Philosopher left no writings.  “Who knows, does not tell,” said he; and Po Chu-i quotes this, and pertinently adds:  “What then of his own five thousand words and more.—­the Tao Teh King.” That book was proved centuries ago, in China, not to have come, as it stands, even from Laotse’s age; because there are characters in it that were invented long afterwards.  The wisest thing to believe is that it is made up mostly of his sayings, taken down by his disciples in the Pitman of the time; and surviving, with accretions and losses perhaps, through the disquiet of the next two centuries, and the burning of the books, and everything.  Because whatever vicissitudes may have befallen it, one does hear in its maxims the tones of a real voice:  one man’s voice, with a timbre in it that belongs to the Lords of Wisdom.  And to me, despite Lao Lai and Tan the Grand Historiographer, it is the voice of an old man in the seclusion of the Royal Library:  a happy little bald-headed straggly-bearded old man anxious to keep himself unknown and unapplauded; it is a voice attuned to quietness, and to mental reactions from the thunder of the armies, the drums and tramplings and fuss and insolence of his day.  I thoroughly believe in the old man in the Royal Library, and the riding away on oxback at last into the west,—­where was Si Wang Mu’s Faery Garden, and the Gobi Desert, with sundry oases therein whereof we have heard.  I can hear that voice, with childlike wonder in it, and Adept-like seriousness, and childlike and Adept-like laughter not far behind, in such sayings as these:  “Tao is like the emptiness of a vessel; and the use of it, we may say, must be free from all self-sufficiency.  How deep and mysterious it is, as if it were the author of all things!  We should make our sharpness blunt, and unravel the complications of things. . . .  How still and clear is Tao, a phantasm with the semblance of permanence!  I do not know whose son it is.  It might appear to have been before God.”

We see in Christendom the effects of belief in a personal God, and also the inefficacy of mere ethics.  Believers make their God in their own image, and nourish their personalities imitating an imitation of themselves.  At the best of times they take their New Testament ethics, distil from these every virtue and excellent quality, and posit the result as the characteristics of their Deity:—­the result, plus a selfhood; and therefore the great delusion and heresy, Separateness, is the link that binds the whole together.  It is after all but a swollen personality; and whether you swell your personalitv with virtues or vices, the result is an offense.  There is a bridge, razor-edged, between earth and heaven; and you can never carry that load across it.  Laotse, supremely ethical in effect, had a cordial detestation—­ take this gingerly!—­of un-re-enforced ethics.  “When the great Tao is lost,” says he, “men follow after charity and duty to one’s neighbor.”