all that, and to seek perfect passionless tranquillity.  Then we may hope to die.  Meditation, if it be deep, and long, and frequent enough, will teach even our practical Western mind to understand the Hindu mind in its yearning for Nirvana.  One infinitesimal atom of the great conglomerate of humanity, who enjoys the temporal, sensual life, with its gratifications and excitements, as much as most, will testify with unaffected sincerity that he would rather be annihilated altogether than remain for ever what he knows himself to be, or even recognizably like it.  And he is a very average moral specimen.  I have heard it said, “The world’s life and business would come to an end, there would be an end to all its healthy activity, an end of commerce, arts, manufactures, social intercourse, government, law, and science, if we were all to devote ourselves to the practice of Yoga, which is pretty much what your ideal comes to.”  And the criticism is perfectly just and true.  Only I believe it does not go quite far enough.  Not only the activities of the world, but the phenomenal world itself, which is upheld in consciousness, would disappear or take new, more interior, more living, and more significant forms, at least for humanity, if the consciousness of humanity was itself raised to a superior state.  Readers of St. Martin, and of that impressive book of the late James Hinton, “Man and his Dwelling-place,” especially if they have also by chance been students of the idealistic philosophies, will not think this suggestion extravagant.  If all the world were Yogis, the world would have no need of those special activities, the ultimate end and purpose of which, by-the-by, our critic would find it not easy to define.  And if only a few withdraw, the world can spare them.  Enough of that.