GREEK AND CHINESE THOUGHT. 181 



perhaps with something of the religious man's 

 fear and distrust of worldlincss. " The perfect 

 man ignores self; the divine man ignores action; 

 the true sage ignores reputation " (p. 5). The 

 Emperor Yao would have abdicated in favour of a 

 hermit, but the hermit replies that " reputation is 

 but the shadow of reality," and will not exchange 

 the real for the seeming. But greater than Yao 

 and the hermit is the divine being who dwells in 

 the mysterious mountain in a state of pure, passion- 

 less inaction. 



For the sage, then, life means death to all that 

 men think life, the life of seeming or reputation, of 

 doing or action, of being or individual self-hood. 

 This leads on to the " budget of paradoxes " in 

 Chap. II. As in the moral and active region we 

 escape from the world and self, and are able to 

 reverse and look down upon the world's judgments, 

 so in the speculative region we get behind and 

 beyond the contradictions of ordinary thinking, 

 and of speech which stereotypes abstractions. The 

 sage knows nothing of the distinction between 

 subjective and objective. It exists only ex analo- 

 gid hominis. "From the standpoint of Tao" all 

 things are one. People " guided by the criteria of 

 their own mind," see only the contradiction, the 

 manifoldness, the difference ; the sage sees the 

 many disappearing in the One, in which subjec- 

 tive and objective, positive and negative, here and 



