Taoist Texts: Ethical, Political, and Speculative (Classic Reprint)

Jy is thrown upon a long-disputed subject from a source the very existence of which was unsuspected, and the authority of which would certainly never have been allowed. Just as an accident may reveal what generations of scientific men have laboured in vain to discover: just as a rank outsider may win a race, or the dart, shot at a venture, hit the bull s-eye when trained archers have discharged a quiver-full of arrows without success, so may some happy and spontaneous phrase, falling from one who approaches a topic of interest or difficulty for the first time, fresh and unencumbered by preconceptions or the dissertations of experts, embody in itself the kernel of the enigma, and make the whole thing promptly and for ever plain. And such a service has, I think, been recently rendered to the cause of philosophical research inC hina. A late able American writer, whose work onO riental Heligions is, or ought to be, on the shelf of every reading man, has given to the Confucian school, for the first time, its true designation of nationalist. Confucius was a Rationalist in every sense ;his followers are Rationalists; his philosophy was altogether Rationalistic in its scope. The word is just the one we wanted, but which we never found; and its universal acceptation, from henceforth, can be only a matter of time. It is not only for supplying us with a just descriptive epithet for the orthodox philosophy of China, however, that we are indebted toM r. Johnson. As soon as ever the term Bationalism is recognised as belonging to the system of Confucius, it will fall into deserved desuetude in that sphere where hitherto it has usurped anothers right. No word could, in my opinion, be more inappropriate, or more unhappily selected, as applied to the philosophy of Lao Tsze. That the character Tao jmay be properly translated reason in certain instances, I do not deny. That it
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)