In the popular religion demonology and magic play a constant part, and numerous growths out of the worship of ancestors provide ever fresh additions to the higher ranks of spirits. These are regulated by decrees of the Board of Rites, one of the most ancient religious institutions in China. The spirit of a departed governor, perhaps two centuries ago, is believed to have appeared in time of flood, and by his beneficent influence dangers have been averted. Memorials are sent up to Peking by the local authorities, and after repeated manifestations divine honours are awarded. Beneath these august personages are the spirits which preside over the trades and professions, over the parts of a house--the door, the bed, or the kitchen range--over the breeding of domestic animals, and a large variety of occupations, to say nothing of medicine and disease, the limbs of the body, and the stars. They are analogous to the Kami, the equivalent powers in Japan (p. 91); and they are not without parallel in religions further west. Half a century before Confucius, in 604, was born another sage, known in history as Lao Tsze. Fragments of his teaching are embodied in a small book of aphorisms, concerned with the doctrine of the Tao, the way, the path, or course. In nature this corresponded to the ordered round of the seasons, and the regularities which we call laws. In man it might be seen in the line of right {65} conduct, and the inner principles which pointed to it. On this conception, which was much older than Lao Tsze himself, a kind of metaphysical mysticism was reared by later disciples, not without affinities with some aspects of the Brahmanical philosophy. They have been explained by suggestions of travel and contact which more careful study cannot justify. The religion of the Tao (whence the name Taoism) could never have been popular had it not become strangely entangled with alchemy and transformed under the influence of its later rival, Buddhism, from which it derived much both in ritual, in ethics, and in doctrine.