GREEK AND CHINESE THOUGHT. 195 



St. Clement, with all his liberal recognition of truth 

 in Greek philosophy, cannot get beyond the idea 

 that it is borrowed or stolen wisdom. One might 

 have supposed that we should have outgrown this. 

 But this is only partly true. Even in our own 

 days, the attempt has been made (by Gladisch and 

 Roth) to find an Oriental origin for Greek philo- 

 sophy. There are still to be found people who 

 think that Christianity borrowed from Buddhism, 

 while some suppose that the debt was on the other 

 side. People similarly suppose that the Sufis of 

 Islam must have come under Buddhist influence. 

 There have been endless attempts to show that the 

 doctrine of the Trinity is, or is not, to be found in 

 Taoism, in Hinduism, and elsewhere ; the under- 

 lying assumption being that, if it is, it is a borrowed 

 doctrine. In the same way "people think," as 

 Hegel says, "that by pronouncing a doctrine to be 

 Neo-Platonic, they have ipso facto banished it from 

 Christianity." 1 But it is wildly improbable that 

 Aristotle should have borrowed his doctrine of the 

 Mean from the grandson of Confucius, or that 

 Chuang-Tzti should have had any knowledge of 

 the philosophy of Heracleitus, or that the Taoistic 

 view of the human life of morality and the divine 

 life of the contemplation of the Eternal should have 

 influenced Aristotle's view of the relation of the 

 practical to the speculative life. 



1 Phil, of Arist., p. 343., Eng. Tr. 



