GREEK AND CHINESE THOUGHT. 187 



the first step in the protest against the Confu- 

 cianist. The sage, as conceived by the Taoist, 

 cannot be content with the visible and the world 

 as it is known to the senses. He seeks for the 

 Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal. He seeks to 

 attain to TAO. 



It is here that we reach (in chaps, vi., vii.) what 

 properly constitutes the mysticism of Chuang-Tzu. 

 Heracleitus is not a mystic, though he is the 

 founder of a long line, which through Plato, and 

 Dionysius the Areopagite (so-called), and John 

 the Scot in the ninth century, and Meister Eckhart 

 in the thirteenth, and Jacob Bohme in the six- 

 teenth, reaches down to Hegel. Heracleitus de- 

 spises the world and shuns it ; but he has not yet 

 made flight from the world a dogma. Even Plato, 

 when in a well-known passage in the Theaetetus, 1 

 he counsels flight from the present state of things, 

 explains that he means only "flee from evil and 

 become like God." Still less has Heracleitus got 

 so far as to aim at self-absorption in God. In 

 Greek thought the attempt to get rid of conscious- 

 ness, and to become the unconscious vehicle of a 

 higher illumination, is unknown till the time of 

 Philo. Yet this is the teaching of Chuang-Tzu. 

 " The true sage takes his refuge in God, and learns 



1 Theaet., 176, A. Sib KO,\ ireipaadai xpfy eVfle'j/Se e/ce?<re 

 o ri Tax^Ta . <pvyr) Se 6^oica<ris ef Kara, rb ^vva.r6v . 

 KO.\ CXTLOV 



