Thirteen decades after the death of Confucius, Plato died in Greece; and about that time two men arose in China to carry forward, bring down, and be the expositors of, the work of the two great Teachers of the sixth and seventh centuries. These were Chwangtse for Taoism, and Mangtse or Mencius for Confucius: the one, the channel through which spiritual thought flowed to the quickening of the Chinese imagination; the other, the man who converted the spiritual thought of Confucius into the Chinese Constitution. Alas! they were at loggerheads: a wide breach between the two schools of thought had come to be by their time; or perhaps it was they who created it. We shall arrive at them next week; tonight, to introduce you to Liehtse, a Taoist teacher who came sometime between Laotse and Chwangtse;--perhaps in the last quarter of the fifth century, when Socrates was active in Greece. Professor De Groot, of Holland, speaks boldly of Confucius as a Taoist; and though I dislike many of this learned Dutchman's ideas, this one is excellent. His thesis is that Laotse was no more an innovator than Confucius; that both but gave a new impulse to teachings as old as the race. Before Laotse there had been a Teacher Quan, a statesman-philosopher of the seventh century, who had also taught the Tao. The immemorial Chinese idea had been that the Universe is made of the interplay of two forces, _Yang_ and _Yin,_ positive and negative;--or simply the Higher and the Lower natures. To the Yang, the Higher, belong the _Shen_ or gods,--all conscious beneficent forces within and without man. To the Yin or lower belong the _kwei,_ the opposite of gods: _fan_ means foreign; and _Fan Kwei_ is the familiar Chinese term for white men. From Shen and Tao we get the term _Shentao,_ which you know better as _Shinto,_--the Way of the Gods; or as well, the Wisdom of the Gods; as good an equivalent of our term _Theosophy_ as you should find; perhaps indeed better than _Theosophy_ itself; for it drives home the idea that the _Wisdom_ is a practical _Way of Life._ Shentao, the Taoism of the Higher Nature, then, was the primeval religion of the Chinese;--Dr. De Groot arrives at this, though perhaps hardly sees how sensible a conclusion he has reached. In the sixth century B.C. it was in a fair way to becoming as obsolete as Neoplatonism or Gnosticism in the nineteenth A.D.; and Laotse and Confucius simply restated some aspects of it with a new force and sanction;--just as H.P. Blavatsky, in the _Key to Theosophy,_ begins, you will remember, with an appeal to and restatement of the Theosophy of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists of Alexandria.