turn, had no established center for
his school; it was a thing that wandered the world with
him, and ceased, as in organization (however hazy) to exist
when he died. Nothing remained, then, of either Teacher
for posterity except the ideas and example. And yet I have
hinted, and shall try to show, that tremendous results for
good followed: that the whole course of history was turned
in an upward direction. You may draw what inferences you will.
The matter is profoundly significant.

Thirteen decades after the death of Confucius, Plato died in
Greece; and about that time two men arose in China to carry
forward, bring down, and be the expositors of, the work of
the two great Teachers of the sixth and seventh centuries.
These were Chwangtse for Taoism, and Mangtse or Mencius for
Confucius: the one, the channel through which spiritual thought
flowed to the quickening of the Chinese imagination; the other,
the man who converted the spiritual thought of Confucius into the
Chinese Constitution. Alas! they were at loggerheads: a wide
breach between the two schools of thought had come to be by their
time; or perhaps it was they who created it. We shall arrive at
them next week; tonight, to introduce you to Liehtse, a Taoist
teacher who came sometime between Laotse and Chwangtse;--perhaps
in the last quarter of the fifth century, when Socrates was
active in Greece.

Professor De Groot, of Holland, speaks boldly of Confucius as a
Taoist; and though I dislike many of this learned Dutchman's
ideas, this one is excellent. His thesis is that Laotse was no
more an innovator than Confucius; that both but gave a new
impulse to teachings as old as the race. Before Laotse there had
been a Teacher Quan, a statesman-philosopher of the seventh
century, who had also taught the Tao. The immemorial Chinese
idea had been that the Universe is made of the interplay of two
forces, _Yang_ and _Yin,_ positive and negative;--or simply the
Higher and the Lower natures. To the Yang, the Higher, belong
the _Shen_ or gods,--all conscious beneficent forces within and
without man. To the Yin or lower belong the _kwei,_ the opposite
of gods: _fan_ means foreign; and _Fan Kwei_ is the familiar
Chinese term for white men. From Shen and Tao we get the term
_Shentao,_ which you know better as _Shinto,_--the Way of the
Gods; or as well, the Wisdom of the Gods; as good an equivalent
of our term _Theosophy_ as you should find; perhaps indeed
b