In the teachings of Lao-tzŭ in Speculative Physics, as sketched above, the student of philosophy will find many ideas resembling others with which he is already more familiar. To those of the sages of Ancient Greece it is perhaps unnecessary for me to do more than refer. With them as living also in the comparative childhood of the world Lao-tzŭ might naturally be supposed to have considerable affinity. In the Timæus of Plato there is a passage which does not accord with the rest of that work, nor with the spirit of the other Platonic dialogues, and which bears considerable resemblance to the doctrine of Lao-tzŭ about the primordial all-producing Nature (Tao). The hero of the dialogue, if such an expression may be used, Timæus himself, suddenly leaves the train of imaginative discourse which he had been for some time pursuing about the visible universe and the mode in which the divine artificer constructed it, and he introduces a new conception, that of the primeval mother, formless, immortal, and indestructible.[33] Reference has already been made to the resemblance between Lao-tzŭ’s teachings and those of Anaximander, and Hegel says of the latter’s notion, that the _ἄπειρον_ is the principle from which endless worlds or gods originate and into which they vanish, that it sounds quite Oriental.[34] But not only are Lao-tzŭ’s speculations on physics like those of other ancients, they resemble also those of many modern philosophers, and his theory about the study of Nature may well be compared with that of Schelling. The Tao itself, or the primordial existence, appears under various names in the history of Philosophy. It is the Tʽai-chi (太極) or Great Extreme—the Tʽai-yi (太一) or Great Unit—the _Anima Mundi_—the Absolute—the Vital Force—Gravity—Caloric—when considered as universally active and productive. “There is but one vast universal dynamic, one mover, one might, Variously operant under the various conditions it finds; And we call that by turns electricity, friction, caloric, and light, Which is none of these things, and yet all of them. Ask of the waves and the winds, Ask of the stars of the firmament, ask of the flowers of the field; They will answer you all of them, naming it each by a different name. For the meaning of Nature is neither wholly conceal’d nor reveal’d; But her mind is seen to be single in her acts that are nowhere the same.”[35]