Wherefore it follows that men of true virtue are unconscious of its possession. How much more then the man of TAO? This is what the ancients called escaping the vengeance of God. Which would be incurred by aping his goodness. The true Sage rests in that which gives rest, and not in that which does not give rest. The world rests in that which does not give rest, and not in that which does give rest. The natural and the artificial. * * * * * Chuang Tzŭ said, "To know TAO is easy. The difficulty lies in the elimination of speech. To know TAO without speech appertains to the natural. To know TAO with speech appertains to the artificial. The men of old were natural, not artificial. "Chu P'ing Man spent a large patrimony in learning under Chih Li I how to kill dragons. To acquire TAO. There is no record of the persons mentioned. By the end of three years he was perfect, but there was no direction in which he could show his skill. TAO cannot be put into practice. "The true Sage regards certainties as uncertainties; therefore he is never up in arms. In a state of mental disturbance. Men in general regard uncertainties as certainties; therefore they are constantly up in arms. To accustom oneself to arms causes one to fly to arms on every provocation; and to trust to arms is to perish." "The intelligence of the mean man does not rise beyond bribes and letters of recommendation. His mind is be-clouded with trivialities. Yet he would penetrate the mystery of TAO and of creation, and rise to participation in the ONE. The result is that he is confounded by time and space; and that trammelled by objective existences, he fails to reach apprehension of that age before anything was. "But the perfect man,--he carries his mind back to the period before the beginning. Content to rest in the oblivion of nowhere, passing away like flowing water, he is merged in the clear depths of the infinite. "Alas! man's knowledge reaches to the hair on a hair, but not to eternal peace." * * * * * A man of the Sung State, named Ts'ao Shang, acted as political agent for the prince of Sung at the court of the Ch'in State. When he went thither, he had a few carriages; but the prince of Ch'in was so pleased with him that he added one hundred more. On his return to Sung, he visited Chuang Tzŭ and said, "As for living in poverty in a dirty hovel, earning a scanty subsistence by making sandals, with shrivelled face and yellow ears,--this I could not do. Interviewing a powerful ruler, with a retinue of a hundred carriages,--that is my forte." "When the prince of Ch'in is sick," replied Chuang Tzŭ, "and he summons his physician to open a boil or cleanse an ulcer, the latter gets one carriage. The man who licks his piles gets five. The more degrading the work, the greater the number of carriages given. You, Sir, must have been attending to his piles to get so many carriages. Begone with you!"