"Take the human body with all its manifold divisions. Which part of it does a man love best? Does he not cherish all equally, or has he a preference? Do not all equally serve him? And do these servitors then govern themselves, or are they subdivided into rulers and subjects? Surely there is some soul which sways them all. "But whether or not we ascertain what are the functions of this soul, it matters but little to the soul itself. For coming into existence with this mortal coil of mine, with the exhaustion of this mortal coil its mandate will also be exhausted. To be harassed by the wear and tear of life, and to pass rapidly through it without possibility of arresting one's course,--is not this pitiful indeed? To labour without ceasing, and then, without living to enjoy the fruit, worn out, to depart, suddenly, one knows not whither,--is not that a just cause for grief? "What advantage is there in what men call not dying? The body decomposes, and the mind goes with it. This is our real cause for sorrow. Can the world be so dull as not to see this? Or is it I alone who am dull, and others not so? "If we are to be guided by the criteria of our own minds, who shall be without a guide? The mind should be a _tabula rasa_, free from all judgments or opinions of its own as to the external world, and ready only to accept things as they are, not as they appear to be. What need to know of the alternations of passion, As above described. when the mind thus affords scope to itself?--verily even the minds of fools! Whereas, for a mind without criteria As it should be. to admit the idea of contraries, is like saying, _I went to Yüeh to-day, and got there yesterday_. One of Hui Tzŭ's paradoxes. See ch. xxxiii. Or, like placing nowhere somewhere,--topography which even the Great Yü The famous engineer of antiquity (B.C. 2205), who drained the empire of a vast body of water and arranged its subdivision into nine provinces. would fail to understand; how much more I? "Speech is not mere breath. It is differentiated by meaning. Take away that, and you cannot say whether it is speech or not. Can you even distinguish it from the chirping of young birds? "But how can TAO be so obscured that we speak of it as true and false? And how can speech be so obscured that it admits the idea of contraries? How can TAO go away and yet not remain? Being omnipresent. How can speech exist and yet be impossible? See p. 13. "TAO is obscured by our want of grasp. Speech is obscured by the gloss of this world. _I.e._ by the one-sided meanings attached to words and phrases. Hence the affirmatives and negatives of the Confucian and Mihist schools, Mih Tzŭ was a philosopher of the fourth century B.C., who propounded various theories which were vigorously attacked by the Confucianists under Mencius. We shall hear more of him by-and-by.