over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If
they really knew who he was, they would tremble. Chuang Tzu spent his
life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the
uselessness of all useful things. 'Do nothing, and everything will be
done,' was the doctrine which he inherited from his great master Lao Tzu.
To resolve action into thought, and thought into abstraction, was his
wicked transcendental aim. Like the obscure philosopher of early Greek
speculation, he believed in the identity of contraries; like Plato, he
was an idealist, and had all the idealist's contempt for utilitarian
systems; he was a mystic like Dionysius, and Scotus Erigena, and Jacob
Bohme, and held, with them and with Philo, that the object of life was to
get rid of self-consciousness, and to become the unconscious vehicle of a
higher illumination. In fact, Chuang Tzu may be said to have summed up
in himself almost every mood of European metaphysical or mystical
thought, from Heraclitus down to Hegel. There was something in him of
the Quietist also; and in his worship of Nothing he may be said to have
in some measure anticipated those strange dreamers of mediaeval days who,
like Tauler and Master Eckhart, adored the _purum nihil_ and the Abyss.
The great middle classes of this country, to whom, as we all know, our
prosperity, if not our civilization, is entirely due, may shrug their
shoulders over all this and ask, with a certain amount of reason, what is
the identity of contraries to them, and why they should get rid of that
self-consciousness which is their chief characteristic. But Chuang Tzu
was something more than a metaphysician and an illuminist. He sought to
destroy society, as we know it, as the middle classes know it; and the
sad thing is that he combines with the passionate eloquence of a Rousseau
the scientific reasoning of a Herbert Spencer. There is nothing of the
sentimentalist in him. He pities the rich more than the poor, if he even
pities at all, and prosperity seems to him as tragic a thing as
suffering. He has nothing of the modern sympathy with failures, nor does
he propose that the prizes should always be given on moral grounds to
those who come in last in the race. It is the race itself that he
objects to; and as for active sympathy, which has become the profession
of so many worthy people in our own day, he thinks that trying to make
others good is as silly an occupation