and I shall therefore make an effort to set before you a clue, which, I trust, will lead toward at any rate a partial elucidation of the mystery.

At some unknown period in remote antiquity, there appears to have lived a philosopher, known to posterity as Lao Tzu, who taught men, among other things, to return good for evil.  His parentage, birth, and life have been overloaded in the course of centuries with legend.  Finally, he is said to have foreseen a national cataclysm, and to have disappeared into the West, leaving behind him a book, now called the Tao-Te-Ching, which, for many reasons, he could not possibly have written.

The little we really know of Lao Tzu is gathered from traditional utterances of his, scattered here and there in the works of later disciples of his school.  Many of these sayings, though by no means all of them, with much other matter of a totally different character, have been brought together in the form of a treatise, and the heterogeneous whole has been ascribed to Lao Tzu himself.

Before proceeding with our examination of Tao, it is desirable to show why this work may safely be regarded as a forgery of a later age.

Attempts have been made, by the simple process of interpolation in classical texts, to prove that Lao Tzu lived in the same century as that in which Confucius was born; and also that, when the former was a very old man, the two sages met; and further that the interviews ended very much to the astonishment of Confucius.  All this, however, has been set aside by the best native scholarship ever produced in China, as the work of later hands.

Further, there was another philosopher of the same name, who really was contemporary with Confucius, and it is held by many Chinese critics that the two have been confused, perhaps with malice aforethought.

We can only say for certain that after Lao Tzu came Confucius—­at what interval we do not know.  Now, in all the works of Confucius, whether as writer or as editor, and throughout all his posthumously published Discourses, there is not a single word of allusion either to Lao Tzu or to this treatise.  The alleged interviews have been left altogether unnoticed.

One hundred years after Confucius came Mencius, China’s second sage.  In all his pages of political advice to feudal nobles, and all his conversations with his disciples, much more voluminous than the Discourses of Confucius, there is equally no allusion to Lao Tzu, nor to the treatise.

It has been pointed out by an eminent Chinese critic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that Mencius spent his life chiefly in attacking the various heterodox systems which then prevailed, such as the extreme altruistic system of Mo Ti and the extreme egoistic system of Yang Chu; and it is urged—­in my opinion with overwhelming force—­that if the Tao-Te-Ching had existed in the days of Mencius, it must necessarily have been recognised and treated as a mischievous work, likely to alienate men’s minds from the one perfect and orthodox teaching—­Confucianism.