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CH, T.
INTRODUCTION.
not left in doubt as to his belief in an early state of paradisiacal Taoism. Hwang Tỉ, the first year of whose reign is placed in B.C. 2697, is often introduced as a seeker of the Tao, and is occasionally condemned as having been one of the first to disturb its rule in men's minds and break up the State of Perfect Unity. He mentions several sovereigns of whom we can hardly find a trace in the records of history as having ruled in the primeval period, and gives us more than one description of the condition of the world during that happy time 1.
I do not think that Kwang-jze had any historical evidence for the statements which he makes about those early days, the men who flourished in them, and their ways. His narratives are for the most part fictions, in which the names and incidents are of his own devising. They are no more true as matters of fact than the accounts of the characters in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress are true, with reference to any particular individuals ; but as these last are grandly true of myriads of minds in different ages, so may we read in Kwang-zze's stories the thoughts of Taoistic men beyond the restrictions of place and time. He believed that those thoughts were as old as the men to whom he attributed them. I find in his belief a ground for believing myself that to Taoism, as well as to Confucianism, we ought to attribute a much earlier origin than the famous men whose names they bear. Perhaps they did not differ so much at first as they came afterwards to do in the hands of Confucius and Lâo-jze, both great thinkers, the one more of a moralist, and the other more of a metaphysician. When and how, if they were ever more akin than they came to be, their divergence took place, are difficult questions on which it may be well to make some remarks after we have tried to set forth the most important principles of Taoism.
Those principles have to be learned from the treatise of Lâo-jze and the writings of Kwang-jze. We can hardly
1 See in Books IX, X, and XII.
B 2
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