Hu-Chiu Tzu-lin, we read, taught Liehtse these things.  Said he:  “You must familiarize yourself with the Theory of Consequents before you can talk of regulating conduct.”  Liehtse said:—­“Will you explain what you mean by the Theory of Consequents?” “Look at your shadow,” said his teacher; “and you will know.”  Liehtse turned his head and looked at his shadow.  When his body was bent the shadow was crooked; when upright, it was straight.  Thus it appeared that the attributes of straightness and crookedness were not inherent in the shadow, but corresponded to certain positions in the body . . . .  “Holding this Theory of Consequents,” says Liehtse, “is to be at home in the antecedent.”  Now the antecedent of the personality is the Soul; the antecedent of the action is the motive; the antecedent of the conduct of life is the relation in which the component faculties of our being stand to each other and to the Soul.  If the body is straight, so is the shadow; if the inner harmony or balance is attained and held to—­well; you see the point.  “The relative agrees with its antecedent,” say the grammar books, very wisely.  It is karma again:  the effect flowing from the cause.  “You may consider the virtues of Shennung and Yuyen,” says Liehtse; “you may examine the books of Yu, Kia, Shang, and Chow,”—­that is, the whole of history;—­“you may weight the utterances of the great Teachers and Sages; but you will find no instance of preservation or destruction, fulness or decay, which has not obeyed this supreme Law of Causality.”

Where are you to say that Liehtse’s Confucianism ends, and his Taoism begins?  It is very difficult to draw a line.  Confucius, remember, gave "As-the-heart" for the single character that should express his whole doctrine.  Liehtse is leading you inward, to see how the conduct of life depends upon Balance, which also is a word that may translate Tao. Where the balance is, there we come into relations with the great Tao.  There is nothing supra-Confucian here; though soon we may see an insistence upon the Inner which, it may be supposed, later Confucianism, drifting toxards externalism, would hardly have enjoyed.—­A man in Sung carved a mulberry-leaf in jade for his prince.  It took three years to complete, and was so well done, so realistic in its down and glossiness, that if placed in a heap of real mulberry-leaves, it could not be distinguished from them.  The State pensioned him as a reward; but Liehtse, hearing of it, said:  “If God Almighty took three years to complete a leaf, there would be very few trees with leaves on them.  The Sage will rely less on human skill and science, than on the evolution of Tao.”