“‘Yet perhaps after all,’ he continued, speaking from the pigs’ point of view, ’it is better to live on bran and escape the shambles...

“‘No,’ said he; speaking from his own point of view again.  ’To enjoy honor when alive one would readily die on a war-shield or in the haeadsman’s basket.’

“So he rejected the pigs’ point of view and clung to his own.  In what sense, then, was he different from the pigs?”

And here, the still more famous tale of the Sacred Tortoise:—­

“Chwantse was fishing in the river P’u when the Prince of Ch’u sent two high officials to ask him to take charge of the administration.

“Chwangtse went on fishing, and without turning his head said:  ’I have heard that in Ch’u there is a sacred tortoise which has been dead now some three thousand years.  And that the prince keeps this tortoise carefully enclosed in a chest on the altar of his ancestral temple.  Now if this tortoise had its choice, which would it prefer:  to be dead, and have its remains venerated; or to be alive, and wagging its tail in the mud?’

“‘Sir,’ replied the two officials, ’it would rather be alive, and wagging its tail in the mud.’

“‘Begone!’ cried Chwangtse.  ‘I too will wag my tail in the mud!’”

Well; so much for Butterfly; now for Chwang—­and to introduce you to some of his real thought and teaching.  You will not have shot so wide of the mark as to see in his story of the skull traces of pessimism:  Chwantse had none of it; he was a very happy fellow; like the policeman in the poem,

“.....a merry genial wag
Who loved a mad conceit.”

But he was by all means and anyhow for preaching the Inner as against the outer.  Yet he did not dismiss this world, either, as a vain delusion and sorrowful mockery;—­the gist of his teaching is this:  that men bear a false relation to the world; and he desired to teach the true relation.  He loved the Universe, and had a sublime confidence in it as the embodiment and expression of Tao; and would apply this thought as a solvent to the one false thing in it:  the human personality, with its heresy of separateness.  Dissolve that,—­and it is merely an idea; in the words of a modern philosopher, all in the mind,—­and you have the one true elixir flowing in your veins, the universal harmony; are part of the solemn and glorious pageant of the years.  The motions of the heavenly bodies, the sweetness of Spring and the wistfulness of Autumn, flaunting Summer and Winter’s beauty of snow—­all are parcel of yourself, and within the circle of your consciousness.  Often he rises to a high poetic note;—­it is largely the supreme beauty of his style which keeps his book, so thouroughly unorthodox, still alive and wagging its tail among his countrymen.  Chwangtse will not help you through the examinations; but he is mighty good to read when your days of competing are over; as I think it is Dr. Giles who says.