GREEK AND CHINESE THOUGHT. 199 



and Confucianism, though elsewhere Confucius is 

 ridiculed as wanting in sense. 



May not the explanation be as follows ? 

 (i.) Lao-Tzti and Confucius were probably much 

 nearer to one another philosophically than the 

 Taoism of Chuang-Tzu and the Confucianism of 

 Mencius. The passages in which Confucius talks 

 Taoism would, on this hypothesis, represent a 

 traditional survival of their real relations to one 

 another. The episode of Confucius' visit to Lao- 

 Tzu "to ask about the TAO," would, whether it 

 records a fact or not, tend in the same direction. 



(ii.) From the first we may assume that the one 

 took an ideal, the other a practical and utilitarian 

 view of TAO "the Way" ; Confucius finding it in 

 social duties and the work of practical life, Lao- 

 Tzu in the hidden and the imvard, the "interior 

 life," as Christian mystics would call it. Thus the 

 historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien, 1 says, " Lao-Tzu culti- 

 vated the TAO and virtue, his chief aim in his 

 studies being how to keep himself concealed and 

 unknown." Seeing the decay of the dynasty he 

 withdrew himself out of sight, and no one knows 

 where he died. 



(iii.) The divergence between the two views, the 

 ideal and the actual, the mystical and the practical, 

 would increase with time, each intensifying the 

 other by opposition and reaction, until the practical 



1 Quoted by Dr. Legge, loc. cit. 



