Thus it is that virtue should prevail and outward form be forgotten. But mankind forgets not that which is to be forgotten, forgetting that which is not to be forgotten. This is forgetfulness indeed! And thus with the truly wise, wisdom is a curse, sincerity like glue, virtue only a means to acquire, and skill nothing more than a commercial capacity. For the truly wise make no plans, and therefore require no wisdom. They do not separate, and therefore require no glue. They want nothing, and therefore need no virtue. They sell nothing, and therefore are not in want of a commercial capacity. These four qualifications are bestowed upon them by God and serve as heavenly food to them. And those who thus feed upon the divine have little need for the human. They wear the forms of men, without human passions. Because they wear the forms of men, they associate with men. Because they have not human passions, positives and negatives find in them no place. Infinitesimal indeed is that which makes them man: infinitely great is that which makes them divine! Hui Tzŭ said to Chuang Tzŭ, "Are there then men who have no passions?" Chuang Tzŭ replied, "Certainly." "But if a man has no passions," argued Hui Tzŭ, "what is it that makes him a man?" "TAO," replied Chuang Tzŭ, "gives him his expression, and God gives him his form. How should he not be a man?" "If then he is a man," said Hui Tzŭ, "how can he be without passions?" "What you mean by passions," answered Chuang Tzŭ, "is not what I mean. By a man without passions I mean one who does not permit good and evil to disturb his internal economy, but rather falls in with whatever happens, as a matter of course, and does not add to the sum of his mortality." The play of passion would tend to create conditions which otherwise would not exist. "But whence is man to get his body," asked Hui Tzŭ, "if there is to be no adding to the sum of mortality?" This is of course a gibe. Hui Tzŭ purposely takes Chuang Tzŭ's words _à double entente_. "TAO gives him his expression," said Chuang Tzŭ, "and God gives him his form. He does not permit good and evil to disturb his internal economy. But now you are devoting your intelligence to externals, and wearing out your mental powers. You prop yourself against a tree and mutter, or lean over a table with half-closed eyes. God has made you a shapely sight, Yet your only thought is the _hard and white_." Chang Tzŭ puts his last sentence into doggerel, the more effectively to turn the tables against Hui Tzŭ, whose paradoxical theories he is never tired of ridiculing. See ch. ii. CHAPTER VI. THE GREAT SUPREME. _Argument_:--The human and the divine--The pure men of old--Their qualifications--Their self-abstraction--All things as ONE--The known and the unknown--Life a boon--Death a transition--Life eternal open to all--The way thither--Illustrations.