e pomp and ceremony of the
sacrifice, the public honor, ought more than to compensate them
for the momentary inconvenience of being killed. Opposite ways
of thinking; points of view: which cherishing, Grand Augur and
pigs alike dwelt on the plane of externals; and so there was no
real difference between them. When you stand for you, and I for
myself, it is six of one and half a dozen of the other; but when
either of us stand for That which is both of us, and all else,--
then we touch reality; then there is no longer conflict, or
opposites; no longer false appearances,--but the presence and
cognition of the True.

Here let me note what seems to me a radical superiority in
Chinese methods of thought. You may take the _Bhagavad-Gita,_
perhaps, as the highest expression of Aryan religio-philosophic
thinking. There we have the Spirit, the One, shown as the self
of the Universe, but speaking through, and as, Krishna, a human
personality. Heaven forbid that I should suggest there is
anthropomorphism in this. Still, I think our finest mystical and
poetic perceptions of the Light beyond all lights do tend to
crystallize themselves into the shape of a _Being;_ we do tend
to symbolize and figure that Wonder as ..... an Individuality
.....in some indefinable splendid sort. Often you find real
mystics, men who have seen with their own eyes so to say, talking
about _God, the Lord,_ the _Great King,_ and what not of the
like; and though you know perfectly well what they mean, there
was yet that necessity on them to use those figures of speech.
But in China, no. There, they begin from the opposite end.
Neither in Laotse nor in Confucius, nor in their schools, can you
find a trace of personalism. Gods many, yes; as reason and
common sense declare; but nothing you can call a god is so
ancient, constant, and eternal as Tao, "which would appear to
have been before God." Go to their poets, and you find that the
rage is all for Beauty as the light shining through things. The
grass-blade and the moutain, the moonlit water and the peony, are
lit from within and utterly adorable: not because God made them;
not as reminding you of the Topmost of any Hierarchy of Being;
but, if you really go to the bottom of it, because there is no
personality in them,--and so nothing to hinder the eternal
wonder, impersonal Tao, from shining through.--As if _we_ came
through our individuality to a conception of the Divine;
but _they,_ through a