Jesus was followed by St. Paul, Socrates by Plato, fucius by Mencius, and Laotse by gtse. In all four cases, the first was the real teacher aher wrote no books or wrote very little, and the sed began to develop the does and wrote long and profound discourses. gtse, who died about 275 B.C., was separated from Laotses death by not quite two hundred years, and was strictly a porary of Mencius. Yet the most curious thing is that although both these writers mentiohe other philosophers of the time, her was mentioned by the other in his works.
On the whole, gtse must be sidered the greatest prose writer of the Chou Dynasty, as Chu: Yu:an must be sidered the greatest poet. His claim to this positios both upon the brilliance of his style and the depth of his thought. That explains the fact that although he robably the greatest slanderer of fucius, and with Motse, the greatest antagonist of fu ideas, no fu scholar has not openly or secretly admired him. People who would not openly agree with his ideas would heless read him as literature.
Nor it be said truly that a pure-blooded ese could ever quite disagree with gtses ideas. Taoism is not a school of thought in a, it is a deep, fual trait of ese thinking, and of the ese attitude toward life and toward society. It has depth, while fuism has only a practical sense of proportions; it enriches ese poetry and imagination in an immeasurable manner, and it gives a philosophi to whatever is in the idle, freedom-loving, poetic, vagabond ese soul. It provides the only safe, romantic release from the severe fu classic restraint, and humahe very humanists themselves; therefore when a ese succeeds, he is always a fuist, and when he fails, he is always a Taoist. As more people fail than succeed in this world, and as all who succeed know that they succeed but in a lame and halting manner when they examihemselves in the dark hours of the night, I believe Taoist ideas are more often at work than fuism. Even a fuist succeeds only when he knows he never really succeeds, that is, by following Taoist wisdom. Tseng Kuofan, the great fu general who suppressed the Taiping Rebellion, had failed in his early campaign and began to succeed only one m when he realized with true Taoist humility that he was "no good," and gave power to his assistant generals.
gtse is therefore important as the first one who fully developed the Taoistic thesis of the rhythm of life, tained in the epigrams of Laotse. Uher ese philosophers principally occupied with practical questions of gover and personal morality, he gives the only metaphysics existing in ese literature before the ing of Buddhism. I am sure his mysticism will charm some readers and repel others. Certain traits in it, like weeding out the idea of the ego and quiet plation and "seeing the Solitary" explain how these native ese ideas were back of the development of the (Japanese Zen) Buddhism. Any branch of human knowledge, eveudy of the rocks of the earth and the ic rays of heaven, strikes mysticism when is reaches ah at all, and it seems ese Taoism skipped the stific study of nature to reach the same intuitive clusion by insight aloherefore it is not surprising that Albert Einstein and gtse agree, as agree they must, on the relativity of all standards. The only difference is that Eiakes on the more difficult and, to a ese, more stupid work of mathematical proof, while gtse furhe philosophic import of this theory of relativity, which must be sooner or late