nce can education be, when it serves simply
to make each man differ from his neighbour? We arrive ultimately at a
chaos of opinions, doubt everything, and fall into the vulgar habit of
arguing; and it is only the intellectually lost who ever argue. Look at
Hui Tzu. 'He was a man of many ideas. His work would fill five carts.
But his doctrines were paradoxical.' He said that there were feathers in
an egg, because there were feathers on a chicken; that a dog could be a
sheep, because all names were arbitrary; that there was a moment when a
swift-flying arrow was neither moving nor at rest; that if you took a
stick a foot long, and cut it in half every day, you would never come to
the end of it; and that a bay horse and a dun cow were three, because
taken separately they were two, and taken together they were one, and one
and two made up three. 'He was like a man running a race with his own
shadow, and making a noise in order to drown the echo. He was a clever
gadfly, that was all. What was the use of him?'

Morality is, of course, a different thing. It went out of fashion, says
Chuang Tzu, when people began to moralize. Men ceased then to be
spontaneous and to act on intuition. They became priggish and
artificial, and were so blind as to have a definite purpose in life.
Then came Governments and Philanthropists, those two pests of the age.
The former tried to coerce people into being good, and so destroyed the
natural goodness of man. The latter were a set of aggressive busybodies
who caused confusion wherever they went. They were stupid enough to have
principles, and unfortunate enough to act up to them. They all came to
bad ends, and showed that universal altruism is as bad in its results as
universal egotism. 'They tripped people up over charity, and fettered
them with duties to their neighbours.' They gushed over music, and
fussed over ceremonies. As a consequence of all this, the world lost its
equilibrium, and has been staggering ever since.

Who, then, according to Chuang Tzu, is the perfect man? And what is his
manner of life? The perfect man does nothing beyond gazing at the
universe. He adopts no absolute position. 'In motion, he is like water.
At rest, he is like a mirror. And, like Echo, he answers only when he is
called upon.' He lets externals take care of themselves. Nothing
material injures him; nothing spiritual punishes him. His mental
equilibrium gives him the empire of the worl