what is meant:  the ‘One’ is Tao; the ‘Two’ is this conditioned world, whose nature and essence is to appear as pairs of opposites—­to be attractive, or to repel.  The pigs’ point of view was that it was better to live on bran and escape the shambles; the Grand Augur’s, that the pomp and ceremony of the sacrifice, the public honor, ought more than to compensate them for the momentary inconvenience of being killed.  Opposite ways of thinking; points of view:  which cherishing, Grand Augur and pigs alike dwelt on the plane of externals; and so there was no real difference between them.  When you stand for you, and I for myself, it is six of one and half a dozen of the other; but when either of us stand for That which is both of us, and all else,—­ then we touch reality; then there is no longer conflict, or opposites; no longer false appearances,—­but the presence and cognition of the True.

Here let me note what seems to me a radical superiority in Chinese methods of thought.  You may take the Bhagavad-Gita, perhaps, as the highest expression of Aryan religio-philosophic thinking.  There we have the Spirit, the One, shown as the self of the Universe, but speaking through, and as, Krishna, a human personality.  Heaven forbid that I should suggest there is anthropomorphism in this.  Still, I think our finest mystical and poetic perceptions of the Light beyond all lights do tend to crystallize themselves into the shape of a Being; we do tend to symbolize and figure that Wonder as ..... an Individuality .....in some indefinable splendid sort.  Often you find real mystics, men who have seen with their own eyes so to say, talking about God, the Lord, the Great King, and what not of the like; and though you know perfectly well what they mean, there was yet that necessity on them to use those figures of speech.  But in China, no.  There, they begin from the opposite end.  Neither in Laotse nor in Confucius, nor in their schools, can you find a trace of personalism.  Gods many, yes; as reason and common sense declare; but nothing you can call a god is so ancient, constant, and eternal as Tao, “which would appear to have been before God.”  Go to their poets, and you find that the rage is all for Beauty as the light shining through things.  The grass-blade and the moutain, the moonlit water and the peony, are lit from within and utterly adorable:  not because God made them; not as reminding you of the Topmost of any Hierarchy of Being; but, if you really go to the bottom of it, because there is no personality in them,—­and so nothing to hinder the eternal wonder, impersonal Tao, from shining through.—­As if we came through our individuality to a conception of the Divine; but they, through a perception of the divine, to a right understanding of their individuality.  It amounts to us to fall into gross hideous anthropomorphism; the worst of them into superstitions of their own.—­When one quotes Chwangtse as speaking of “the delegated adaptability of God,” one must remember that one has to use some English word for his totally impersonal Tao or Tien, or even Shangti, or whatever it may be.