One other description of the primeval state is still more interesting. It is in the second paragraph of bk. IX:—“The people had their regular and constant nature:—they wove and made themselves clothes; they tilled the ground and got food. This was their common faculty. They were all one in this, and did not for themselves into separate classes; so were they constituted and left to their natural tendencies. Therefore in the age of perfect virtue men walked along with slow and grave step, and with their looks steadily directed forwards. On the hills there were no footpaths nor exacted passages; on the lakes there were no boats nor dams. All creatures lived in companies, and their places of settlement were made near to one another. Birds and beasts multiplied to flocks and herds; the grass and trees grew luxuriant and long. The birds and beasts might be led about without feeling the constraint; the nest of the magpie might be climbed to, and peeped into. Yes, in the age of perfect virtue, men lived in common with birds and beasts, and were on terms of equality with all creatures, as forming one family;—how could they know among themselves the distinctions of superior men and small men? Equally without knowledge, they did not leave the path of their natural virtue; equally free from desires, they were in the state of pure simplicity. In their pure simplicity, their nature was what it ought to be.”
Such were the earliest Chinese of whom Chuang-tzŭ could venture to give any account. If ever their ancestors had been in a ruder or savage condition, it must have been at a much antecedent time. These had long passed out of such a state; they were tillers of the ground, and acquainted with the use of the loom. They lived in happy relations with one another, and in kindly harmony with the tribes of inferior creatures. But there is not the slightest allusion to any sentiment of piety as animating them individually, or to any ceremony of religion as observed by them in common. This surely is a remarkable feature in their condition. I call attention to it, but I do not dwell upon it.
But by the time of Lao and Chuang the cultivation of the Tao had fallen into disuse. The simplicity of life which it demanded, with its freedom from all disturbing speculation and action, was no longer to be found in individual or in government. It was the general decay of manners and of social order which unsettled the mind Lao, made him resign his position as curator of the Royal Library, and determine to withdraw from China and hide himself among the rude peoples beyond it. The cause of the deterioration of the Tao and of all the evils of the nation was attributed to the ever-growing pursuit of knowledge, and of what we call the arts of culture. It had commenced very long before;—in the time of Huang-ti, Chuang says in one place;30 and in another he carries it still higher to Sui-jên and Fu-hsi.31 There had been indeed, all along the line of history, a grouping for the rules of life, as indicated by the constitution of man’s nature. The results were embodied in the ancient literature which was the lifelong study of Confucius. He had gathered up that literature; he recognised the nature of man as the gift of heaven or God. The monitions of God as given in the convictions of man’s mind supplied him with a Tao or path of duty very different from the Tao or mysterious way of Lao. All this was gall and wormwood to the dreaming librarian or brooding recluse, and made him say, “If we could renounce our sageness and discard our wisdom, it would be better for the people a hundredfold. If we could renounce our benevolence and discard our righteousness, the people would again become filial and kindly. If we could renounce our artful contrivances and discard our (scheming for) gain, there would be no thieves nor robbers.”32
We can laugh at this. Taoism was wrong in its opposition to the increase of knowledge. Man exists under a law of progress. In pursuing it there are demanded discretion and justice. Moral ends must rule over material ends, and advance in virtue be ranked higher than advance in science. So have good and evil, truth and error, to fight out the battle on the field of the world, and in all the range of time; but there is no standing still for the individual or for society. Even Confucius taught his countrymen to set too high a value on the examples of antiquity. The school of Laozi fixing themselves in an unknown region beyond antiquity—a prehistoric time between “the grand beginning of all things” out of nothing, and the unknown commencement of societies of men—has made no advance but rather retrograded, and is represented by the still more degenerated Taoism of the present day.
There is a short parabolic story of Chuang-tzŭ, intended to represent the antagonism between Taoism and knowledge, which has always struck me as curious. The last paragraph of his seventh book is this:—“The ruler (or god Ti) of the southern ocean was Shu (that is, Heedless); the ruler of the northern ocean was Hu (that
