"What advantage is there in what men call not dying? The body decomposes, and the mind goes with it. This is our real cause for sorrow. Can the world be so dull as not to see this? Or is it I alone who am dull, and others not so?
"If we are to be guided by the criteria of our own minds, who shall be without a guide?
The mind should be a tabula rasa, free from all judgments or opinions of its own as to the external world, and ready only to accept things as they are, not as they appear to be.
What need to know of the alternations of passion,
As above described.
when the mind thus affords scope to itself?—verily even the minds of fools! Whereas, for a mind without criteria
As it should be.
to admit the idea of contraries, is like saying, I went to Yüeh to-day, and got there yesterday.
One of Hui Tzŭ's paradoxes. See ch. xxxiii.
Or, like placing nowhere somewhere—topography which even the Great Yü
The famous engineer of antiquity (B.C. 2205), who drained the empire of a vast body of water and arranged its subdivision into nine provinces.
would fail to understand; how much more I?
"Speech is not mere breath. It is differentiated by meaning. Take away that, and you cannot say whether it is speech or not. Can you even distinguish it from the chirping of young birds?
"But how can Tao be so obscured that we speak of it as true and false? And how can speech be so obscured that it admits the idea of contraries? How can Tao go away and yet not remain?
Being omnipresent.
How can speech exist and yet be impossible?
See p. 13.
"Tao is obscured by our want of grasp. Speech is obscured by the gloss of this world.
I.e. by the one-sided meanings attached to words and phrases.
Hence the affirmatives and negatives of the Confucian and Mihist schools,
Mih Tzŭ was a philosopher of the fourth century B.C., who propounded various theories which were vigorously attacked by the Confucianists under Mencius. We shall hear more of him by-and-by.
each denying what the other affirmed and affirming what the other denied. But he who would reconcile affirmative with negative and negative with affirmative,
The "union of impossibilities," which Emerson credits to Plato alone.
must do so by the light of nature.
I.e. Have no established mental criteria, and thus see all things as ONE.
"There is nothing which is not objective: there is nothing which is not subjective. But it is impossible to start from the objective. Only from subjective knowledge is it possible to proceed to objective knowledge. Hence it has been said,
By Hui Tzŭ.
'The objective emanates from the subjective; the subjective is consequent upon the objective. This is the Alternation Theory.' Nevertheless, when one is born, the other dies. When one is possible, the other is impossible. When one is affirmative the other is negative. Which being the case, the true sage rejects all distinctions of this and that. He takes his refuge in God, and places himself in subjective relation with all things.
It was to this end that Tzŭ Ch'i "buried himself."
"And inasmuch as the subjective is also objective, and the objective also subjective, and as the contraries under each are indistinguishably blended, does it not become impossible for us to say whether subjective and objective really exist at all?
What is positive under the one will be negative under the other. Yet as subjective and objective are really one and the same, their positives and negatives must also be one and the same.
It is as though we were to view them through a kind of mental Pseudoscope, by which means each would appear to be the other.
"When subjective and objective are both without their correlates, that is the very axis of Tao. And when that axis passes through the centre at which all Infinities converge, positive and negative alike blend into an infinite One. Hence it has been said that there is nothing like the light of nature.
Probably an allusion to Lao Tzŭ's "Use the light that is within you to revert to your natural clearness of sight." We should then be able to view things in their true light. See Tao-Tê-Ching, ch. lii., and The Remains of Lao Tzŭ, p. 34.
"To take a finger in illustration of a finger not being a finger is not so good as to take something which is not a finger. To take a horse in illustration of a horse not being a horse is not so good as to take something which is not a horse.
"So with the universe and all that in it is. These things are but fingers and horses in this sense. The possible is possible: the impossible is impossible. Tao operates, and given results follow. Things receive names and are what they are. They achieve this by their natural affinity for what they are and their natural antagonism to what they are not. For all things have their own particular constitutions and potentialities. Nothing can exist without these.
These last few sentences are repeated in ch. xxvii. ad init.
"We can never know anything but phenomena. Things are what they are, and their consequences will be what they will be."—J. S. Mill.
"Therefore it is that, viewed from the standpoint of Tao, a beam and a pillar are identical.
The horizontal with the vertical.
So are ugliness and beauty, greatness, wickedness, perverseness, and strangeness. Separation is the same as construction: construction is the same as destruction. Nothing is subject either to construction or to destruction, for these conditions are brought together into One.
"Only the truly intelligent understand this principle of the identity of all things. They do not view things as apprehended by themselves, subjectively; but transfer themselves into the position of the things viewed.
Avoiding the fallacious channels of the senses.
And viewing them thus they are able to comprehend them, nay, to master them;—and he who can master them is near. So it is that to place oneself in subjective relation with externals, without consciousness of their objectivity—this is Tao. But to wear out one's intellect in an obstinate adherence to the individuality of things, not recognising the fact that all things are One—this is called Three in the Morning."
"What is Three in the Morning?" asked Tzŭ Yu.
"A keeper of monkeys," replied Tzŭ Ch'i, "said with regard to their rations of chestnuts that each monkey was to have three in the morning and four at night. But at this the monkeys were very angry, so the keeper said they might have four in the morning and three at night, with which arrangement they were all well pleased. The actual number of the chestnuts remained the same, but there was an adaptation to the likes and dislikes of those concerned. Such is the principle of putting oneself into subjective relation with externals.
"Wherefore the true Sage, while regarding contraries as identical, adapts himself to the laws of Heaven. This is called following two courses at once.
He is thus prevented from trying to walk through walls, etc., as later Taoists have professed themselves able to do, of course with a view to gull the public and enrich themselves. "God," says Locke, "when he makes