194 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



in accord with man." In a supposed conversation 

 between Lao-Tzu and Confucius this is made the 

 difference between them. 1 



This idea of absorption in God, which Chuang- 

 Tzu reached, belongs to a post-Aristotelian age. 

 But we can see the preparation for it in the dis- 

 tinction between the moral and the metaphysical, 

 and the subordination of morality to Stupta. If 

 we could imagine the practical part of Aristotle's 

 ethics separated from its connection with Stupid, as 

 in later days his logic was divorced from his meta- 

 physics, we can understand how rapidly it would 

 have degenerated into a mere eudaemonism, while 

 the metaphysics divorced from the ethics would 

 naturally and perhaps necessarily have developed 

 on Neo-Platonic lines into a pure mysticism. 



The conclusions which I draw from these parallels 

 are, I think, not without bearing on modern questions. 

 i. Ever since the days of St. Clement of Alex- 

 andria, there has been a tendency to explain 

 parallelisms of thought by the assumption that 

 one philosophy had borrowed from the other. 

 The early Christians on finding fragments of truth 

 in heathen philosophy, jumped to the conclusion 

 that the Greeks had stolen from the barbarians, i.e. 

 the Jews. Numenius had already suggested that 

 Plato was a Greek Moses, Mwi)o% drriKi^v, 2 and 



1 See Chuang-Tzu, p. 166. 



2 ap. Clem. Alex. Strom., i. xxii. 150. 



