"We can never know anything but phenomena. Things are what they are, and their consequences will be what they will be."--_J. S. Mill._ "Therefore it is that, viewed from the standpoint of TAO, a beam and a pillar are identical. The horizontal with the vertical. So are ugliness and beauty, greatness, wickedness, perverseness, and strangeness. Separation is the same as construction: construction is the same as destruction. Nothing is subject either to construction or to destruction, for these conditions are brought together into ONE. "Only the truly intelligent understand this principle of the identity of all things. They do not view things as apprehended by themselves, subjectively; but transfer themselves into the position of the things viewed. Avoiding the fallacious channels of the senses. And viewing them thus they are able to comprehend them, nay, to master them;--and he who can master them is near. So it is that to place oneself in subjective relation with externals, without consciousness of their objectivity,--this is TAO. But to wear out one's intellect in an obstinate adherence to the individuality of things, not recognising the fact that all things are ONE,--this is called _Three in the Morning_." "What is _Three in the Morning_?" asked Tzŭ Yu. "A keeper of monkeys," replied Tzŭ Ch'i, "said with regard to their rations of chestnuts that each monkey was to have three in the morning and four at night. But at this the monkeys were very angry, so the keeper said they might have four in the morning and three at night, with which arrangement they were all well pleased. The actual number of the chestnuts remained the same, but there was an adaptation to the likes and dislikes of those concerned. Such is the principle of putting oneself into subjective relation with externals. "Wherefore the true Sage, while regarding contraries as identical, adapts himself to the laws of Heaven. This is called following two courses at once. He is thus prevented from trying to walk through walls, etc., as later Taoists have professed themselves able to do, of course with a view to gull the public and enrich themselves. "GOD," says Locke, "when he makes the prophet, does not unmake the man." So Carlyle in his essay on Novalis:--"To a Transcendentalist, matter has an existence but only as a Phenomenon.... It is a mere relation, or rather the result of a relation between our living souls and the great First Cause." "The knowledge of the men of old had a limit. It extended back to a period when matter did not exist. That was the extreme point to which their knowledge reached. "The second period was that of matter, but of matter unconditioned. By time or space. "Being, in itself," says Herbert Spencer, "out of relation, is itself unthinkable." _Principles of Psychology_, iii. p. 258.