state, to which he who lives in harmony with nature attains.  Knowledge is shallow if we compare it with the extent of the unknown, and only the unknowable is of value.  Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.  That is the only result of School Boards.  Besides, of what possible philosophic importance 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 works 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 swiftly-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 moralise.  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 world.  He is never the slave of objective existences.  He knows that, ’just as the best language is that which is never spoken, so the best action is that which is never done.’